Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion

In 1975, eleven years after Derrida published “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas declared poststructuralism the “ruin of the world.” This new “philosophical literature,” Levinas wrote “prefers to play with verbal signs rather than to take seriously the system registered in their said” (EN 76, 61). However, along with communicating a disgruntled impression that disorder had become the name of the game in politics as well as philosophy, Levinas saw an opportunity in this disorder for a truth perhaps older than the world. “In this rupture, and in this awakening, and in this expiation, and in this exaltation, the divine comedy of a transcendence beyond ontological positions unfolds.” Instead of literature, Levinas suggested, the deconstruction of philosophy could expose what he would elsewhere call “religion” (TI 40, 64, 80, 30, 58, 79).

In making this claim, Levinas did not name Derrida, and he did not credit himself with the insight into a “transcendence beyond ontological positions.” The essay was given at the first meeting of the Gabriel Marcel association, and Levinas’s explicit purpose was to tie poststructuralism to an earlier twentieth-century movement, which, in critiquing idealist rationalism forty years earlier, had already welcomed in religion as philosophy’s other. The essay thus credits Marcel and Jean Wahl as early witnesses to philosophy’s end in France and treats them as inaugurators of its new beginnings. In so doing, Levinas framed the relationship between his own philosophy and poststructualism within a larger French philosophical conversation and presented Marcel and Wahl as his original counterparts. He thus provides us with the outline of a narrative, one that begins with Marcel and Wahl and culminates with Levinas and Derrida’s articulation of what constitutes the possible in this postmetaphysical world.

In 1975 the conversation, as Levinas himself asserts in his essay, was taking place after philosophy’s closure, the death of God, and the end of the book. But the terms that defined these endings—philosophy, religion, and literature—lived on and continued to be mobilized with and against one another. Levinas and Derrida themselves never ceased to define and redefine them.¹ The very first engagement between these two thinkers in the pages of “Violence and Metaphysics” is already about the potential of religion and literature to occupy positions at the margins of philosophy. Our task in this chapter is thus to retrace the history of a conversation about the relationship between religion, literature, and philosophy. And with Levinas we must return to a historical moment that predates Derrida’s arrival on the scene. We do this here not only to build up a sense of historical context but to show that when Derrida came to engage these terms implicitly and explicitly in relation to Levinas it was because Levinas himself had been using, thinking through, arguing about them in a milieu that was itself politically charged. The conversation between Derrida and Levinas, took place thus in the wake of a contest that Levinas had already fought. The very category of religion, I argue here, emerged in Levinas’s work in and through a demand to think with many of his contemporaries, Wahl and Marcel among others, about the margins of philosophy and to insist sometimes with and sometimes against them on religion’s exigency even after the death of God in a Europe rebuilding its cultural infrastructure after the deluge of World War II. Literature could perhaps reveal a subject with a different relation to power and agency, but only religion, Levinas argued, could ground reason in justice.

One explanation for the prominence of assimilated Jews in French philosophy in the beginning of the twentieth century was the status of the discipline in the Third Republic. For idealists like Brunschvicg, the exactitude of reason was a replacement for religion.⁴ Through its method of abstraction, Brunschvicg suggested, idealist philosophy could provide an ethic and an orientation. And, indeed, if philosophy could replace religion, if it could be the means to a shared humanist project, Jews could not only participate equally in this new faith, but could be its prophets, in and through their absolute willingness to divest themselves of any particularist allegiances. In this version of the quest for truth, wrote Brunschvicg when canvassed on the status of contemporary humanism, “we will be the worthy heirs to the Greeks only in so far as we succeed at being the contemporaries of our civilization as they were of theirs. What good is it to know how to read Plato, if one is incapable of understanding Einstein?”⁵

In the early years of his philosophical career, Levinas seemed to have found philosophy attractive for similar reasons, and he would, even after his philosophical ideals shifted, always praise Brunschvicg for his commitment to universalism, for what he saw as the selflessness or disinterestedness of that position. He seemed, furthermore, to feel buoyed by the position of Jews within philosophy’s highest strata. In a 1986 interview with François Poirie, he credited the very mention of the Dreyfus affair by Maurice Pradines, a philosopher and early pioneer of psychology at the University of Strasbourg, with inclining him toward the study of philosophy. When asked why he chose to study philosophy, he replied, “You know among the Jews of Eastern Europe the name of Dreyfus was known everywhere. Old Jews with beards who had never seen a Latin letter in their life spoke of Zola as a saint. And then, suddenly, in front of me, a professor in the flesh chose this as an example.”⁶

No doubt the strengthening of the discipline of philosophy was a direct response to the Third Republic’s secularization of the state following the Dreyfus affair. If institutionalized religion was to be marginalized, it had to be replaced, the discipline of philosophy inculcated not through churches but through schools. It was to serve as religion’s replacement.⁷ It is no surprise, then, that the École normale supérieure, the grande école for training France’s teachers, would rise to extraordinary national prominence during this period, or that philosophy would be its most prestigious discipline, or, in fact, that Jews seeking to cultivate and prove their identification with the nation-state would be inordinately attracted to its universalizing promise.⁸ Yet it is all these factors that quickly made the discipline of philosophy and its professors the target of so much criticism in the post–World War I era.

Already during the Dreyfus affair the association between Jews and intellectuals was popularized by Maurice Barrès through his common designation of them as “Les déracineés” (1897). By World War I, the Dreyfusards were seen to have won and to have transformed French culture in the process. In his 1938 book, De Jaurès a Léon Blum, Hubert Bourgin associated the rise of socialism after the war with the prominence of the Dreyfusard generation within the École Normale Supérieure. He went as far as blaming the Jewish currents of the school for “the school’s transformation and subversion.”⁹ Bourgin emphasized the Jewish commonality among France’s leading intellectuals, describing Henri Berr and Durkheim’s rabbinic physiognomy at length, as though it were evidence for their corrupting force,¹⁰ and concluding that the socialist turn of the institution was the consequence of a kind of brilliant but nefarious domination by “des juifs réalistes.”¹¹ Paul Nizan’s 1932 Les Chiens de garde attacked the leading Jewish figures of philosophy on opposing grounds, not because of their manipulation of the discipline for the sake of politics but because of their very disdain for such pragmatic concerns, because of their dogged commitment to abstract universalism. While salvaging an approach to the discipline of philosophy that would proceed on materialist grounds, he attacked its leading figures for their propagation of the “myth of the mind.”¹² As products of bourgeois philosophy, he argued, the philosophers of Paris fashioned “whatever myths this democracy may require.”¹³ Brunschvicg’s idealism was one of his main targets: “Brunschvicg expounds his philosophy without ever mentioning that men suffer, that their private lives are often nothing but a welter of trivial, painful or calamitous episodes,”¹⁴ Nizan wrote. But neither Durkheim nor Bergson were exempt from critique. Durkheim was credited with being the first “to produce with such efficiency”…“the idealogical ammunition for the defense of the status quo,” and Bergson with easing the consciences of the bourgeoisie by allowing them the indulgence of thinking that they have a soul.¹⁵ While Nizan did not directly attack any of the thinkers on the grounds of their religious background, it is clear that what the group had in common was that they were, as Pierre Birnbaum has dubbed a whole generation of Jewish functionaries, “les fous de la République.”¹⁶

By the early 1930s, critiques of academic philosophy began emerging from within philosophy’s inner circles and from Jews within it as well. Levinas would come to share in those critiques. The inaugural issue of Recherches Philosophiques set itself up as a source for alternative approaches to the discipline of philosophy even as it included philosophical mainstays of the previous generation on its comité de patronage.¹⁷ In the opening avertissement the editors announced their interest in broadening the boundaries of the discipline. They acknowledged that the work might “waken” the “resistances” of its readers, but designated it as part of the journal’s aim that readers test its theories with their own objections.¹⁸

The first article was Jean Wahl’s introduction to Vers le concret, in which Wahl used William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gabriel Marcel to establish a countermodel to idealism and abstraction. Wahl was himself an assimilated Jew and would later attend the Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française after the war, but like Bergson before the war, he did not identify with Judaism and clearly found the Christian tradition a more compelling resource for his thought. The goal of his early writings was “to reinstate the power of the immediate.”¹⁹ This meant that religion as a source for experience that transcended the rational would have a new exigency. But it also involved a turn toward literature. For Wahl, mysticism was the model for thinking about a transcendence that did not resolve into totality or an empty idealism. But Wahl insisted that the model of the soul standing alone before a transcendent other was not exclusively theological. What he wanted to recuperate from mysticism was the subject’s experience of the Other as an experience of individuation. “Nature is no less mysterious than the God of the Orthodox,” Wahl wrote in 1937.²⁰ He saw himself here echoing Heidegger, for whom “transcendence was first of all transcendence toward the world.”²¹ But in Heidegger, and in Jaspers as well, Wahl recognized “a nostalgia and echo of the religious” that they had not fully surpassed.²² Existential philosophy was in danger of being too tightly bound to theology and of being too far detached from the concrete given. It was with this dynamic in mind that Wahl spoke of the metaphysical nature of poetry. Were not the artists, the poets, and the writers, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, or Van Gogh, better able to evoke the transcendent nature of existence?²³ Wahl, in asking this question, wanted to set up poetry and religion as two responses to the question of existence and thus to make room for both within the purview of an existentialist philosophy arising out of his readings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

While not as well remembered as many of his contemporaries and successors, Wahl was thus one of the prime agents in the transformation of philosophy in France, key in the articulation of existentialism as a movement and key to the role that literature and religion would play after the war. In Wahl’s articulation, existentialism found its origins in Kierkegaard as a protest against Hegel. As a professor at the Sorbonne and a Normalien, he served as an intermediary between the marginal and foreign influences on French philosophy and its central establishments.²⁴ Levinas himself wrote of Wahl, “during half a century of teaching and research, [he] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic and even, to a degree, anti-academic philosophy” of France.²⁵

Equally important to the shift in the philosophical scene of the decade preceding the war, but far more often credited, was Alexandre Kojève, whose famous 1930s seminars on Hegel brought German philosophy to the center stage of the French intellectual scene, making its mark on many of the key figures of twentieth-century France.²⁶ Although Kojève’s reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit had a Marxist bent and focused explicitly on the master-slave dialectic, his lectures seemed to have inspired a myriad of philosophical/antiphilosophical approaches, which took combating the Hegelian system as their starting point. In certain versions of the attack, including Levinas’s, Hegel’s name became synonymous with philosophy and his teleological view of history, the ultimate idol to be deposed.

Levinas and Derrida were both strongly imprinted by the philosophical developments ensuing from Kojève’s lectures, Levinas as a follower of the seminar and Derrida as a reader in the 1950s of the thinkers who emerged from the inner circle. Levinas in the 1930s was making his first public forays into Parisian philosophical spheres, establishing a friendship with Jean Wahl, publishing one of his first original essays, “De l’évasion,” in the fifth volume of Recherches Philosophiques, and attending philosophical lectures, all while maintaining his day job for the Alliance Israélite Universelle.²⁷ For Derrida, a generation younger, these developments were equally important, but as an already established debate that would inform his earliest writings almost thirty years later.

Levinas in the 1930s was primarily known in Paris as an interpreter and translator of Heidegger and Husserl, but the foundations of his later projects were first laid down in the second half of the decade. The goal of this early work was not so distant from Wahl’s: to use the resources of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology to counter German idealism. While Wahl looked to other thinkers such as Whitehead and Kierkegaard for his resources, Levinas began the work of writing his own phenomenological accounts of lived existence. Levinas would always claim a stark distinction between his Jewish and philosophical writings, but during the 1930s that distinction was most clearly in place, with very few references to biblical and other Jewish sources in these early philosophical texts. Nonetheless, Levinas did not lose sight of what it meant to navigate this world as a Jew, nor of the history of that dynamic.

Even as Levinas came to define Judaism as a force of interruption to the philosophical tradition, he was not averse to invoking some of the same arguments as Hubert Bourgin to identify a kind of Jewish undercurrent in the thinking of the Third Republic’s philosophers, and as a student at the University of Strasbourg in the mid 1920s, an immigrant who appealed for French citizenship, he seemed to have been attracted to philosophy for the same reasons that the previous generation of Jews found it so liberating. If, as David Carroll has argued, literature as a cultural form in prewar France was treated as an organic entity, linking language to history and territory, philosophy remained free of such regional particularism and thus represented the means to becoming European in the most cosmopolitan sense of the term.²⁸

In his 1949 essay on Léon Brunschvicg, Levinas still found something laudable in the cosmopolitan ideal, even as it has been relegated by the war to the past. He presents Brunschvicg as a Jewish countermodel to the Zionist pioneer, seeing in his cosmopolitanism a justification for Diaspora. In Brunschvicg’s commitment to social justice, which showed not “the slightest trace of a specifically Jewish” inclination (DL 76; DF 43), he finds, paradoxically, “the thought of a Jew” or at least one means of inhabiting that identity (DL 77; DF 45). “Assimilation,” thus for Brunschvicg, “proceeded not from betrayal, but from adherence to a universal ideal to which he could lay claim outside of any particularism” (DL 76; DF 43).

Even after the war, Levinas continued to invoke the assimilated generation of the Third Republic, to forge something of a tradition through a reinterpretation of their thought. But one thing was clear: in this new landscape they were proponents of a worldview that was no longer viable.²⁹ The relationship between Judaism and philosophy had to be modeled anew.

Levinas’s own sensitivity to the relationship between philosophy, religion, and literature is already evident in his 1935 essay for Recherches Philosophiques, “De l’évasion.” Here he focuses on preserving philosophy’s priority.³⁰ Levinas’s first full-fledged move toward the articulation of an original philosophical project, the essay treats the West’s fixation on transcendence as its defining characteristic and primarily presents the portrait of this drama in philosophical terms, arguing that “the need for escape—whether filled with chimerical hopes or not, no matter!—leads us into the heart of philosophy.” The essay thus presents literature and religion as poor accomplices in this narrative of failed escape. Levinas discounts the Romantics—Byron and Rousseau by name—as being merely symptomatic and mistaken in a belief that a heroic I can break the shackles of “the foreign reality that chokes it (DE 373; OE 49–50). This romanticism is thus complicit with a bourgeois mentality. At the same time, modern literature and literary criticism might seem to be at least the source for the discovery of Levinas’s very theme of escape. He credits his literary contemporaries for the currency of the term itself, but nonetheless insists that literature serves here only as an expression of a cultural malaise, which philosophy grasps at a more fundamentally ontological level. Religion plays an analogous role as symptom: asceticism expresses “the fundamental event of our being: the need for escape” (DE 381; OE 60). Or, alternately, it too strives futilely for a solution in theology, in the contemplation of and ascendance toward the creator, “as though one could surpass being by approaching an activity or by imitating a work that led precisely to being” (DE 391; OE 72).

Yet the essay ends enigmatically with the clarion call to blaze a new trail: “It is a matter of getting out of being by a new path, at the risk of overturning certain notions that to common sense and the wisdom of nations seemed most evident” (DE 392, OE 73). One can only retrospectively wonder if Levinas was not already gesturing toward Judaism as that alternative means in contradistinction to “the wisdom of nations.” The very term the wisdom of nations is a rabbinic idiom and suggests a contrast between the nations and Judaism and thus harkens to a different relationship between our three terms: religion, literature, and philosophy.³¹ But Levinas did not begin to rethink their relation in earnest until the 1940s, during his captivity as a prisoner of war.

Thanks to the recent publication of Levinas’s wartime journals, we now have new insight into the ways in which Levinas used sources in the years of his early philosophical germination. These seven notebooks composed between 1937 and 1948 include the period of Levinas’s captivity from 1940 to 1945, first in Laval in Western France and then at Stalag 11B, near Hanover, Germany. A member of the French Army and thus protected by the uniform under the 1929 Geneva Convention, Levinas spent these years doing hard labor as a logger in a barrack reserved mostly for French Jewish prisoners.³² Conditions were harsh, but even those prisoners of war marked as Jews from nations that the Germans deemed useful or from which they feared reprisals subsisted under better conditions than their peers in concentration camps.³³

One striking feature of these notebooks is their abundance of literary citations, many of which reappear in Levinas’s later works, often word for word. In the later works they are cited primarily as artful means of expressing the phenomena that Levinas is describing. Baudelaire expresses an ennui from which the heroic subject cannot escape, Dostoyevsky the experience of a radical guilt that precedes me. Macbeth’s cry evinces the futility of suicide.³⁴ In the notebooks, however, they appear otherwise, as partners in a dialogue, as sources even for his philosophy.

The second notebook, which dates from the time of the captivity, opens with the closing line from the symbolist poet Henri de Régnier’s poem “L’ennui,” which itself might seem to express the theme of “De l’évasion”: the weightiness of being. It describes a kind of longing for an oblivion that will not come and closes with the image of black water that resists one’s every stroke, “a weighty river that is not Lethe” (CC 61). Levinas continues with notes on Racine’s Phèdre and once again finds a confirmation that death is not treated here as an escape. “The crime of Phèdre makes visible the fact that she cannot hide. She has assumed the ineffaceable manner of existence. And tragedy is there. It is stronger than death” (CC 63). He continues on with Edgar Allan Poe, Ludovico Ariosto’s Roland furieux, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Interspersed with quotations and meditations on these texts is the development of a concept of a kind of redemption through the experience of being singled out or called by God, an inflection of the very experience of ennui, of the density of being by a religious resignification: “the happiness of suffering in suffering itself, in its election” (CC 64). Thinking with Jankélévitch’s L’alternative (1938), Levinas reflects that such a redemption requires another. Without the other, the acceptance of suffering is “almost vanity, snobbery” (CC 68). He then develops this theme along both religious and literary lines, but in such a way that certain literary sources serve as a means to developing religious concepts.

Thus it is through biblical sources, but also with and against the literary texts of Catholic thinkers, such as Paul Claudel and Léon Bloy, that Levinas begins to formulate his notion of being Jewish. Ironically, this means that Levinas was reading the same sources as the right-wing thinkers of his era.³⁵ Seán Hand has noticed that at the same time Levinas was reading Bloy, less than fifty miles away, so was Ernst Jünger, the notorious nationalist writer, friend and correspondent of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger.³⁶ Levinas even listed Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, as one of his objects of philosophical study. The function of all of these thinkers was to serve as a countermodel against which to theorize the nature of being Jewish. But this also entailed a reappropriation of the logic of Catholic-royalist thought, that is to say, a conception of identity built on tradition and heritage. From this point forward, Levinas rejected philosophy as the replacement of religion, as the site of spiritual guidance. Instead, his project entailed a rerooting of philosophy in a religious foundation, and ironically Catholic attempts to do the same provided an important and useful paradigm in this endeavor.

Even Joseph de Maistre played a role in Levinas’s thought. Reading Alfred de Vigny’s Stello, Levinas encountered his denunciation of de Maistre. He comments, “despite all [that is revolting] in de Maistre,” there is a plane that goes beyond the subjective and objective that implies a theory of the substitution of suffering, which is paradoxically on the subjective plane and on the objective plane where this would be to misconstrue the subjective character of suffering. One arrives at the ideal plane that I am looking for “in the face of God.” While Maistre’s theory of substitution justifies the suffering of others, Levinas uses it in his journals to articulate a logic of election that transcends and overcomes the very correlation of guilt and suffering that would seem to be instrumental to Maistre’s notion of expiation. Vigny quotes de Maistre: “The nations will continue to buy their salvation forever by the substitution of expiatory suffering.”³⁷ This paradigm is reoriented by Levinas so that this substitution can never be understood as the suffering of another for me, but only of mine for another.³⁸ In so doing, he later claims, in the essay “Useless Suffering,” he overcomes the horror of theodicy. “The justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality. Accusing oneself in suffering is undoubtedly the very turning back of the ego to itself. It is perhaps thus; and the for-the-other—the most upright relation to the Other—is the most profound adventure of subjectivity, its ultimate intimacy” (EN 109, 99). Thus, in a Christian theodicy at its most gruesome, Levinas found a source for an ethics that operates through a reversal of the very logic of theodicy. Through its reworking Levinas discovered a conception of being Jewish.

In commenting on Léon Bloy’s letters to his fiancée from 1889–1890, Levinas explicitly highlighted what Bloy had done for Christianity, that he had, without constructing a system, provided an account of mystery in concrete lived experience. For Bloy, Levinas writes, “all of man is put in the categories of Catholicism…. While the rest of us remain on the surface of these categories, the Christian, in revealing the meaning of mystery and transcendence, lives these categories at a deeper level…. Same work is there to be done for Judaism” (CC 151). Bloy’s treatment of Catholicism thus provides a model for Levinas in developing a notion of Jewish being.

However, Levinas reworked Bloy’s aesthetic of suffering into an ethics. In Bloy the suffering exalted in his work is a feminine suffering, the impoverished prostitute, of whom Mary Magdalene is the archetype. Thus Bloy finds in certain women an instantiation of the theology of the suffering on the cross. In Levinas’s journals and, after the war, in the 1947 essay “Être Juif,” Levinas reversed the paradigm and suggested that Judaism’s theology explicates its facticity. In the notebooks Levinas writes, “Js [Judaism] as category: or individual salvation becomes collective…the meaning of the nightmare. Immobile reality—absolutely strange. Night in plain day” (CC 86). But this individual move from the experience of election in suffering to the collective paradigm of Judaism can also be universalized and thus serve not only to describe Jewish existence but also as a means to rethink the human condition. As he put it in 1947: “Jewish existence is thus the fulfillment of the human condition as fact, personhood and freedom. And its entire originality consists in breaking with a world that is without origin and simply present. It is situated from the very start in a dimension that Sartre cannot comprehend. It is not situated there for theological reasons, but for reasons of experience. Its theology explicates its facticity” (EJ 263; BJ 210).

Ultimately, in Otherwise Than Being, Levinas uses a formulation derived from his description of being Jewish to define religion as a subjection to the Other inflected by God’s illeity. In an early notebook he wrote, “In persecution I find the original sense of J[udaism], its original emotion…passivity pure by which I become the son of God” (CC 179). In Otherwise Than Being, then, religion is described in parallel terms: “It is the trace of a relationship with illeity that no unity of apperception grasps, ordering me to responsibility.” We can thus trace a line connecting three moments: Levinas’s interpretation of Catholic sources during the war, his formulation of Jewish being in 1947, and his definition of religion in Otherwise Than Being. This is not to say that the Catholic sources are necessary to the laterthought, or to argue for their priority over Jewish sources, but only to reveal the connection between the comments from the notebooks and a matureexpression of Levinas’s thought.³⁹

Given Levinas’s initial project, especially as it was first formulated in De l’évasion and in Existence and Existents, to describe the emergence of the subject from the anonymity of existence, literature could have been, as it was for Sartre and Camus, more than a means to religion for Levinas. Levinas might have harnessed it as the avenue toward his analysis of sociality, as the means to develop a distinction between sociality and the engagement of the subject with objects. This distinction between the social relation and intentionality toward objects would not necessarily seem to necessitate the category of religion. Indeed, there are glimpses in the notebooks that Levinas considered such a possibility.

In the carnets Levinas identifies Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu as a key source for thinking through the dynamics of a social redemption from ennui. Levinas’s first mention of Proust is as “the poet of the social—of the very fact that there is for me the other person.” Proust reveals the other as other than object, as evanescent, “as a presence made of absence” (CC 72). Proust’s vision of sociality seems to entice Levinas in its fixation on the inaccessible. Sociality for Proust takes the place of adventure, of the test, of the other novelistic guises of your standard novels. One could say the same for the Other in Totality and Infinity, and given his fixation on the Marcel-Albertine relation, may have provided the model for Levinas’s conception of the feminine. When Levinas published his reflections on Proust in 1947, he went as far as saying “Proust’s most profound teaching—if indeed poetry teaches—consists in situating the real in a relation with what forever remained other—with the other as absence and mystery. It consists in rediscovering this relation also within the very intimacy of the I and in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides” (NP 122–23; PN 104–5).

Yet even as Proust represents another avenue for an exploration of alterity, there is also evidence that Proust may have provided an avenue toward describing sociality in religious terms. Proust himself repeatedly compares his own relation to the other of his desire with religious terminology. He refers to an unexpected response from a lover as a miracle, to the inner sanctum of a home and its supernatural activities. Social rituals are compared to a mass, and even his devotion to the Swanns he relates to a good Catholic’s encounter with Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus. Like the believer who comes into contact with a source of demystification, Marcel too must have “banished forever from…[his] mind” any corrupting influence.⁴⁰ While there is a certain irony in these comparisons, Proust performs a transposition of the ultimate site of mystery into the very being of the other.

Proust would thus be a resource for formulating a metaphysics that implies pluralism, one of the formulations Levinas gives his own project at the conclusion of Totality and Infinity (TI 322–23, 291–92). Yet when Proust appears in Totality and Infinity it is only as his description of a lady’s sleeve provides an example of the role of the formal in art, of the facade, of a sensual mode of access fundamentality at odds with the face (TI 210, 192). Even in the 1947 essay, Levinas needs to discount the poetic or literary. To teach, literature must be redeemed by criticism.⁴¹ This is a point that Levinas will make more explicitly in his early essays after the war, and there are notes from the later war years that gesture toward this position.

Already by the fourth wartime notebook, Levinas had begun to think methodologically about the relationship of literature to religion. Late in 1943 he wrote, “A literary work—a created world is only valued as the real world by the supernatural of which it leaves a margin and which it makes present: that is the meaning of the symbol and its function.” Levinas expanded this notion into a theory of metaphor that was further worked out in his postwar notes and later given as a conference in early 1962 at Jean Wahl’s Collège philosophique.

It is striking but not surprising that Levinas never published his paper on metaphor or developed his thinking into a publishable essay. He seems at odds with himself on the topic. On the one hand, metaphor offers a means to identifying transcendence in language. The essence of the metaphor is “the transfer of meaning,” the capacity to go beyond the given. Levinas even hints that transcendence could not be understood without metaphor and describes God as the ultimate metaphor. On the other hand, Levinas is in the midst of developing a philosophy that argues transcendence is only possible through the face-to-face relation. Thus in his notes he writes, “How to reconcile my thesis: the speech act [la parole] disposesses the one who speaks and the thesis the metaphor is the going beyond [dépassement] of signification. How to show that the power of verbal transcendence [du dépassement verbal] is placed in the relation with the Other?” (CC 242). By his 1962 conference, Levinas had solved this dilemma, but we might gather from the fact that he did not publish his thoughts on the topic that it continued to trouble him.

His solution in 1962: “The universally metaphoric quality of language and of signification attests, ipso facto, to the depreciation of transcendence inscribed in metaphor, the beyond itself which is there announced in itself does not represent for language the passage to an alterity that is completely other, for it would be an abstraction, an exit out of context that the universality of metaphor precisely contests. The universalization of metaphor is a condemnation of transcendence” (PS 337). If literary language findstranscendence everywhere; it finds it nowhere. It can all be reduced to play. Artistic life can not point the way to the transcendent. It remains “consequently a transcendence of pure game” (PS 338). He even seems to suggest that this element of art leads to the denouncement of religious transcendence. It is as though literature in its constant production of metaphor either fails to be able to see an escape from its game toward a real beyond or the literary arts reject it insofar as it would lead to a conception of art itself as impotence. Levinas then goes on to argue for a more fundamental conception of metaphor, one that transcends its role in signification: “the metaphor absolute” or the interlocutor as that which breaks through worldly signification (PS 340). Levinas thus credits metaphor for allowing us to think transcendence, then discounts it as a literary operation in order to rehabilitate the notion in terms that liberate it from the discursive element of signification. It is a feat that recalls Plato’s banishing the artist from the republic even while depending on their craft for his own articulation of his political model. This will, of course, be Derrida’s argument as well, and we can see in Levinas’s fear that metaphor is mere play the early articulation of what would become his critique of Derrida. And yet the crossroads is also evident here, for it seems that Levinas depends on metaphor to reach transcendence.

Given Levinas’s denunciation of literary or artistic craft, it is surprising that one further form of literary exploration evident in the wartime journals are Levinas’s own literary exploits. When he listed his projects in the wartime notebooks, he divided them between philosophy, literature, and criticism. Proust was to form his critical project. Under philosophy he listed 1. being and nothingness, 2. time, 3. Rosenzweig, 4. Rosenberg. His literary project consisted of two novels of his own, notes for which are interspersed throughout the wartime notebooks. Fragments of the novels themselves are also in the archive and were published in the third volume of the Oeuvres complètes. The dating of their composition has not been definitively determined.⁴² In his introduction to the volume containing the novels, Jean-Luc Nancy describes the ambiguity surrounding the very question of Levinas and literature as well as the question of the role of these novels as an element of Levinas’s overall project. As he points out, the limited nature of Levinas’s own engagement with literary themes sets him apart from his contemporaries: from Sartre, Blanchot, and Derrida, but also we can add from Wahl and Marcel At the same time, the fact that Levinas in fact wrote novels separates him from other interlocutors of his: from Derrida, Ricoeur, Husserl, Heidegger, and Rosenzweig (ELP 9–10).

The novels themselves seem to have provided him the opportunity to explore the wartime world as the nonethical world or, more precisely, the world from which social mores and the political structures undergirding morality had vanished. Levinas would later remember the fall of France in 1940 in exactly these terms, as the dropping away of all forms of culture. “There was no longer any measure to contain monstrosities,” Levinas wrote in the essay “Honneur sans drapeau.”⁴³ The image itself goes back to a passage from the notebooks: “The drapery which falls. The world which appears without its contors <naked?>…the fall of the drapery—the defeat. To describe in the scene of Alençon the rhythm of this fall. There was nothing left of the official. There was no more official” (CC 112).⁴⁴ This is the world of the novel that Levinas entitled “Triste Opulence” in the notes which refer to it in the wartime notebooks and “Eros” in the notebooks that contain its fragments. A world where “there was no more France [plus de France]. It had departed in a night like an immense circus tent, leaving a clearing strewn with debris” (ELP 43). This is the world to which he would much later compare Derrida’s “philosophical literature.” He even transcribed a scene from the novel into the later essay on Derrida. A barber gets drunk because nothing has any value anymore and, in a play on the old joke, the barber hangs a sign outside his door that says, “Demain on rase gratis,” offering free shaves to passing soldiers, “and suddenly it was today” (NP 67; PN 56).⁴⁵ It is a world that has lost its meaning, yet also a world “from which all the fog had lifted. One reaches the things in themselves,” Levinas wrote in the novel fragment. Here anything is possible, and Levinas even describes a scene of wanton abandon: erotic desire resurfaces in the forgotten corner of the trenches with a schoolgirl “feeling with joy reborn in him desire without ambiguity, without feeling, like purity itself” (ELP 44).

But the novel is not a sustained effort. It is fragmented, without developed characters, without a stable place or time, and ultimately the notebooks containing its fragments pass into philosophical reflection on eroticism, on being Jewish as suffering.

The second novel, entitled “La Dame de chez Wepler,” also explores the theme of a world devoid of moral subjectivity, devoid of humanity, a man whose wife is hospitalized wanders around Paris during the war without direction, without purpose, and in this world the reading of literature, erotic desire, and the very experience of materiality in its weightiness—with its smells and close corridors—subsist unredeemed. Levinas’s own literary attempts thus seem to confirm his view of literature itself, and the view he associates with Blanchot’s novels that literature exposes the underside of being, but it cannot “break open the definitiveness of eternity.” As Levinas put it in 1966, “Two beings locked in a room struggle with a fatality that brings them too close together or sets them too far apart to find a door. No novel, no poem—from the Illiad to Rememberance of Things Past—has done anything other than this” (SB 39; PN 147).

The journal, which appeared for the first time in 1946, takes the flood as its central motif, but only by way of a Greek-Latin-French translation of the event. No doubt the biblical narrative resonates in the title, but Wahl chose to transpose it into a Greek mythological referent for the philosophical nature of the journal and for its humanist bent. The epigram itself is a retelling of the Greek myth by Stéphane Mallarmé by way of Ovid. In this version, instead of Noah as God’s chosen one, Deucalion gives the orders, prays to Zeus, and brings back the human race by tossing stones, the bones of his mother behind him. The poem concludes, “The stones…became men and women and so began the hard life of labor which is ever since the lot of humanity.” Wahl presented the journal as a kind of ground clearing. He commenced the présentation by writing, “The upheavals in the midst of which we find ourselves are accompanied by profound modifications of thought, perhaps even its very essence. It is necessary to know what has disappeared and what has survived.”⁴⁶ The journal begins with the presupposition that, insofar as they are to be reinterpreted, philosophical concepts will occur through philosophy’s interaction with other human activities, literature and art in particular.⁴⁷ In this, existentialism is seen to lead the way.

Wahl was indeed one of the most explicit thinkers in the postwar moment to associate literature and religion, not only in Deucalion but also in a book of essays composed during the war and published in 1948.⁴⁸ As Wahl saw it, science had itself overturned the basic assumptions of classical mechanics; the categories of time and space had burst. The philosophies of Bergson, Heidegger, and Whitehead had attempted to respond. But what they missed was poetry’s power to rewrite our sense of perception. The twentieth century was a moment like that of the romantics responding to Kant, yet again one saw the association of metaphysics and poetry. And poetry has the advantage of being able to manipulate the categories of time and space. In this sense it goes beyond metaphysics and is indeed a form of spiritual exercise.

It was in Wahl’s Deucalion that Levinas published what would become the centerpiece of Existence and Existents, the essay “Il y a,” a philosophical description that makes the atmosphere of the Lager an archetype for being. But, even as Levinas’s essay was intended as a rebuttal to Heidegger, Heidegger was still clearly the central figure around which new thought would emerge. The journal includes an essay by Alphonse de Waehlens on Heidegger and Sartre, one by Wahl himself on Sartre’s notion of nothingness, and an essay by Roland Caillois on time in Husserl and Heidegger. An emphasis on literature is notable by the second issue’s inclusion of a poem by Wallace Stevens, with whom Wahl had become acquainted while teaching at Mount Holyoke College during the war, an essay on Kafka, and an essay by Levinas on Proust.⁴⁹ Georges Bataille contributed to the second issue of Deucalion as well, even as he began his own journal Critique in the same year, with a similarly international emphasis and a commitment to thinking together the philosophical, the literary, the political, the historical, and the economic. It was also clear in Critique that literature would allow philosophy to rethink its purview, with essays on Henry Miller, Sade, Kafka, the poet René Char, and Rilke.

The attention by philosophers to literature in the years immediately following the war is striking. Given the immanent concerns of food and energy shortages, war orphans, and the unearthing of Nazi atrocities, it might seem surprising that something as seemingly frivolous as literature would become such a point of concern, but the question of literature arose in the wake of a spiritual vacuum that made the reconstruction of culture as crucial as the rebuilding of political and physical infrastructure. The journals themselves make clear that France’s postwar intellectuals set themselves the task of reimagining the human being in the wake of its destruction.⁵⁰ Levinas published in both Les Temps Modernes and Deucalion and was reviewed in Critique. Thus he was no doubt a part of this conversation. While he too saw the need to re-evaluate the function of culture and to rethink the position of rationality in our conception of the subject, he resisted the turn to literature and vocalized his objections. To understand how Levinas established his resistance and how and why he inserted Judaism, sometimes under the more general category of “religion,” into this debate, we must consider all of the debate’s angles.

In the introduction to Les Temps Modernes, and in subsequent essays on the topic, Sartre presents literature as the instrument for creating a new mythology for a new era.⁵² “Literature’s only chance” is “Europe’s chance, the chance of socialism, of peace, and of democracy…We must play it.” The aims are linked. Literature would help forge this new world, even as its possibility was dependent on the emergence of peace and democracy. The very form of literature understood as an expression of embedded freedom would be the instantiation of these principles and ideals. Sartre’s interests here are both political and philosophical. In the introduction to Les Temps Modernes, Sartre insists that the journal itself will resist staking claims in terms of political parties, but he does not deny that there were clear political stakes to the essays ultimately collected under the title Qu’est-ce que la littérature? For Sartre argued that, by its very nature as an expression of the world in which the writer writes, literature is always already political. “The writer is situated in his time; every word he utters has reverberations. As does his silence. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they didn’t write a line to prevent it,” he declared.⁵³

Sartre understood himself to be writing his manifesto at a crucial point in France’s literary history. In the “Situation of the Writer in 1947” he traces out the previous fifty years, dividing it into three generations. The first were those that came of age before 1918 and forged a connection between literature and the bourgeoisie. Here Sartre writes of writers such as Claudel, Proust, and Gide, whom he groups with Barrès for Barrès’s bourgeois version of a monarchist sensibility.⁵⁴ The second generation is best represented by the surrealists, whom Sartre attacks for an adolescent sensibility. The third generation is his own, for whom literature does not offer a means of escape or amusement but rather a means of reconstruction. “The flood has come. What remains to be destroyed?” he writes.⁵⁵ In this essay Sartre thus renders the history of the first half of the twentieth century as a history of literature, thus making its future literary too.

It is no surprise then that the question of literature’s essence, its relation to philosophy, to ethics, and to politics, generated multiple responses. Among them were Georges Bataille’s, Maurice Blanchot’s, and Emmanuel Levinas’s. It was the conversation between these three thinkers that determined Derrida’s own position on literature and indeed his reading of Levinas. Bataille was one of Derrida’s clear forerunners in raising the profile of literature as a means of resisting philosophy’s hegemony. Sartre, in his series of essays on literature, disparages Bataille as a feeble echo of surrealism.⁵⁶ Perhaps this is because of the very threat he posed.⁵⁷ Bataille’s journal Critique was Les Temps Modernes’s main rival. But Bataille would not be so easily dismissed. He became one of the key interlocuters in the debates that followed Sartre’s essays. Suzanne Guerlac has argued that it is Bataille’s conception of literature that largely shaped its later politicization in the 1960s in the journal Tel Qel.

In 1943 Bataille lauded poetry in terms starkly opposed to those for which Sartre championed literature after the war. Instead of functioning as “tools of useful acts,” poetry performs a sacrifice “in which words are victims.”⁵⁸ This is exactly what made poetry significant for Bataille as a spiritual practice.⁵⁹ It is a form of destruction and through that destruction a kind of rescue practice, a restoration. Like a horse put out to pasture, words can be released from service. “Poetry is only a havoc which restores. It gives to time, which eats away, that which a dull vanity removes from it; it dissipates the false pretenses of an ordered world.”⁶⁰ It is by definition the antithesis of philosophical discourse insofar as it takes language out of its servitude to reason.

But part of what made it significant for Bataille is its vanity, for of course poetry can’t fully succeed in the venture of sacrificing meaning; even in poetry words continue to mean, especially inasmuch as they become the object of critique. But this again is poetry’s virtue, for if it fully succeeds it then replicates the structure of project. To be conceived as sacrifice, it has to fail. As Derrida puts it in the essay “From Restricted to General Economy,” “The poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to loss of its sense,” but in so doing, he continues, “poetry risks letting itself be domesticated, ‘subordinated’ better than ever” (ED 384; WD 261; my emphasis).

Bataille first responded to Sartre’s conception of engaged literature in the third issue of Critique in a review of Jacques Prévert’s volume of poetry, Paroles. Here he aligns himself momentarily with Sartre’s introduction to Les Temps Modernes with the desire to rescue literature from the rut into which it had fallen, to take it out of bourgeois circulation.⁶¹ But, to the charge of irresponsibility that Sartre makes in the opening lines of his introduction, Bataille responds, “Poetry dresses in red, finds the anguished note…but it does not suffice to say to the poet, what event do you express…It expresses the event…it is change…it is nothing but the condition of change.”⁶² And he concludes, “In truth society is vulgar, made by men fleeing from themselves, and it hides itself under decoration. But poetry evokes this society not by being content to describe it: it is its negation.”⁶³ Bataille thus places the political gesture of literature on a different plane. He insists that it is not through representation that it is relevant in the world as action, but through the negation of the referential dimension itself, as a kind of laying bare of what the very act of reference, of representation hides. Literature is thus seen to expose being as it precedes illumination.

It is on these grounds in fact that Bataille identified a point of alliance between Levinas’s first major publication after the war, De l’existence à l’existant, and his own theorizing of literature. But in a move that Derrida’s own analysis in “Violence and Metaphysics” later echoes, this is an alliance forged at the expense of Levinas’s own expressed intentions. In De l’existence à l’existant Levinas in fact formulates an understanding of art that seems even to borrow from Bataille’s own formulations. He describes painting and poetry as preserving exoticism insofar as they “removed from represented objects their servile function” (EE 89, 47). But Levinas associates this operation with returning materiality to an impersonal state, to the rustling of the Il y a. In this context art and poetry are identified with primitivism and against the hypostasis of the subject in subjectivity. Levinas did not laud the activity of the artist. Rather he told a coming-of-age story of the subject coming out of this primitive space into the illumination of subjectivity and finally moving toward the exteriority of the other. Levinas was not yet explicitly judgmental about literature or art in Existence and Existents. Yet Bataille recognized already a kind of rivalry in Levinas’s work between art and religion before it had even explicitly appeared. It is this same rivalry that Derrida exploits in his own readings of Levinas.⁶⁴

In a review essay in Critique Bataille focused on the description of the Il y a in the text. Levinas’s attempt was to describe being in a different register than Heidegger did, as a kind of horrific rustling in which there is an absence of subject and object, an impersonal anonymous force of existence. Bataille here foreshadows Derrida’s critique of Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” when he points out the very tension between the philosophical discourse in which Levinas writes and that which he describes: “Ultimately, the discourse that does not wish to oppose to the there is a sentence that speaks about it (which would distance it, due to the very fact that once enunciated, discourse limits the one who enunciates it to the clear world) ceasing to speak of it, therefore in order to reach it, translates an inability not to betray its intention by a mortal disorder.”⁶⁵ But Bataille credits Levinas with seeing the link between art and literature and the Il y a, identifying art or poetry as that which “destroys the meaning of the thing,” thus “returning it to the last silence: that which it reveals is matter and ‘matter is the very fact of the there is.”⁶⁶

Bataille would thus seem to be developing points of consonance with Levinas. But, in fact, Bataille suggests, he cannot follow Levinas as far as he will go. For, first of all, if the Il y a is a space of nonknowledge, what is to allow us to read it as harrowing as opposed to ecstatic, anguished as opposed to joyful? Furthermore these states themselves can only be described in and through a recourse to “formal effects,” among which are modern painting and surrealist art. But Levinas can only reach them from the outside.⁶⁷ What Levinas seemed to miss, Bataille suggests, is the activity itself of art and poetry, the fact that they aren’t merely renderings of the world without subjects, but activities performed by subjects attracted by the prospect of dissolution, of letting go, of expenditure without return. Poetry is the “end of the one who knows,” but it cannot reveal to us existence without existents, only the time of expenditure, the sacrifice of recompense.

The philosophy of existence has posited subjectivity, but it is to the extent that this positing necessarily implies the ruin of the subject posited that this philosophy is worthy of interest. Furthermore, it had to forge part of the way itself. Already the existence of the philosophy of Levinas is no longer that of the subject. It is existence given independently of all subject and object, although still approached by way of the subject. But the objective way introduces a decisive change: the servitude of the operations of knowledge—the substitution by philosophy of known existence (of an intellectual approach) for naked existence—arises at the very moment in which intimacy comes into play. The method poses in principle the impossibility of knowing the instant with which intimacy is identified. The outside is only given to knowledge by the fact of the appurtenance of things to duration. Thus it leaves open a chance to experience poetry or rapture, supposes a downfall and the suppression of knowledge, which are not given in anguish. This is the sovereignty of poetry—at the same time, a hatred of poetry because it is not inaccessible.⁶⁸

This account of Levinas’s philosophical project on the one hand locates it as a tremendous achievement, but unwittingly. Levinas reveals the subject’s temptation for dissolution whether in religion or art. But rendering this dissolution means abandoning oneself to nonknowlege. “Nothing remains that is up to reason, but reason no longer renders an account of the fact of a world up to reason.” Levinas’s anxious efforts to distinguish a dissolution of the subject that would precede it in art from a dissolution of a subject in religion is, Bataille suggests, “an unavoidable necessity,” an attempt at a kind of recuperation of meaning. “The futile—and guilty—aspect of crucial moments is justified—and is affirmed as a face.”⁶⁹ Bataille thus affirms the immorality of art, but only by rendering the ethics of alterity as a kind of guilty effect of the temptation of dissolution.

Whether or not Levinas ever read the review, he only bolstered his attack on art after its appearance, working even harder to render a distinction between what he calls “religion” and art.

Three of Levinas’s postwar essays take up this theme, two of which can be read as debates over Sartre’s question, “What is literature?” The first is “L’autre dans Proust,” published in Deucalion in 1947. Following from Levinas’s wartime reading of Proust, it is the most positive of the three. Its disclaimer, “if indeed poetry teaches,” becomes the argument for his next essay, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in which Levinas argues that literature requires criticism to tear “the artist out of his irresponsibility” (IH 126; UH 90).

“Reality and Its Shadow” was published in Les Temps Modernes in November of 1948.⁷⁰ Levinas’s very choice to publish the essay there suggests that he intended it as a response to Sartre, but it is perhaps also in response to Bataille, Jean Wahl, and later to Heidegger that Levinas felt it necessary to intensify his critique. “Reality and Its Shadow” develops the argument not explicitly in relation to literature but in relation to art. As Martin Jay argues, the insistence on the visual here is tied to a denigration of art in terms of image, a Jewish anti-iconic argument, which further solidifies the opposition between religion/Judaism and art/literature.⁷¹ But in 1948 Levinas most explicitly accused Sartre—though not by name—of returning after the death of God to “artistic idolatry” when he came to see himself as both critic and artist, believing in his “mission as creator and revealer” (IH 127; UH 91).

The editors of Les Temps Modernes clearly understood Levinas’s essay as a response to Sartre and prefaced it with a note suggesting that the essay showed that Levinas had only “partially considered Sartre’s ideas on the engagement of literature.”⁷² In the essay Levinas argues that, in its essence, art is “dégagée” (IH 109; UH 77). “Does not the function of art consist in not understanding? The obscurity of art, does this not provide it with its very element and its achievement sui generis, foreign to the dialectic and the life of ideas?” (IH 109–10; UH 77).⁷³ Levinas goes on to further develop his argument from Existence and Existents, but also to engage Bataille’s critique by insisting on the difference between transcendence and literary immanence. Transcendence, he argues, is defined by communication and understanding. “Isn’t the function of art to not understand?” He asks rhetorically (IH 109–10; UH 77).⁷⁴. If they are both on the margins of knowledge, their directionality is in tension. He seems thus to have accepted Bataille’s account of poetry as a form of sacrifice, and to borrow from its definition as activity, when he writes, “To use theological terms that permit, however roughly, the definition of ideas with regard to current conceptions, we will say that art does not belong to the order of revelation. Nor does it belong to the order of creation, whose motion is pursued in exactly the opposite sense” (IH 110; UH 78). In distinguishing so adamantly between art and religion, Levinas not only refutes Bataille’s reading of his project, he refutes what he sees as the cultural turn toward art. After denouncing art in perhaps his starkest terms, he acknowledges, at least obliquely, the way in which his own critique is an attack on the recent fascination for the aesthetic as a new route to the spiritual.⁷⁵ “It is outrageous to denounce the hypertrophy of art in our times, when almost everyone identifies it with spiritual life” (IH 125; UH 90).

One figure surprisingly unmentioned in Reality and Its Shadow is Maurice Blanchot. He was himself a prominent player in the “What is literature?” debate and Levinas’s clearest intellectual fellow traveler, going back to their student days at University of Strasbourg.⁷⁶ Blanchot had himself directly responded to Sartre’s essays in “La Règne animal de l’ésprit” and “La littérature et la droit à la mort” published in late 1947 and early 1948 in Bataille’s journal Critique.⁷⁷

Blanchot too proposed an aesthetics of disengagement or désoeuvrement, as he came to call it. His focus was more specifically on literature as opposed to art, and he developed its relation to what he called the neuter specifically in terms of Levinas’s notion of the il y a. But for Blanchot the worklessness of literature is only to be denigrated as a means toward recognizing it as a form of resistance. “It is not a question of abusing literature, but rather of trying to understand it and to see why we can only understand it by disparaging it.”⁷⁸ Staging an attack on Sartre for his attempt to co-opt writing as another form of meaningful activity in the Hegelian sense, Blanchot found in writing a subject to be understood by Hegelian analysis, but harnessed against it. In his essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” literature’s nonpower is lauded for its resistance to instrumentality. Thus the analysis is developed in exactly the opposite direction from Sartre’s description of writing as an expression of will and freedom, and yet his aims are no less political. As opposed to Sartre’s definition of writing as instrument, “a means of extending one’s hand to the highest branch,”⁷⁹ Blanchot offers us writing as Lazarus’s stinking corpse.⁸⁰ Thus Blanchot too allies religion and literature.⁸¹ But literature is not a parallel form of transcendence as it was for Wahl, rather it reveals death’s immanence. Language’s materiality points us toward what is left over after the concept emerges from my encounter with a particular object. It thus disrupts the productive movement of history. As Blanchot puts it, “by turning itself into an inability to reveal anything, literature is attempting to become the revelation of what revelation destroys.”⁸² To express this, Blanchot borrowed the terminology of Levinas’s description of existence without existents, describing literature as “my consciousness without me, the radiant passivity of mineral substances, the lucidity of the depths of torpor.”⁸³

Blanchot, Bataille, and Levinas thus all align in an analysis of literature at odds with Sartre. But Bataille, Blanchot, and Sartre all align against Levinas in a rehabilitation of literature as a political and spiritual resource. For Sartre, literature is developed in the service of action, and for Bataille and Blanchot it is developed as resistance to work or project. For Blanchot, in particular, its political exigency emerges from its disruptive function, a disruption that is passive, disengaged from the working of force. It ruins action by introducing deceit and mystification into communication, and yet it does so with complete honesty. When lined up, “Reality and Its Shadow” and “Literature and the Right to Death” reveal a powerful consonance, but with opposing valorizations. Yet Blanchot and Levinas’s friendship was clearly the source of these resonances. Levinas had himself quoted Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure in developing the notion of the il y a, and then Blanchot referenced the il y a in developing the relationship between literature and worklessness. Ironically it was exactly the social dynamic of such a textual relationship that redeemed it for Levinas. As he’d written in “Realité et son ombre,” critique “integrates the inhuman work of the artist into the human world” (IH 126; UH 90). Art must be made to speak, as he elaborates in the 1949 essay on Michel Leiris’s “The Transcendence of Words.” Also published in Les Temps Modernes, in this essay Levinas argues, “criticism, which is the word of a living being speaking to a living being, brings the image in which art revels back to the fully real being. The language of critique takes us out of our dreams, of which artistic language is an integral part” (HS 202; OS 149).⁸⁴ Levinas’s position on criticism points toward an ambivalence, a refusal to relinquish his own relationship to literature as source for philosophical analysis, while he at the same time pursues a strategy of vanquishing it as religion’s rival. Blanchot provided the friendliest site to work out this rivalry, and Heidegger the unfriendliest.

Heidegger’s own turn to poetry had begun in the 1930s, not long after the rector’s address. And, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe argues, it is tied intrinsically to the political project developed over the 1930s and 1940s.⁸⁵ Already in the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger describes poetry as the “the fable of the unconcealment of beings,” one that unfolds in and through history and thus is linked to the expression not only of individuals, but the expression and destiny of historical peoples.⁸⁶ To read Hölderlin, thus, was a national project, one tied to the enactment of a German ethos from which “mere residents of the soil” were excluded.⁸⁷ It is not surprising then that in his attempt to define himself against the thinker who he had himself helped to introduce to France in the late 1920s, Levinas would associate the poetic with the pagan and define himself insistently against it. Heidegger’s work on poetry continued into the 1940s and 1950s with essays on the relation of poetry, language, and thought, which were in themselves a mature expression of Heidegger’s “turn” away from philosophy toward “thinking. “During this same period, Heidegger’s influence in France grew steadily. It was impossible to separate Sartre’s existentialism from its Heideggerian roots, and after Sartre’s famous 1946 essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism,” and Heidegger’s epistolary response, published as “A Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger furthermore became a resource for thinking against Sartre.⁸⁸ At the same time, this growing attraction was not without its ambivalence. Les Temps Modernes published two accounts of visits with Heidegger by seekers attempting to gauge his involvement with the Nazi Party. ⁸⁹ The upshot, published in its fourth postwar issue in early 1946, was an attempt to salvage the thinking while condemning the thinker. “Occasionally philosophers are unfaithful to their best thinking when it comes to political decisions,” the editors wrote in the preface, while insisting that one nonetheless needed to read the texts of this thinker to discover its vulnerabilities to political weakness.⁹⁰ The harshest of the two accounts concludes, “Whatever his genius, how could one not measure the contrast between the demands of his philosophy and the evasive attitude of “l’homme en situation”?⁹¹ Jean Wahl, who, as a Jew, had himself taken refuge in New England during the war, gave a course on the thinker in 1946 and referred only once to Heidegger’s political errors. “One can conclude [On est amené a dire] that Heidegger as a man was inferior to Heidegger as a politician, at least at a certain moment.”⁹²

Levinas, from the very beginning, did not take the same tack. He resisted the postwar French romance with a poetics infused by Heideggerian “thinking.”⁹³ Thus, in 1956 in a review of Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire, Levinas took up the Parisian attraction to the post-turn Heidegger. “Everyone seems to think this century is the end of philosophy!” he wrote in one of his characteristically ironic passages (SB 9–10; PN 127). This has translated, he suggests, into an exaltation of submission, but to what? “A strange nothingness, that does not keep still but ‘nihilates,’ a silence gifted with speech, an essential speech even” (SB 10, PN 128). Levinas then points in the essay to the commonality between Heidegger and Blanchot, that they both name this speech as poetic or literary. Without explicitly allying himself with Blanchot, he describes Blanchot’s project in terms consonant with his own attempts to grapple with alterity. “How can the other…appear, that is, be for someone without already losing its alterity and exteriority by that way of offering itself to view? How can there be appearing without power?” (SB 14; PN 130). Blanchot and Heidegger share in common an attempt to answer this question after the gods have departed and to find in the poetic or the literary the answer to that question. Literature is thus once again positioned as religion’s replacement, one that, like Levinas’s own writing on the encounter, reverses the direction of the gaze. “The gaze is seized by the work; the words look at the writer” (SB 16; PN 132). But what is disclosed by this reversal of power? Here is where Levinas marks the contrast between Blanchot and Heidegger and finds in Blanchot at least the occasion for a path forward. For Heidegger, poetry’s disclosure is the “truth of being,” and it shines (SB 19; PN 134). Blanchot’s is a “nontruth,” and its darkness is unwavering (SB 19; PN 134). This is its virtue, its capacity to uproot. Ironically through the same turn to literature, sometimes even to the same texts that Heidegger read, Rilke and Hölderlin, Blanchot led the exodus from “the Heideggerian universe,” exposing a portrait of being that “call[s] us away from the Heideggerian world” (SB 26; PN 139). And yet, Levinas asks, is this enough? What can it show us? “Does not the poet, before the ‘eternal streaming of the outside’ hear the voices that call away from the Heideggerian world?” (SB 26, PN 139). Whose voices? Levinas will not say in positive terms. Instead he concludes by characterizing the Heideggerian world itself: the world where “man dwells poetically” is one in which “justice does not condition truth,” one “which remains forever closed to certain texts, a score of centuries old, in which Amalek’s existence prevents the integrity of the Divine Name—that is, precisely, the truth of being” (SB 26; PN 139).

While Levinas does not literally oppose religion to literature in this essay, we can nonetheless read it as a plea for another spiritual response to the death of God, another means of opposing the “being able [à pouvoir]” of philosophy (SB 16, PN 132). For Levinas, that response was religion. In claiming this term explicitly, Levinas was once again taking a stand against Heidegger. Heidegger’s poetic turn, which, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, involved its own sort of piety, was itself a response to the eclipse of religion, As Heidegger wrote in the 1946 essay “Why Poets?”: “the default of God means that a God no longer gathers men and things to himself visibly and unmistakably and from this gathering ordains world-history and man’s stay in it.”⁹⁴ In place of religion, in place of this visible gathering together, Heidegger saw the vocation of the poet as the one who speaks not from a site of transcendence but from within the “destiny of the age,” but speaks so that other men can listen. Thinking with the poet means entering into “a dialogue engaged with the history of being.”⁹⁵ Poetry is thus religion’s replacement, speaking the destiny of an era without claiming transcendence to it or an exigency outside of it, opposing as well the objectivizing voice of science. Poetry is a voice at risk, which nonetheless holds a relation to the holy, but as beckoning.

Against Heidegger Levinas doggedly insisted on maintaining the term religion. But Levinas reconfigured it idiosyncratically, maintaining the principle of transcendence, but in such a way that it was consistent with the death of God. Religion indeed thus came to mean for him, in Totality and Infinity, a justice that conditions truth.

It is something of a truism in Levinas studies that it was the Catholics who first discovered Levinas as philosopher. While this account undervalues his position within the postwar Jewish community as well as the prominence of his role in Jean Wahl’s College de philosophie, it is nonetheless clear that, as Lescourret puts it, for those “practicing Religion and philosophy,” the Catholics were the most prominent interlocutors for even a Jewish philosopher in France.⁹⁶ Levinas had himself made this conversation one of his prime political projects after the war. As he wrote in the preface to Difficult Freedom, “To find oneself a Jew in the wake of the Nazi massacres…meant once more taking up a position with regard to Christianity” (DL 10; DF xiii). While this new relation involved a reclaiming of Jewish sources from Christian interpretation and thus an effort to define the Jewish message, often against the Christian one, it is clear, as we’ve already seen from Levinas’s wartime journals, that Levinas found the model, if not the resources, for his own project in Catholic sources. Moreover, it was in Emmanuel Mounier’s personalism, Gabriel Marcel’s Christian existentialism, and in the movements surrounding them that religion was most prominently represented in the first decade after World War II as a means of social and philosophical critique.

But it is also the case that more diffuse conceptions of religion were at play in postwar attempts to rethink and revalue the scope and nature of human activity and interaction. Bataille’s journal Critique, which defined its mission expansively as “wanting to provide, insofar as it was possible, the least incomplete overview of the diverse activities of the human spirit,” gave almost equal space to religious themes as it did to literature.⁹⁷ It included an essay on T. S. Eliot as spiritual poet and a review by Mircea Eliade suggesting that “Western philosophy maintained itself in a sort of ‘provincialism,’ which disallowed it from acceding to the other great currents of human thought (the primitive, the East, and the Far East).”⁹⁸ In a review essay concerning the relationship between religious ecstasy and intoxication, Bataille, clearly aligning his own project with the religious, writes that “the experience of intoxication defines the domain of religion…[It] is rightly tied to the overcoming of self, to the leap beyond the limit of the real.”⁹⁹ The journal even allowed for an alliance between such an endeavor and those of theologians rethinking the church’s potential role for the left. A review of Henri de Lubac’s Proudhon et le Christianisme points toward de Lubac’s attempt to establish commonalities between Pascalian antihumanism and Proudhon’s antitheism, thus paving a way for a Christian response to social injustice, which began from a starting point of human humility.¹⁰⁰ Given, however, the historical associations between the Catholic Church and France’s right-wing movements, as well as the dominance of the French Communist Party (PCF) after the war, the Catholic establishment had its work cut out for itself in defining a position that made it a legitimate interlocutor on the left.

The most prominent figure in the recalibration of Catholicism’s position after the war was Emmanuel Mounier. Mounier’s movement, personalism, and his journal, Ésprit, were themselves born of a reorientation of the Catholic mainstream in France after the Holy Office in 1926 placed the right Catholic review Action française on the index of books forbidden to Catholic readership.¹⁰¹ In the power vacuum that opened up after right-wing leaders were ousted from positions of Church power in France, Mounier carved out a prominent position for himself and his journal by returning to Charles Péguy’s opposition between mystique and politique. Despite having been the child of a pharmacist in Grenoble, Mounier followed in Péguy’s footsteps and built his ethos by claiming humble peasant origins and developing a critique of bourgeois culture founded in a call for spiritual renewal.¹⁰² Trying at first, with Jacques Maritain, to find a way for French Catholicism to position itself above politics, he ultimately cut a crooked path toward a leftist Catholic position through a two-decade long oscillation that took the journal Esprit and the movement from a centrist skepticsm of both right and left political poles into a semicollaborative relation with Vichy and ultimately toward an avowed leftist stance.¹⁰³ After the war, Mounier’s journal became a major platform on the left, one that brought together and published prominent Catholic figures such as Gabriel Marcel, Jean Lacroix, and Jean-Marie Domenach, along with Paul Ricouer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Even Louis Althusser was a significant figure at Esprit in his early years. Mounier’s capacity to create conversations that linked Christian existentialism, phenomenology, Sartre’s existentialism, and Marxism arose from his concern for movements and thinkers that were combating philosophical idealism and bourgeois liberalism. In the discourse of humanism, Mounier and other figures on the Catholic left, such as Domenach and Lacroix, were able to locate if not a common position for each of these groups then at least some common points of critique and a question that put Catholics, existentialists, and Marxists in conversation.¹⁰⁴ For Mounier, the importance of existentialism was its capacity to return religion’s most powerful questions to the center of philosophical discussion. This was particularly crucial for Mounier after the “death of God,” when people found themselves unmoored from tradition and religious infrastructure. For Mounier, “all religions, even if ‘atheist,’ contributed to the progress of personalism,” that is to say to the protection of the person as a being of absolute value against the varying threats of modernity that sought to degrade it.¹⁰⁵

One advantage that Christian existentialism in particular had in this battle and the larger cultural renegotiation of reason’s autonomy was its appeal to mystery. The leading figure of Christian existentialism in France was Marcel, who was even credited with having coined the term existentialism in early 1943.¹⁰⁶ Marcel was a prominent member of Wahl’s circle in the 1940s and one of the subjects of Wahl’s Vers le concret (1932). In Marcel, Wahl found a fundamentally antisystematic thinker, a proponent of a philosophy of invocation, for whom metaphysics was not a dry objective philosophy. Rather, discoveries about the nature of being followed from the exigencies of the subject in Marcel’s Journal Métaphysique, the structure of which, a series of dated meditations, reoriented the very form of what one understood by metaphysics. Marcel’s work, too, crossed the lines between philosophy and the literary arts. He was also a playwright who found in the theater a means to explore the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge’s capacity to “transcend objectivity.”¹⁰⁷ A convert to Catholicism in 1929, Marcel was also one of Levinas’s earliest Catholic theological interlocutors. In the 1930s it was at both Wahl’s College and Marcel’s Friday night salons that Levinas and Marcel first exchanged ideas about subjectivity and alterity and where Levinas had the chance to encounter Wladimir Jankélévitch, Jacques Maritain, and Eugène Minkowski. After his conversion to Catholicism in 1929, Marcel’s work began to develop around the central node of mystery. Experience, he would argue in On the Ontology of Mystery, comes first, and thought and explication after, and only inadequately.¹⁰⁸ Marcel criticized the reduction of human existence to functions and sought to reveal and expose in existence that which was not reducible to function, that which called the human being, but to which no formulation could ever adequately respond.

In the postwar context Marcel’s Christian existentialism offered an antidote to Sartre’s formulation of human freedom as pure unfounded self-projection. Marcel described human transcendence “towards a supra-human experience,” one that could not be claimed, possessed, or even understood by the subject.¹⁰⁹ Mounier contrasted the two visions of existentialism this way. For Christian existentialism,

Individual liberty is surrounded and envisaged by a Being, who for not having the logical immobility of objectified substance overflows no less in all dimensions the outpouring of the individual existence. Freedom for him is an infinite sovereignity, but it is freedom before God or better in God…[It] places action in a tension between a creative superabundance and a purifying meditation. For existentialism inexistentialiste [Sartre’s existentialism] the tension is between an ethic of action for action’s sake, indeterminate, passionate, that which the heroes of Malraux or Hemmingway try to exercise and an unavowed assent, almost a constraint, in the face of the necessity of the world, which means before the necessity of a world which is not necessary, the necessity of the absurd and the preposterous. Man, useless passion, cultivates action in vain.¹¹⁰

Although neither Christian existentialism nor personalism is remembered as the dominant movement of the period, it is clear that in the late 1940s and early 1950s they held a powerful hold on the minds of many young intellectuals in France attracted by the capacity to furnish a site of historical critique, one that distanced itself from the right, but nonetheless held onto its prewar suspicion of liberalism and capitalism without succumbing to Marxist determinism. As numerous historians have shown, there was even a kind of fluidity in the late 1940s between the Catholic, Marxist, and existentialist positions, before battle lines were drawn by the 1949 papal decree that excommunicated members of the Communist Party.¹¹¹

While Levinas never fully denounced Marx, stressing on multiple occasions the materialist elements of his own thought, Levinas insisted with the Christian existentialists on the fundamental need for thinking of transcendence against the heteronomy of reason, but also specifically in the postwar context, when it was imperative to find a site of judgment rooted outside history. His championing of “religion” over against “literature” was a means of staking a claim on one side of contemporary debates about the power of reason, the extent of human freedom, and the source of our powers for moral and political judgment.

On the one hand this meant aligning with the dominant Catholic thinkers of his day, but often it also meant defining religion in such a way that Christianity would always fall short for not providing a conception of transcendence that broke with logos or with being. In a 1971 review of Jean Lacroix’s La crise intellectuelle du catholicisme français (1970), Le sens de l’athéisme moderne (1970), and Spinoza et le problème du salut (1970), Levinas considered the capacity of an apologetic Catholicism to provide a conception of religion that was not complicit with philosophy’s hegemony. The review, which treats Lacroix’s books as separate prongs in a single argument, can be read as a summary diagnosis and ultimately a dismissal of the Catholic foray into debates over humanism. Lacroix, one of the pioneers of socialist humanism, was himself one of the founding members of Esprit, the philosophy columnist for Le Monde, and one of the major proponents of dialogue between the Catholic and non-Catholic left; he thus served effectively as a mascot for a movement that by 1970 had clearly run its course.¹¹²

By 1970, the left-leaning Catholics had a new profile and a renewed cultural legitimacy subsequent to the Second Vatican Council, for which many of the left-leaning French intellectuals had been instrumental.¹¹³ At the same time, in the aftermath of May 1968, they faced a new leftist student politics and a new intellectual challenge in structuralist antihumanist arguments coming from the human sciences.¹¹⁴ In response to these events, Lacroix argued for a renewed synthesis of reason and faith, “the resurgence of a state of mind that we have perhaps not seen since Saint Thomas Aquinas,” as Levinas described it (NP 99; PN 85).¹¹⁵ This position seemed at least like a reversal, Levinas suggests. “M. Jean Lacroix formerly contemplated a philosophy of insufficiency, or a necessary insufficiency of philosophy, which was to leave a place for faith. He now believes that position untenable, and that one must, in philosophy, go on to the end” (NP 103; PN 89). Lacroix thus tried to think a Spinozist theology. Levinas does not lament this shift in position so much as he points to its fundamental consonance with the Christian existentialism of the past. His point is that a theology of being is always already in cahoots with logos. Whether in Marcel or in the move of Jean Beaufret toward Heidegger’s philosophy of being, Levinas saw only totality. “Does not there exist for modern consciousness…an alternative that does not come down to a choice between reason and incommunicable meaning, between theology and mysticism?” Levinas asked (NP 99–100; PN 86).

Two alternatives present themselves, Levinas suggested. One was literary. In a move that echoes Levinas’s opposition between Blanchot and Heidegger in “The Poet’s Vision,” Levinas turns to Blanchot’s analysis of literature to suggest an ominous force within or behind “totalized totality.” He goes as far as pointing toward literature’s disruption of logos. “Transcendence, in contemporary poetry (but probably perennially) may disrupt and bewilder apophansis, which is unable to embrace its epos in terms that, delayed in relation to their writing [écriture] do not rejoin their identity” (NP 100; PN 86). Literature is thus raised as an interruption, an antithesis to Lacroix’s religio-philosophical synthesis. But Levinas only raises it here to supersede it. Only a religious transcendence can provide interruption without becoming taxed by nihilism, he insists in the following paragraph. In what could be read as him a co-opting and reorienting himself to Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas writes,

In “Violence and Metaphysics” Derrida argues that Levinas’s own resorting to the terminology of empiricism and thus to experience cannot extract him from the metaphysics of presence. Here Levinas makes the same argument about literature. Two years later he referred to Derrida’s frisson, his poetry as another form of disruption. Here he wants to distinguish between a shivering or a quaking, a ϕρικη, that is literary from one that is religious (NP 101; PN 87).¹¹⁶ He thus confirms the religious way, but rejects both a Spinozist philosophy of substance “in itself and…conceived through itself” and a theology of being, which placed “however high, would not prevent its immediate agglutination [s’agglutine] to the totality it transcends.” The only manifestation of transcendence left standing is “the excessive expenditure of the human, in the-one-for-the-other, destroying the balance of accounts” (NP 101; PN 88). Only a religion understood as ethics can disrupt economy. Levinas thus reclaimed the banner of antihumanism not to side with Foucault or Derrida but to suggest that in the wake of an antihumanist critique of autonomy “that denies the I that takes its own security for an ontology” one might find another form of heteronomy (NP 102; PN 88).