Levinas Unhinged

By Tom Sparrow

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2012 Tom Sparrow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78279-056-3

Contents

Preface: Haunting Levinas…………………………………………..11. Darkest Hours…………………………………………………..92. The Spectator’s Shadow…………………………………………..223. Aesthetic Identity………………………………………………434. Strange Ecology…………………………………………………735. Complexions…………………………………………………….846. Plastic Subjects………………………………………………..122

CHAPTER 1

Darkest Hours

Introduction

Absent a comprehensive history of darkness and the night asphilosophical metaphors, a history that would match the well-documentedubiquity of light as a metaphor, what I will say hereabout Levinas’s deployment of the night could seem like littlemore than an ahistorical curiosity. But Levinas’s analysis of thenight is situated within at least three lines of thinking in thehistory of philosophy, each of which is tied to the Platonic legacy.And insofar as Levinas’s discourse on the night contests thislegacy’s exultation of light and illumination—that is, contests theimagery which constitutes the very discourse of the Westernphilosophical tradition—we can regard his thinking as, in acertain sense, counter-philosophical. The following remarksattempt to elucidate this counter-philosophical tendency and, ina modest way, contribute to what would be the conceptualhistory of the night. Levinas’s 1947 text Existence and Existentsprovides the primary reference point.

The three lines of thinking entered by Levinas’s discourse onthe night are: (1) the history of light as philosophical metaphor;(2) the history of ontology or metaphysics; and (3) the turn to thebody in the twentieth century. It is with this latter trajectory thatI am primarily concerned, and it is my interest in Levinas as botha philosopher of the body and a strange materialist thatmotivates my attention to his analysis of light, the night, and theinsomniac’s struggle with wakefulness. Indeed, it is via a critiqueof light in Existence and Existents that Levinas builds ametaphysical theory of the subject which, I contend, is basicallymaterialist. This materialism is given explicit expression in thediscourse on the night and it is concretized in the phenomenologyof insomnia.

Metaphorics of Light

The metaphor of light plays a significant role in every period ofphilosophy’s history, a role which is not reducible to an innocentliterary trope. As Hans Blumenberg notes, “already in Plato … themetaphorics of light already has a metaphysics of light implicit init.” The philosophical function of the light metaphor isevidenced by glancing at the work of Plato, Descartes, andHeidegger, each of whom informs Levinas’s ethics in a fundamentalway. In his descriptions of the transcendent goodness ofthe Other, Levinas draws on Plato’s image of the sun as thatwhich illuminates beings and thus enables vision andknowledge. The light which emanates from the sun, which in onesense represents the Good beyond being, figures as the divinesource of what exists. To quote Levinas: “Light, whether itemanates from the sensible or from the intelligible sun, is, sincePlato, said to be the condition for all beings” (EE 40). InDescartes, from whom Levinas borrows the idea of infinity inorder to characterize once again the transcendence of the Other,it is the natural light of reason, the lumen naturale, that intuitswhat is beyond our doubt and as such designated certainknowledge. The natural light of reason, which is “[withdrawnfrom] all my senses” and all “images of corporeal things,” isessential to rational self-reflection and the discovery of the egocogito. Finally, the image of light figures into Heidegger’s notionof truth. Dasein serves as the Lichtung, or “lighted clearing,”wherein being is disclosed or uncovered. Levinas’s critique oflight seizes upon this notion of disclosure and its ubiquity inphilosophical and phenomenological rhetoric.

On Levinas’s account the “essential event” of the world is”intention and light” (EE 28-29). This is as the phenomenologistsees it. By “the world,” Levinas here means Heidegger’s worldwhere beings are first and foremost an array of equipment to begrasped, manipulated, and employed as tools toward determinatehuman ends: “A being is what is thought about, seen,acted on, willed, felt—an object. Consequently, existence in theworld always has a center; it is never anonymous” (EE 29). As hewrites this, Levinas is preparing a decisive criticism of theluminosity of the subject-object correlation endemic to phenomenology(and Heideggerian ontology), which in a sense includesPlato and Kant. Remarking on how the sun’s rays bind togetherseer and seen, and thus constitute vision, Plato holds that “whenthe eyes are no longer turned upon objects upon whose colorsthe light of day falls but that of the dim luminaries of night, theiredge is blunted and they appear almost blind …” The problemwith this perspective is that it restricts the realm of sense to whatappears and has form; it disallows for meanings or significationsthat resist the ordering gaze of the ego. “What does not enter intothe forms is banished from the world,” Levinas says (EE 31).This is because, for intentional consciousness, “sense is that bywhich what is exterior is already adjusted to and refers to whatis interior” (EE 40). Its “light is that through which something isother than myself, but already as if it came from me.”

Ontology of the Night

The luminous view of the world entails, for Levinas, a reductionof the otherness of the given as well as a reduction of thechallenge to theoretical consciousness that alterity poses: itassumes that everything that exists is graspable by the intellectand able to be encompassed by a totalizing vision. But it fails tonotice that the intellect only grasps that which has “objective”sense, that is, has a form imposed on it: “Form is that by which abeing is turned toward the sun, that by which it has a face,through which it gives itself, by which it comes forward” (EE 31).Consequently, and as Derrida will point out in “Violence andMetaphysics,” by maintaining a primacy of intentionality andthe subject-object correlation, the phenomenological conceptionof sense maintains an implicit violence which manifests in itsreduction of the Other. In the phenomenological and ontologicaltraditions, Derrida argues,

there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude of light. Incapableof respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenologyand ontology would be philosophies of violence.Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in itsmeaning and at bottom, would make common cause withoppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. Theancient clandestine friendship between light and power, theancient complicity between theoretical objectivity andtechnico-political possession.

Whether the stakes are as dire as this passage suggests (andLevinas seems to see them as such), the seriousness of itsportrayal fuels the urgency of Levinas’s ethical project. His ethicsnecessitates a renunciation of light and a defense of thosemeanings which exceed the limits of theoretical apprehension.One such meaning is expressed in and by the body. Levinas’sanalysis of the night develops the ontological significance of thebody’s expressivity; the analysis of insomnia gives it a concrete,i.e. phenomenological, presentation. Against the primacy of thepersonal and theoretical, the night harbors a dark realm ofsensuous materiality that is not without meaning, howevernegatively it must be conceived. As Cathryn Vasseleu puts it,”Night reveals the limits of phenomenology in the body’scarnality.” Levinas’s turn to the night serves as a reminder thatto live is not simply to be conscious, but to find oneself caught inthe grip of an alterity that not only approaches from the outside,but which wells up inside of us to disrupt and menace thesmooth operation of the intellect and the cultivation of a solipsisticidentity.

For Levinas any philosophy that privileges the form of beingsover their materiality risks forcibly concealing the “nudity inwhich an undressed being withdraws from the world, and is asthough its existence were elsewhere” (EE 31). As we know,nearly the whole of Western philosophy is guilty of this kind ofviolence against alterity, whereas it is in Levinas’s metaphysicsthat the nudity of beings—and especially the nudity of thehuman being—is most respected in its vulnerability. (Derrida, itshould be noted, will show that Levinas could have done better.)The “relationship with nudity,” Levinas maintains, “is the trueexperience of the otherness of the other” (EE 31). A philosophyof the night recognizes that form disintegrates in the darkness,objects lose their graspabilty, and the naked materiality ofexistence encroaches upon the meaning that light reveals. Thismust not be seen as simply a deficient mode of knowing,however, but as an intimate engagement with a carnal alterity.”Scandal takes cover in the night,” says Levinas (EE 31), and it isin the night that the caress, voluptuousness, and desire findrefuge. It is arguably under the cover of darkness that goodness,as fecundity, is most productive. Each of these Levinasiancatchwords (desire, fecundity, voluptuousness, caress) describesa certain encounter with the other as other, as that “objectlessdimension” (EE 35) of nocturnal existence which humbles ourwill to consume or annihilate it:

In the random agitation of caresses there is the admission thataccess is impossible, violence fails, possession is refused.There is also the ridiculous and tragic simulation ofdevouring in kissing and love-bites. It is as though one hadmade a mistake about the nature of one’s desire and hadconfused it with hunger which aims at something, but whichone later found out was a hunger for nothing. (EE 35)

The night, Alphonso Lingis explains in what is assuredly a glosson Levinas, is “not a substance, but an event.” This event effacesidentity, depersonalizes without destroying us. Blanchot illustratesthe point in Thomas the Obscure (1941):

The darkness immersed everything; there was no hope ofpassing through its shadows, but one penetrated its reality ina relationship of overwhelming intimacy. [Thomas’s] firstobservation was that he could still use his body, and particularlyhis eyes; it was not that he saw anything, but what helooked at eventually placed him in contact with a nocturnalmass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in whichhe was bathed.

What, then, is produced by the “nocturnal” event that Totality andInfinity will designate as exceeding the “play of lights” whichdefines representational thinking and the adequation betweenconsciousness and being? A certain affective encounter withbeing qua being is produced, and thereby Levinasian ontologyseeks to darken the metaphysics of light.

Levinas draws an ontological distinction within the nightitself. Levinas differentiates between the night of the il y a (the”there is,” or bare anonymous existence, which Levinas calls the”central concept” of Existence and Existents [EE 44]) and thephenomenal night which opposes daylight. In Heidegger’slanguage, there is both an ontological and ontic understanding ofthe night. Vasseleu maintains that the former is synonymous withalterity and the trace of the Other, which is why she designates itas the “non-visual, non-ontological precursor of presence.” Theil y a, she says, is unrelated to light, purely affective, and thesource of a horror greater than the anxiety found in Heidegger’sfundamental ontology. Now, it may be the case that the il y a isprior to the hypostasis of an existent who actively takes up aposition in being, but I would contend that the passivity sufferedby the existent in the face of the il y a—that is, in the night—isitself an ontological event that reveals the basically heterologicalnature of embodied subjectivity. In other words, ontology is notexhausted by the visible or the illuminable. Ontology suffersfrom a fundamental obscurity, opacity, and darkness.

It is also unnecessary to posit the il y a as beyond being oroutside of immanence (immanence understood in the Spinozistor Deleuzean sense). It is possible to think the separation of anexistent as immanent to the rumble of the il y a, bare existence.This separation, however, need not be cast as a transcendence ofbeing. This is what it would mean to think the advent of thesubject as an event of being in its fundamental materiality or”elemental” nature (EE 44), rather than as an incarnation of adisembodied spirit. Indeed, to conceive the hypostasis,separation, or positioning of the subject as an effect of effort andlabor and fatigue, as Levinas does in both Existence and Existentsand Totality and Infinity, is to conceive subjectivity as the practicalproduction (rather than reception) of form—clothing, dwellings,societal roles, etc., whatever cloaks bare existence in singularmaterial effects and individuates the subject (EE 31). QuotingExistence and Existents again,

here materiality is thickness, coarseness, massivity,wretchedness. It is what has consistency, weight, is absurd, isa brute but impassive presence; it is also what is humble, bareand ugly. A material object, in being destined for a use, informing part of a setting, is thereby clothed with a formwhich conceals its nakedness. The discovery of the materialityof being is not a discovery of a new quality, but of its formlessproliferation. Behind the luminosity of forms, by which beingsalready relate to our ‘inside’, matter is the very fact of the thereis … (EE 51, italics added)

Insofar as the materiality of the existent, the existent’s body, is intouch with the il y a, Vasseleu is right to point out that the bodyfor Levinas is the adventitious materialization of consciousnessand that “consciousness begins as a sense of corporeality.” Thatis, separation begins in the formless rumblings of immanence.And the carnality of our sensibility is precisely what gets back intouch with the il y a when our bodies and minds dissolve into thenight. It would not be accurate to describe this as an “experience”of the il y a, Levinas insists (EE 52), because the term “experience”is “inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusionof light.” The night is non-discursive, an immediate encounterwith a pure nothingness (or a pure plenitude?) that is neverthelessan impersonal something: “What we call the I is itselfsubmerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it.The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannotappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whetherone wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously”(EE 53). The night opens us up to a signification that canonly be apprehended by the body, the body taken not as aprosthesis of a situated, perspectival consciousness (as inMerleau-Ponty, who will not allow the night to completelydestroy personal identity), but rather as an event that is withoutperspective and lacking intentional directedness (EE 53).

The body engulfed in nocturnal space has no point ofreference; it is a sentience reduced to its affectivity or sensibility,which Totality and Infinity calls enjoyment and Existence andExistents denotes as horror (EE 54-55). Material life is a frighteningjoy. The horror of the night presents us with an “indeterminatemenace” in which “one is exposed” to the “darkbackground of existence” (EE 55), that is, to the materiality andmortality of being—in other words, to all the forces which restrictour freedom as embodied, contingent beings who nonethelessremain necessarily riveted to their being. The contradiction of thisposition is perhaps what makes it so unsettling or tragic. “Horrorcarries out the condemnation to perpetual reality, to existencewith ‘no exits'” (EE 58). Maybe it is this “insecurity” in the faceof existence that Elie Wiesel had in mind when he gave the titleNight to his recollection of the Holocaust. Wiesel illustratesLevinas’s point that daylight is not exempt from the horror of thenight when he writes: “We received no food. We lived on snow;it took the place of bread. The days resembled the nights, and thenights left in our souls the dregs of their darkness. The trainrolled slowly, often halted for a few hours, and continued. Itnever stopped snowing. We remained lying on the floor for daysand nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. Wewere nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merelywaited for the next stop, to unload our dead.”

Tangible Darkness

The night is not just a metaphysical concept for Levinas; it has aconcrete modality. It is the insomniac who experiences the nightphenomenologically, but she is also the one who succumbs to thehorrifying absence of form featured in insomnia. The insomniacwills herself to sleep, to take leave of the night, but instead theanonymous “field of forces” that constitute existence disallowsher rest and commands her vigilance. She is kept awake bysomething. Insomnia catches the subject up in its immanence,terrorizes consciousness (EE 62) and seizes the body, revealingthe shadowy depths of the gift of being. It is the realization thatbeing’s truth is not always exhibited in the light of day, but issometimes—even essentially—delivered under the cloak ofdarkness and in the deafening silence of insomnia, that marksLevinas’s deployment of the night.
(Continues…)Excerpted from Levinas Unhinged by Tom Sparrow. Copyright © 2012 Tom Sparrow. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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