Human Studies 27: 187206, 2004. DISSYMMETRY AND HEIGHT 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Dissymmetry and Height: Rhetoric, Irony and Pedagogy in the Thought of Husserl, Blanchot and Levinas
GARY PETERS
University of the West of England, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol, BS3 2JT, UK (E-mail: [email protected])

Abstract. This essay is concerned with an initial mapping out of a model of intersubjectivity that, viewed within the context of education, breaks with the hegemonic dialogics of current pedagogies. Intent on rethinking the (so-called) problem of solipsism for phenomenology in terms of a pedagogy that situates itself within solitude and the alterity of self and other, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas will here speak as the voices of this other mode of teaching. Beginning with the problematization of intersubjectivity in romantic aesthetics and hermeneutics, I introduce the concept of irony as a crucial element in the conceptualization of this other pedagogical model, one that requires, initially, a discussion of Husserls response to the charge of solipsism in the 5th Cartesian Meditation. As a starting point I introduce his symmetrical notion of bodily pairing into a consideration of rhetoric, understood here as an integral part of teaching, thus forging links with phenomenology via the work of MerleauPonty. The above provides a context for an extended discussion of pedagogy as it appears in the work of Blanchot and Levinas. Although similar in many respects, on closer inspection it will emerge that important differences are evident in the dissymmetrical and asymmetrical models suggested by the two thinkers respectively. These differences, I will argue, begin to open up a critical perspective on Levinas height model of teaching in the name of the more radical configuration of phenomenology and rhetoric to be found in Blanchot.

Misunderstanding and Incomprehension The degree to which human action and interaction is inexplicable is the degree to which the human sciences have been able to propose strategies of intersubjective engagement that produce meaning in the absence of truth. However, prior to the rise of the Geisteswissenschaften in late 19th Century Germany, the German romantic theorists Schleiermacher and Friedrich Schlegel had already signaled the fundamental challenge to the social and human sciences by positing misunderstanding and incomprehensibility as the negative ground and positive groundlessness of human interaction respectively (Schleiermacher 1986, p. 82; Schlegel 1984, pp. 3240). In both cases the absence of an originary communicative community (to use Habermas vocabulary) results in deeply aporetic models of sociality being promoted, one divinatory and the other ironic; models where intersubjective understand-

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ing and an expressed desire for dialogue are made to depend on an art of guessing (Ricoeur 1981, p. 211) while at the same time having to confront, in the case of irony, what might be called an art of second-guessing. To explain: if liberated from textual analysis, the project of romantic divinatory hermeneutics is to initiate a dialogue with the other through a productive process of imagining the intentions of social action. Dialogue here requires the removal or crossing of a distance between self and other in a desire to overcome an originary misunderstanding conceived, by Schleiermacher, in both an active and a passive way, although, significantly, active misunderstanding is understood by him as being the result of reading something into an others action rather than the conscious intention of the action itself (Schleiermacher 1986, p. 83). For Friedrich Schlegel, a contemporary and friend of Schleiermacher, incomprehensibility is far from being an essentially passive negativity to be overcome, albeit infinitely; on the contrary, it is a positive function of what might be called the ironic dimension of sociality itself. While sharing his friends desire for dialogue, Schlegel recognizes the more active role played by irony in both social action and the interpretation of that action. In this model of intersubjectivity irony is understood as a positive force of disruption and dissemblance, an eternal agility (Schlegel 1991, p. 100) that explicitly integrates rhetoric into social action (1991, p. 31) to provide persuasive forms and the necessary finitude for the communication of a subjectivity that is simultaneously conscious of its infinite otherness and formlessness. So while dialogue is promoted by Schlegel it is also, paradoxically, ironized to the degree that the divinatory art of guesswork necessary for such dialogue to commence comes to inhabit both action and reaction, production and reception. That is to say, the understanding of an intentional act through hermeneutical divination is here pre-empted (second-guessed) by the author or agent of this act as part of a mobility that is above all intent on infinitely breaching the restrictive horizon of each new interpretation. These introductory remarks are not intended as an introduction to romantic hermeneutics and irony but, rather, as one way into a consideration of the extraordinary lure of dialogics and its various models of thought and action, shared (against the odds) by both of the above thinkers. In addition, these initial thoughts point towards a rather different model of sociality, one more sensitive to the active solitariness of the self and the consequent aporias of intersubjectivity. From within hermeneutics it is Paul Ricoeur who makes the decisive break with dialogics, and it is, thus, his thought that provides a useful frame for the following reflections. Of particular relevance is his notion of appropriation (Ricoeur 1981, pp. 182193) which replaces the dialogical structure of author/reader, actor/reactor with a much more complex and more productive model that offers an account of the way in which the text does not simply, or

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primarily, ask a question that can be answered, as dialogicians such as Bahktin would have it, but, rather, is the occasion for the unfolding of a world before the text, an opening up of meaning which similarly unfolds or enlarges (1981, p. 182) the subjectivity of the reader regardless of the intentions of the author. In short, the text educates or teaches the reader not through its communication of an intended content but through and exemplary world-creation that in turn invites or, indeed, demands an analogous productivity on the part of the reader. Importantly for the following essay, the same can be said for social action and interaction which, in Ricoeurs view, can only be interpreted and understood once it has been fixed (1981, p. 203) as an autonomous discourse that, in the absence of the agent, leaves its mark or trace for the other to introduce into his or her own world and its own unfolding. Clearly, once again, it is here that one might identify the hermeneutical source of the teaching situation in the place and at the moment where and when the trace of one world is left as an imprint in another, where and when the conclusion of one act marks the commencement of another. This, no doubt, is indeed how the actions of others become meaningful to us and how we might gain an understanding of the world through the interpretive unfolding of an endless stream of worlds in the marked space left by the other. Having said that however, Ricoeur leaves unaddressed a number of issues that have a crucial bearing on the specifics of teaching as outlined in the following essay, as well as leaving in abeyance more general questions of rhetoric, authority and power. In particular he fails to make a clear distinction between those acts that leave a mark and those that do not; just as he fails to distinguish between what, following Barthes, might be called open and closed or, better, opening and/or closing texts. A consequence of this is that the rhetorical and ironic strategies necessary to ensure that one configuration of actions sets in motion another are left largely unanalyzed by Ricoeur. If, against the grain, teaching is understood as a primarily non-dialogical enterprise, then the movement or agility necessary to increase a certain non-empathic fascination (a term returned to below) needs to be central to the discussion. This is where it will be necessary to move outside of Ricoeurs hermeneutics of social action. In what follows, two very different strands of thought will be woven together in an attempt to identify what might be called the educative dimension of intersubjectivity and social interaction. Initially, and in keeping with Ricoeurs own intertwining of hermeneutics and phenomenology (1981, pp. 101128) Husserls trajectory will be followed through solipsism and the painstaking working-out of an (ultimately unconvincing) model of intersubjectivity to the point where the very different tradition of irony and rhetoric is called upon as part of a necessary strategy to hold firm to the radical separation bequeathed by phenomenology in the face of those dubious totalities shadowing the

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dialogical and the empathic. In spite of its title, my intention in this paper is not to propose a novel philosophy of education or pedagogical theory that can be unproblematically situated within current academic debates. Far from it, and on the contrary, the engagement with the pedagogical should here be understood in Weberian terms as an ideal typification of a model of social interaction that is sensitive to the educative dimension of all human intersubjectivity. The aporetic origin of this model is situated in Husserls famous struggle with solipsism. Phenomenological Symmetry and the Body In Husserls hands, phenomenology is intent on disclosing the symmetrical structure of the lifeworld as constituted by the transcendental ego through a phenomenological reduction which removes alienation from experience. The achievement of a pure sphere of ownness thus requires a form of experiential cleansing which frees the horizon from everything that is at all alien (Husserl 1995, p. 95) thus forging a symmetrical and harmonious link between noesis and noemata. The price paid for the phenomenological achievement of a strict reciprocity between ownness and otherness, through the constitutional role of intentionality, is that the figure of the other can only appear within the sphere of ownness as an alter-ego; that is to say, with Husserl, a mirroring of my own self a non-alienating product of the solitary transcendental ego. As an analogical twin the Other does not breach the purified phenomenological horizon, but, rather, reflects back onto the primary constitution of alterity described by Husserl as pairing, whereby the phenomenological account of association is understood in terms of what he calls a unity of similarity. This constitution of plurality through the process of pairing ensures that separate pluralities, not in communion (1995, p. 140) are rendered inconceivable by Husserl, allowing him to assume a single universal community that validates his reliance on empathy as a key moment in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. Importantly, the pairing Husserl speaks of is an experience of the body. It concerns the sensation of the physical presence of an other in the primordial sphere of ownness. It is only to the extent that the self and other form analogous parts of an immediately intuited organic totality that the desired harmony of intersubjectivity is achieved. However, and in spite of his sustained attempt to constitute a symmetrical and harmonious intersubjective world through the pairing of ego and alter-ego, Husserl nevertheless acknowledges that, closer inspection would further show that two streams of experience (spheres of consciousness for two pure Egos) cannot be conceived as having an essential content that is identically the same; moreover, as is evident from the foregoing, no fully determinate experience of the one could ever belong to the

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other.(Husserl 1969, p. 241) Closer inspection still reveals that the asymmetry of Husserls monadic community is also a consequence of the prominence (Husserl 1995, p. 113) of each solitary ego within its sphere of ownness, a prominence which, when introduced into the intentionality of empathic intersubjectivity, threatens to produce precisely the inorganic (or pseudo-organic) discord Husserl is intent on avoiding. It is in the light of this more contestational version of intersubjectivity that I bring rhetoric and ironic configuration into the discussion. Both have pedagogical implications for what follows. Rhetoric and Ironic Configuration Rhetoric, as an un-founded mode of persuasion operative within the domain of truths absence, is particularly suited to the radical pluralism both produced and resisted by phenomenology. The transportation and subsequent actualization of one egos prominence (within its sphere of ownness) into the sphere of an other, that is to say, beyond bodily pairing and analogical reflection, is undoubtedly at the root of teaching and the mastery associated with it not the mastery of a body of knowledge but, rather, the mastery of a regime of persuasion engaged in the configuration of possible worlds. Indeed, as Paul de Man observes, the persuasiveness of persuasion is itself dependent upon an identifiable set of tropes and figures that are singularly or collectively mobilized during a rhetorical speech act or event. (1979, p. 6) It is these figures that are at the heart of rhetoric. In his deconstruction of these rhetorical patterns he enumerates mimesis, paronomasia and personification as playing a crucial role. Noteworthy here is how each of these figures uses resemblance as a way to disguise differences. (1979, p. 16) Whether textually, pedagogically, or socially, it is here that a certain irony can be located, one that knowingly (to speak with Levinas) reduces otherness to the same without (to speak otherwise than Levinas ironically, perhaps) resulting in an undifferentiated totality. The irony of irony is that it seeks dialogue, filiation, and community but only as a means to articulate fragmentation and irreducible difference a totality of difference. The eternal agility of the ironist is by no means simply the empty play and infinite self-enjoyment of the deluded post-Kantian/Fichtean autonomous subject, as Hegel would have it (1981, pp. 101102), but a more rigorous strategy of forging integrated structures which either fail to integrate or achieve a degree of integration that, as a consequence, demands precisely the infinite movement of irony to disengage the ironist from the non-ironic stasis that threatens. The exemplary nature of this perpetual flight from identity to difference and back again infinitely, its spectacular restlessness for the sake of the other who risks incarceration within the dubious totalities that are everywhere apparent, al-

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lows a claim to be made for ironys pedagogical efficacy, driving, as it does, the formation and utilization of the rhetorical patterns already presented. The role of rhetoric within teaching both inside and outside the classroom is, thanks to its necessary liaison with irony, an art of movement. To be persuaded the other must be moved. Movement requires the rhetorical fabrication of a continuity between one place and another, one structure and another, one order of thought and another. The rhetorician invites the other into a world that can be shared, a world that (returning to Ricouer) opens before the ironic fixity of a certain speaking, writing and intersubjective action. To enlarge the mind is to enter into this other world (which is, of course, hermeneutically (re)constructed in the process) only to discover that the rhetorician (as ironist) is no longer present. This absence of rhetoric from itself even, one should say against de Man, from its own tropes and figures, which are equally capable of ensnaring it (political rhetoric being a grim reminder of this) constitutes a fundamental problematization not only of hegemonic pedagogical practices, but of all models of social interaction that fail to take into account the educative role of dissembling and deception. This is the unteachable in teaching. The peculiarity of rhetoric, then, is that it does not instruct it persuades, and it does so in a manner that is itself essentially unteachable. Rhetoric is, at the deepest level, unteachable because its very efficacy depends upon absence; not only the absence of a singular, absolute truth, but also the absence of a communicative community Husserls organic harmony that might share this truth and allow it to inform and, indeed, constitute the intersubjective domain. Rhetoric capitalizes on this absence by satisfying the desire for meaning and clarity in the face of their impossibility. The art of rhetoric of persuasion can only be taught by example. The rhetorician as teacher must be exemplary; that is precisely his/her power. It is the manner in which rhetoric is delivered its exemplary form rather than the validity of its content, which is secondary that accounts for its effectiveness. As Levinas puts it: the saying rather than the said. (1998, pp. 57) Given that, for Husserl, intersubjectivity is grounded in both the physical mirroring of the others presence and the empathic (if partial) intermingling of consciousness streams, there emerges a shared, co-presented lifeworld that is best addressed through a particular rhetoric of familiarity or of (ironic) similarity as outlined by de Man, one that presents itself as a product of what Heidegger calls everydayness. For the other to be educated by phenomenology, the movement here called reduction, it is crucial for Husserl that his example can be followed by all once they have liberated themselves from the natural attitude. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely the natural attitude everydayness which allows self and other, teacher and student to recognize their commonality as analogous components of the they. It is only after the liberation that communication and teaching become problematical.

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This is somewhat obscured by Husserl who, in his attempt to constitute an intersubjective world, begins with the transition from the (already solipsistic) immanency of the ego to the transcendency of the other, (Husserl 1995, p. 89) thus leaving out of account not only the prior motivation for this transition, rooted in the other, but also the extent to which the primordiality of being-with (to use Heideggers vocabulary) forms an essential part of the manner in which such motivation takes place through persuasive teaching. To summarize and explain before moving forward: Husserls ambitions notwithstanding, I understand phenomenology as radically undermining the hasty actualization of objective certainty. Through its painstaking detour through the intentional constitution of noemata it allows the transcendental ego to achieve a degree of certitude, which, however, it cannot translate into objective certainty without re-establishing intersubjective relations with the other. Suspended between the naive intersubjectivity of the natural attitude and the phenomenologically re-constituted intermonadic world (1995, p. 156), the transcendental ego can only arrive at its desired destination if it carries with it from one world to the other the other subjects/monads necessary to actualize this possibility; otherwise nothing will have changed. It is the task of making this transition from one world to another in the company of the other that requires the rhetorical skills necessary to persuade and motivate this phenomenological transformation as a collective rather than a merely solitary act. It is here that phenomenology touches upon the most fundamental pedagogical issue: the transformation of worldviews without the mediation of a founding truth. The Rhetoric of the Body For Husserl, the transition from the natural to the phenomenological attitude must pass through the mediating presence of the body of both self and other as animated reflections of each other. In this way the radicality of the phenomenological reduction which strips away the natural world is, nonetheless, tempered by a recognition of the body of the other as a mark of commonality. The recognition of the other as bodily presence is however much more than the neutral verification of exteriority. Indeed, as Merleau-Ponty makes evident in his work, the body of the other is phenomenologically located in, and of course contributes to, a force field of intentions that animates not only the body but, more importantly, the space between bodies. The body of the teacher is seen in its singularity, separated from the mass both spatially and existentially. The rhetoric of the body, responsible for introducing the dimension of spectacle into the pedagogical event, is the initial means by which the essential solitude of the ego is signified physically and its phenomenological prominence within the sphere of ownness is translated

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into a certitude and commitment that can be read from the visible body of the teacher, a cultural knowledge that is inherited from the natural attitude. Indeed, the very act of separation, the willingness to expose ones singular body to the collective gaze of the other, itself already suggests an authority that is absent in the collective: collectivity has a very different physical power, one based upon force rather than persuasion. Phenomenologically, it is precisely the analogizing gaze of one body towards an other that allows the rhetorical gesture of separation to achieve the power that it does, in that the constitution of the other as organically the same permits the bodily empathy required for rhetoric to work. Students must feel for the teacher, must identify with him or her, as being like them and yet, at the same time, acknowledge that they themselves have not placed their own body before the collective gaze of the other. It is, thus, similarity that allows alterity to be measured, and empathy that allows difference to be felt. Cognizant of this, the persuasive teacher devises teaching strategies, whether consciously or not, that both enable and disable empathy. Without empathy, teaching can provide data, information, and certain forms of knowledge, but as if from another world that, in its absolute difference, is devoid of the transformative power necessary for education. Conversely, the idea (or ideal) of absolute empathy renders teaching redundant, suggesting, as it does, an extreme maeiutics where the evaporation of distance and difference between teacher and student would leave rhetoric nothing to do. It is between these two poles that the teaching strategy of the rhetorician needs to be situated, not at one particular point, but across the whole terrain, understood as a zone of transition where the approach of the analogous body is simultaneously countered by a retreat enacted within language. The body of the teacher is there, analogous to the student and exposed to his or her familiarizing gaze but, as a sound source, as a voice a speaking, a saying this same body is drawn towards a radical exteriority outside of the regime of the visible speaking is not seeing, as Blanchot famously expresses it (1993, p. 25). Clearly, the particular balance of physicality and language, of bodily proximity and distance, of familiarity and disengagement will prove to be different depending on the given context. It might be useful, as a research project for example, to trace the transition from elementary, to secondary, to university education through this particular phenomenological terrain with a view to registering the rhetorical shifts necessary to construct and sustain an intersubjective site that utilizes the appropriate means to achieve its educational ends. Any such study would, no doubt, witness a wide range of pedagogical possibilities from the intimacy of the kindergarten to the (sometimes necessary) severe formalism of secondary education, on to the delicate play of equality and inequality, of reverence and contempt to be found in the university. Whatever the findings, such a study would need, above all, to be sensi-

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tive to the underlying irony of sociality and the rhetorical figures necessary to manage and control this irony. What both the loving mother/father figure and the hateful, vindictive task master/mistress have in common is a knowledge and, hopefully, a mastery of the appropriate rhetorical models for the particular intersubjective environment within which they work. The distance or alterity within the rhetoric of empathy is no greater or smaller than it is in the rhetoric of cold aloofness. Both are active strategies within what might be called a hermeneutics of action where a certain ironic agility and rhetorical expertise are necessary to take some control over the worlds available to be opened up by the pupil/student. Such strategies, regardless of apparent differences, are not, to reiterate, primarily empathic or dialogical; indeed, empathy halts the creation of such worlds. Rhetoric and Absence This splitting of the teachers body into sight and sound disturbs the symmetry of the organic pairing assumed by Husserl, by juxtaposing the presence of the other body as the flesh seen with the peculiarly compelling absence of the embodied voice heard. Anticipating Derrida in many respects, and beautifully capturing the phenomenological essence of rhetoric, Merleau-Ponty writes: The orator does not think before speaking, nor even while speaking; his speech is his thought. In the same way the listener does not form concepts on the basis of signs. The orators thought is empty while he is speaking and, when a text is read to us, provided it is read with expression, we have no thought marginal to the text itself, for the words fully occupy our mind and exactly fulfil our expectations, and we feel the necessity of the speech. Although we are unable to predict its course, we are possessed by it. The end of the speech or text will be the lifting of a spell (Merleau-Ponty 1981, p. 180). The essence of rhetoric is its lack of essence, its emptiness, which, nonetheless, bewitches and persuades thanks to a speech that literally formulates the body of the speaker for the duration of the teaching event. This body does not mirror the other but, rather, flares-up as an embodied language: an improvisational gesture that radically exceeds the reflexive power of the alter-ego, thus constituting a teaching, albeit one devoid of a body of knowledge that can be passed from teacher to student. As Merleau-Ponty affirms: nothing really passes between them and yet the fact is we have the power to understand over and above what we may have spontaneously thought. (1981, p. 178) But, and this is the point, it is a power that is produced by the movement of rhetoric into an exteriority that is radically absent from given forms of knowledge. In this respect, and contrary to the derogation of rhetoric, it is an

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art of persuasion that does not hide absence behind the illusory presence and substance of its fine words. On the contrary, rhetoric draws attention to and intensifies the experience of a fundamental ontological void, the primordial silence (1981, p. 184) between the speaking word (1981, p. 197). This is the power of rhetoric, the power to produce a world in the face of a radical phenomenological pluralism that, in spite of Husserls efforts, unravels the intersubjective lifeworld, casting its inhabitants out into a solitary exteriority that only rhetoric can speak to, albeit obscurely. By all accounts this describes very well Heideggers manner of teaching, creating, in his case, a pedagogy where phenomenology and rhetoric, working in tandem, become the vehicle for the radical transformation necessary to remember and address again the question of Being. Anticipating, in a sense, Merleau-Pontys observation that nothing passes between teacher and student and yet there is transformation, Rudiger Safranski grasps the absence at the core of Heideggers singular, but famed, teaching when he recalls Jaspers comments on Heidegger: It is astonishing how Heidegger manages to captivate us. . . Admittedly, his students then will have felt much the same as we do today that one is drawn into his thought until one arrives at the moment of rubbing ones eyes in astonishment and asking oneself: that was quite something, but what use is the. . . experience to me? Karl Jaspers strikingly formulated this experience with Heideggers philosophizing in his notes. . . This is what Jaspers said about Heidegger: Among contemporaries the most exciting thinker, masterful, compelling, mysterious but then leaving you empty-handed (Safranski 1999, p. 100). All of the rhetorical ingredients are here: mastery, compulsion, mystery and nothingness. Rhetoric gives nothing, it does not instruct, it persuades, and persuasion masters the other not through a superior grasp of a knowledge that can be bequeathed by the teacher, but through the production of a fascinating, seductive and compelling body, occupying in a specific manner, an other, more powerful world. Merleau-Ponty, with typical subtlety, grasps this particular mode of learning: I begin to understand a particular philosophy by feeling my way into its existential manner, by reproducing the tone and accent of the philosopher. In fact, every language carries its own teaching. . . (Merleau-Ponty 1981, p. 179). Merleau-Ponty is not describing empathy but something quite different. The model of learning suggested here is, like Kants, imitative or reproductive and forms part of the model of exemplification where the singular manner of the teacher provides the model to be adopted by the students and used in their own way. (Kant, 1973, para. 49) In this regard, and with the phenomenological

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project in mind, it is the fundamental productivity of the phenomenological/ rhetorical compact which ensures that the reproduction in question is, paradoxically perhaps, the reproduction of production: production can only be reproduced. Pluralism, Language and Estrangement A pedagogy based upon the reproduction of production will not be empathic but, rather, pluralistic. Instead of eroding the barrier between self and other through dialogue and understanding, the infinite plurality of producers (and the production of infinite plurality) creates what Blanchot calls a relation of the third kind. He writes: Now what founds this third relation, leaving it still unfounded, is no longer proximity proximity of struggle, of services, of essence, of knowledge, or of recognition, not even of solitude but rather the strangeness between us: a strangeness it will not suffice to characterize as a separation or even as a distance. Rather an interruption An interruption escaping all measure (Blanchot, 1993, p. 68). Teaching, in this view, would resemble a regime of estrangement rather than of empathy, where teacher and student are cast as strangers rather than analogical twins, and where the phenomenological continuity between self and other, so important for Husserl as a guarantor for a predictable intersubjective world beyond/after the reduction, suffers an interruption that, as Blanchot will argue, breaks the bonds of intersubjectivity. Instead of an organic/psychic bond there is an interval; an empty space, a between that demarcates a radical pluralism not based upon the all-toofamiliar notions of diversity, co-existence and toleration, all of which sit only too comfortably alongside empathy and dialogue, but one signifying a fundamental inequality that strips the other of its horizon (its sphere of ownness), its position in space and time, its selfhood. For Blanchot this does not leave nothingness but, rather, it leaves speech the violence of speech. Here Blanchot distances himself from the perspective of his friend Levinas. For the latter, teaching is rooted in the height of a non-violent ethics of alterity explicitly pitted against the violence of rhetoric. Blanchot, very differently, sees violence as the secret of all speech and language: All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret centre of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it (1993, p. 42).

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The primordial violence of language is the withdrawal of the self as a presence within the written and spoken word. The peculiar death enacted within writing that so concerns Blanchot thus introducing a fundamental rhetorical dimension into all communication is the violence necessary to persuade the other through the power of production rather than the reproduction of a given substance or truth. The strangeness and estrangement of speech then is not the product of an unknown incapable of integration into the communicative community but, instead, the very production of an exteriority that, in its affirmative force enters as other into the horizon of the self as difference rather than contradiction or negation; as an interruption. It is precisely the fact that the other is not constituted as a self within an identifiable horizon that precludes the formation of a shared intersubjective domain within which teaching, as the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student, can take place. This does not destroy teaching, but it transforms its relation to the known (knowledge) in a manner that requires, initially, the re-evaluation of mastery. Mastery Both Blanchot and Levinas use the terms mastery and master repeatedly in, among other things, an effort to resist the longstanding, and continuing, domination of maieutics as a pedagogical model a model that, as the figure of Socrates confirms, dispenses with the teacher/master: teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain (Levinas, 1969, p. 51). The two thinkers have a great deal in common rooted, no doubt, in a long friendship where ideas have been exchanged and shared. However, there are important differences, which will emerge as we continue. To begin with, both Blanchot and Levinas share a concern with otherness and infinity; these terms are central to their pedagogies. Indeed, for Levinas, it is teaching itself which produces the infinite: Teaching signifies the whole infinity of exteriority. And the whole infinity of exteriority is not first produced, to then teach: teaching is its very production (1969, p. 171). Similarly, Blanchot describes the master/student relationship as a relation of infinity, signifying a kind of abyss between the point occupied by the master. . .and the point occupied by the disciple. (1993, p. 6) In both cases there exists a radical non-reciprocity between master and disciple/teacher and student that precludes the establishment of an empathic occupation of each others position within a symmetrical pedagogical structure. In the case of Blanchot this results in the positing of a dissymmetrical interrelational

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(1993:6) structure that might be seen as horizontal in that it flattens the hierarchy which traditionally legitimates the master: the University and, by implication, the State. Levinas, on the other hand, in his understanding of pedagogical non-reciprocity, arrives at a model that is asymmetrical the asymmetry of the interpersonal (1969, p. 215) and, structurally, hierarchical. For him, the master always speaks from a position of height: teaching comes from on high and is delivered as a (non-violent) command (1969, pp. 178, 213) that demands obedience in the name of an ethics of the Other. In both cases the impossibility of empathy not only blocks the phenomenological constitution of the other within an intersubjective lifeworld, but, in fact, promotes this impossibility this impossible relation (Blanchot) as the very crux of teaching. However, the nature of this teaching emerges as something different in each case, opening a rift between the apparent similarity of Blanchot and Levinas. Height From the outset Blanchot is suspicious of the dimension of height as it relates to the proposed alterity of the teacher. There are two main reasons for this one institutional, the other structural. As he makes clear, his pedagogy aligns itself with those he names dissidents (Blanchot, 1993, p. 4) teaching outside of the State University system (Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bataille. . . himself). As with Levinas, Hegel represents, for Blanchot, an absolute dialectics that must be resisted in the name of an irreducible solitude, but more than this he represents a magisterial form of philosophy that speaks from the height of a university chair (1993, p. 4). It is precisely the disintegration of such legitimating hierarchies in the fragmentary form of the dissident that underpins Blanchots particular perspective. Secondly, and more explicitly, Blanchot places a question mark above Levinas use of both ethics and height in his explication of the unequalness of the master/student relation, introducing, as they do, a structural order or perspective that fails to do justice to the inscrutability of this strange interrelation: But what is the meaning of this unequalness? Of what order is it? I dont see it. I dont see it well either. Emmanuel Levinas would say that it is of an ethical order, but I find in this word only secondary meanings. That autrui [the Other] should be above me, that his speech should be a speech of height, of eminence these metaphors appease, by putting it into perspective, a difference so radical that it escapes any determination other than itself. If

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he be higher, autrui is also lower than I am, but always Other, Distant, the Stranger (1993, p. 63). Paradoxically then, given his vehement opposition to the violence of rhetoric, Levinas own image-happy rhetoric obstructs, for Blanchot, an approach that must situate itself outside of the optical imperative (1993, p. 27) if it is to begin to comprehend the exteriority of speech. But there is more to it than this; it concerns the mode of address, which, in turn, raises doubts about the degree of radical asymmetry to be found in the height model of teaching. By placing the master above the student and then, initially at least, viewing the teaching situation through the eyes of the student (but we are all students in this respect), who is compelled ethically to be instructed (Levinas, 1969, p. 73) by the infinite otherness produced by the teacher, a pedagogical regime of command and obedience are established which, at each instant, are irreversible. However, beyond the instant the pedagogy of alterity described proves to be less asymmetrical than it appears. To explain: in order to avoid reducing the teacher to a figure of force, an oppressive commander, Levinas more than once proclaims that the command of the teacher is a command to command (1969, pp. 178, 213). Indeed, a requirement of facing the other-as-master within Levinas version of an ethical domain is that we the student/disciple/poor one are also, at another time, masterful and thus equal to the teacher. It is only through this balance of power that that mastery becomes an issue a concern for Levinas. The poor one, the stranger, presents himself as an equal. . . He comes to join me. . .but he joins me to himself for service; he commands me as a Master. The command can concern me only inasmuch as I am a master myself; consequently this command commands me to command (1969, p. 213). Over time, then, the teacher/student relationship proves itself to be perfectly reversible, reciprocal and, in a word, symmetrical. What is more, the fact that only the master can obey the infinite command of the other master suggests a maieutics of mastery a reciprocal anamnesis of an already given equality very much at odds with the central thrust of Levinas anti-Socratic pedagogy. Distance Returning to Blanchots horizontal, dissymmetrical model of teaching, it is clear, to reiterate the earlier reflections, that it is devoid of the hierarchical (albeit reversible) structure of Levinas thought, placing strangeness and distance above eminence and height. Again, to reiterate, it is not the height of the other that defines alterity. For Blanchot otherness can be understood as either high or low or, more to the point, neither. It is, rather, the peculiar

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spatial and temporal distance between teacher and student that accounts for the strangeness of the interrelational space in which they find themselves. It is important, too, to note that Blanchot works with a notion of interrelationality rather than the more familiar intersubjectivity, a strategy that effectively removes selfhood and with it the demands of a phenomenological constitution of the other as an other subjectivity. This renders the teacher/student relation neutral, to use Blanchots vocabulary, or, perhaps, faceless, to counter Levinasian language, thus grounding non-reciprocity and dissymmetry in a distorted field of relations rather than the infinite excess of the other man. Blanchot writes: [the teacher]. . . is not merely someone who teaches what he knows; and we should not be content with attributing to the master the role of example, or with defining his bond with the student as an existential one. The master represents a region of space and time that is absolutely other. This means that, by his presence, there is a dissymmetry in the relations of communication; this dissymmetry means that where he is the field of relations ceases to be uniform and instead manifests a distortion that excludes any direct relation, and even the reversibility of relations. The presence of the master reveals a singular structure of interrelational space, making it so the distance from student to master is not the same as from master to student. . . (Blanchot, 1993, p. 5). The presence of the teacher is here marked not by the person who, as example, is in danger of embodying the unknown as guru, thereby falsely constituting an identity for the alterity of teaching, but by speech; by the rhetoric of the master. Like Levinas, Blanchot places an emphasis on the saying rather than the said, but their understanding of the masters voice is different, which in turn signals again two rather different pedagogies. For both thinkers the teacher does not use speech to convey knowledge to the student: on the contrary, both see knowledge as a secondary issue. Instead, as Levinas writes, speech is a teaching (Levinas, 1969, p. 98) thanks not to what is said but to the manner in which it impacts on the intersubjective or interrelational pedagogical structure. To begin with, Levinas, in the absence of an order of totality (denied by his philosophy) requires an alternative ordering principle that will not jeopardize the necessary alterity of his ethical project. It is within this context that speech, for him, introduces a principle into anarchy, (1969, p. 98) putting an end to equivocation and confusion (1969, p. 99). This is achieved through the masters act of thematization, which reveals the objective order of phenomena through a primordial frankness (of revelation) that, as a giving from master to student founds an association that, for Levinas, is intrinsically moral: Speech first founds community by giving, by presenting the phenomenon as given; and it gives by thematizing (1969, p. 99).

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The promotion here of the thematization rather than the theme (the infinite is not a theme for Levinas) is not the same as promoting the saying rather than the said, in spite of appearances to the contrary. In fact, it is precisely the anarchy of the saying, its radical discontinuity, and its intermittence (to use Blanchots language) that is destroyed by thematization. Even without freezing phenomena into specific themes (the said), thematization, to make sense, must (as Husserl demonstrates) assume a continuous phenomenology of internal time consciousness on the part of the other in order for the retention and protention necessary for thematization to be recognised for what it is (see Husserl, 1964). This would seem to be something of a retreat from Levinas more radically discontinuous treatment of the instant in his earlier Existence and Existents (Levinas, 1978, pp. 7375). The same could certainly not be said of Blanchot who, while also seeing speech as teaching, retains throughout his thought an almost brutal indifference to the other as source or destination of a pedagogical language of absolute estrangement. Intermittence, interruption, and interval are the terms he uses to articulate the strange region of mastery. All are the product of infinite affirmation. Unlike Levinas prioritization of the other the poor one as master, Blanchot is much closer to Bataille whose attempt to think a sovereignty of pure expenditure outside of all dialectics requires a consideration of affirmation cut loose from the hegemony of negation and critique so powerful within the University. By allowing the answer to precede the question a method Blanchot detects, and admires, in the thought of figures such as Nietzsche and Simone Weil the responsibility for, and response to, the Other crucial for Levinas is removed by Blanchot and replaced by what he describes as the movement of affirmation (1993, p. 108), a movement that can be traced as an interruptive moment in the discontinuity of certitude, thereby creating rather than suffering the fragmentation typical of a radically dissymmetrical order. The teacher here does not create an association through giving, or alienate through taking away; there is, rather, an ontological indifference to the other a being in difference which accounts for the distance, or interval marked by the master/student relation a relation of ir-responsibility. It is this distance that is dissymmetrical, thus allowing an alternative model of non-reciprocity to Levinas chain of command. As Blanchot understands it, the master is the representative for a region of space and time that is absolutely other, (1993, p. 5) a dissymmetrical space/ time where the distance between the master and student is radically different from the distance between student and master. It is this distorted interrelation that structures the pedagogical event but not in the sense that it allows the transmission of a body of authoritative knowledge from teacher to student. On the contrary, Blanchots model of teaching is somewhat perverse (or is it?) in that it is primarily concerned with the interruption of such continuous transmission.

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The master is destined. . . not to smooth out the field of relations but to upset it, not to facilitate the paths of knowledge, but above all to render them not only more difficult, but truly impracticable (1993, p. 6). A representative of an other space/time rather than the embodiment of knowledge, a space/time that cuts across the students as an intermittent affirmation of difference, the teacher, rather than being the face of the other demanding a response and responsibility (Levinas) comes, rather, to resemble him/herself as an image, as the mediating appearance or presence of an absent knowledge or truth. It is this irresolvable juxtaposition of presence and absence epitomised for Blanchot in the self-resemblance of the cadaver (teacher as corpse!!) that produces a fascination which endlessly delays the educative process, obstructing the impatient rush to the illusory goal of knowledge in an infinite detour of turning and returning that Blanchot calls research (1993, p. 6). Fascination Perhaps by thus importing (whether legitimately or illegitimately) this particular notion of fascination into his pedagogy, some sense can be made of Blanchots differentiation of distances between teacher and student. Certainly both Blanchot and Levinas make much use of the notion of proximity which, for them, articulates both intimacy and remoteness simultaneously. But how is the aforementioned distortion of proximal interrelations to be understood here? Who, or what, is close or distant and how does this differential work itself out within the teaching situation? Fascination allows, indeed compels, the fascinated to draw close to the figure of fascination enticed by anything from intrigue to obsession. In this regard if, as I speculate here, the teacher is or becomes the subject of fascination then it is difficult to see how we can measure this distance and differentiate it from its reverse relation with the student when, as Blanchot affirms, it is both close and distant: Whoever is fascinated doesnt see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather it touches him in an immediate proximity: it ceases and ceaselessly draws him close, even though it leaves him absolutely at a distance (Blanchot, 1982, p. 33). If, as I believe to be the case, the teacher does draw the student close in order to open up an infinite distance that is not dialectically resolvable an Outside then at what distance is the student located, and how is this distance different? To answer this, one must begin by recognizing that the teacher is not normally fascinated by the student. Without fascination, the distance between the

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master and the student is neither close nor distant; there is no proximity but only what might be called an interior absence rather than the absence of exteriority that, as witnessed in the movement of rhetoric and irony, creates fascination. The teacher is thus indifferent to the student, and irresponsible in the face of those demands that accompany the constitution of an interrelational space. Thus, as Blanchot affirms, there are two distances within the distorted relations of the teaching situation: one is the paradoxical measure of the teachers proximity, both near and far; the other is the absence of all measure within what might be called the dead time/space of the student a time/space devoid of the near and far and (note) the dimension of height. There is no possibility of reciprocity here. Having reached what looks like an extreme, perhaps terminal point in pedagogical thinking, it might be asked what manner of teaching is under consideration here? Is this teaching at all, or its impossibility as described by Kant in the Critique of Judgment? In fact, to make sense, Blanchots pedagogical model would have to be brought into some engagement with Kants notion of exemplification; not, as Blanchot rightly warns us, by promoting the body of the teacher as example the guru again but through the body nevertheless, as will be suggested in a conclusion which attempts to trace this thought back through the phenomenological tradition to Husserl, where we started. To be fascinating the teacher must present an image to the student. To present an image the teacher must be constituted as a body, one that takes on presence within the students sphere of ownness and which draws the other out of this sphere through such fascination. It is however, not the body of the teacher that is fascinating (not alone anyway) but the voice that, as speech, is mediated there, as is the visual resemblance of the self to itself as presence and absence respectively as a rhetorical figure. In fact, it is precisely this splitting of the body between sight and sound that renders the teacher fascinating. The physicality of teaching, its aesthetic rather than ethical face-to-face-ness, allows the proximity of the teacher/student interrelation to be experienced as a closeness measured by the presence of the other organic body recognized as analogous. At the same time (or is it?) the speaking body interrupts this organic pairing through the force of a language that, unlike the flesh, is not owned by the teacher or student. Here the mediating role of the body introduces the strange and estranging incessance of language which speaks through the speaker from an absolute distance; a distance that the eternal detour of ironic agility works tirelessly to maintain in the face of the teleological urgency that accompanies the insatiable desire for knowledge. If teaching is to take place the teaching of exteriority that is, the most important teaching (?) then the students body must fall within earshot of this voice. As Nietzsche, and following him, Heidegger and Derrida recognize, teaching depends on the ear, on hearing or, better, hearkening (Derrida, 1988, pp. 138; Heidegger, 1962, pp. 206, 313; Shapiro 1991, pp. 1528) The

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responsibility for this necessary approach falls to the organic body of the teacher who, as described already by Merleau-Ponty, must arrive at, or devise a manner of teaching that can be felt as well as heard by the student through the rhetoric of the body its posture, its gesture, its movement and stasis, its concentration and intensity; its physical presence as the flesh of a voice that, nevertheless, escapes all embodiment, hence its rhetorical essence and incomprehensible source. This, perhaps, is the final and primary responsibility of the teacher, the responsibility for an irresponsible and incomprehensible sovereignty that, as the exemplification of an other region of space/time the teachers must be steadfast in its refusal to engage with the other in anything other than a dissymmetrical and distorted interrelational space. It is only through the radical indifference made possible by this distortion of the symmetrical intersubjective space of Husserls phenomenology, that the student can receive an education worthy of the name. A bold claim indeed, and one actively seeking misunderstanding, thus allowing these reflections to open out, as is only proper, into the incomprehensibility from where they arose. References
Blanchot, M. (1993). The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Blanchot, M. (1982). The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, J. (1988). The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1981). The Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Husserl, E (1995). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (1969). Ideas 1, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: Allen and Unwin Press. Husserl, E. (1964). The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. James Churchill. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Kant, I. (1973). Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinas, E. (1978) Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. de Man, P. (1979). Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1981) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. J.B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Safranski, R. (1999). Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Oswald Osers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schlegel, F. (1991) Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schlegel, F. (1984) On Incomprehensibility. In Kathleen Wheeler (Ed.), German Aesthetic Theory and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, F. (1986). Hermeneutik und kritik, trans. J. Duke and J. Forstman. In K. Mueller-Voller (Ed.), The Hermeneutics Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Shapiro, G. (1991) Nietzsche and the Future of the University. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 1: 1528.

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