THE POSSIBILITY of a rapprochement between Nietzsche and Levinas might seem either evident or quite incomprehensible. It appears evident only insofar as we remain open to the madness, even the violence that gave birth to and impels both men’s thought. But it remains incomprehensible so long as we hold fast to rigid schemas and “clichés,” like that which characterizes Levinas as the philosopher of goodness and fidelity to a certain god, and the one that defines Nietzsche as a cynic without ethics, destroyer of all morality and every god. For this and other reasons, I choose without hesitation to embrace the proximity between Nietzsche and Levinas. The evidence of such a relation is supported by at least three general themes. First, the irreducibility of what we might call the “matter” of philosophy to knowledge. Second, the reopening of the notion of desire contained in the word “philosophy,” itself. Finally, a certain “gratuity” that crosses through both men’s thought. Indeed, they express it so forcefully that, in reading them, I am invariably struck by a certain cheerfulness of expression (albeit different) in both their works.
I have enumerated three themes that go some way toward justifying the title of this essay: “Levinas’s Gaia Scienza.” If the word “gaia” or gaiety can denote an episode of madness, a kind of excess that tears thought up from its grounds (as also from the language in which it remains subject to reason) and sets it in the element of gratuity, then my title would translate a perfect cohabitation, free of violence, of Nietzsche and Levinas. This cohabitation would be one of friendship rather than of hospitality, a friendship in which complicity gives rise to a shared gaiety or cheerfulness, in which madness corresponds to the decision to be done with the priority of reason. Yet this association becomes difficult—or acute and more concrete—when we consider one of Nietzsche’s own definitions of “cheerfulness” in The Gay Science. According to Nietzsche, “our cheerfulness” is “the greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’, and that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable” (GS §343 “The Meaning of our Cheerfulness”: 279). A literalist reading of this remark immediately halts the connection I am drawing between Nietzsche and Levinas. For, while he sometimes subscribes to Nietzsche’s claim about the “death of God,” Levinas never avoids naming God in his work. And while I would insist that only a rigid hermeneutics would characterize Levinas’s thought as a fidelity to God, thus fixating it as the moralizing a priori of ethics, it nevertheless seems to me that naming God attests to the ambiguity of Levinas’s thought and prevents it from being reducible to a mere thesis. We might even say that it is to the degree that “God” is always the object of an ambiguous phrase that we cannot bolt Levinas’s thinking down, though we can entertain the hypothesis that the risk he takes in naming God accounts for his thought’s fluidity, and perhaps also its lightness and radiance.
I will attempt in what follows to contextualize these hypotheses and show how they can be brought into relation with Nietzsche. It is in Otherwise Than Being (1974) that Levinas alludes to the so-called event of the “death of God.” This event is named twice in the last chapter of that work, entitled “Outside” (“Au Dehors”; OB 177, 185; AE 272, 284). In the first citation, it explicitly refers to Nietzsche. The second mention occurs on the last page of the work and may be articulating what Otherwise Than Being claimed both as its starting point and that to which it opens; namely, what Levinas calls “the outside.” In his preliminary “Note” to Otherwise Than Being, Levinas indicates that the work is meant to give a hearing to (“donner entente à”) the eventuality of a “God not contaminated by Being,” which is said to be a “human possibility no less important and no less precarious than to bring Being out of the oblivion into which it is said to have fallen in metaphysics and onto-theology” (OB xlii; AE 10). Levinas is here referring to Heidegger, and I will not elaborate that reference. However, it should at least be noted that, in this passage, evoking the name of God in no way implies a regression toward “onto-theology,” that is, toward a foundation of the totality of beings in which the meaning and the ground of morality would also be elucidated. On the contrary, what frames this occurrence of the name of God is the declaration of a rupture more radical than what Heidegger attempted to think with the ontological difference; a rupture Levinas expresses precisely in terms of a certain disturbance or derangement [dérèglement]. Levinas speaks of an “ex-ception [in the sense of ex-cipere], disturbing the conjunction of essence, entities, and the ‘difference’” (OB xli, trans. modified; AE 10). Hearing the name of God to which Levinas calls, and which should be distinguished from Heidegger’s “hearing the call of Being,” would then be intended to disturb [dérégler] a certain way of living or co-inhabiting this “House of the Being,” where, as the “The Letter on Humanism” explains, “man abides.” While I will not explore this difference between Levinas and Heidegger—which is assumed from the first pages of Otherwise Than Being—my attention will be directed toward the “disturbance” [“dérèglement”] by which Levinas demarcates his work from Heidegger’s. It is precisely through his attempted differentiation that we see the proximity—and its stakes—that Levinas will establish with Nietzsche. In fact, we observe, on the one hand that, in the preliminary “Note,” Levinas calls “subjectivity” what he will acknowledge as the “ex-ception” that disturbs the ontological difference. On the other hand, in part 1, subsection 4, entitled “Subjectivity,” it is Nietzsche that Levinas hails and this, in terms that acknowledge precisely this exception. To quote Levinas:
The history of philosophy, in moments of great clarity, has known this subjectivity breaking, as in extreme youth, with essence. From Plato’s One without being, all the way to Husserl’s pure Ego, transcendent in [its] immanence, philosophy has known the metaphysical extraction from being, even if, immediately, in the betrayal of the Said, as if it were under the effect of an oracle, the exception, restored to essence and to destiny, returned to the rules and led only to worlds behind the world.
(OB 8, trans. modified for fluency with the French original; AE 21)
More than anyone else, the Nietzschean human being has broken with essence. Moreover, as Levinas remarks shortly thereafter, in Nietzsche this rupture escapes the oracle that restored it to essence immediately upon its being subsumed by language, itself structured according to Being. Thus Levinas writes: “One should have to go all the way to the nihilism of Nietzsche’s poetic writing, reversing irreversible time in vortices, to the laughter which refuses language” (OB 8; AE 22). Nietzschean subjectivity would then have the virtue of breaking with essence, but it is also through “a way of writing” that this break remains recalcitrant to any return to essence. Through that which Levinas calls “a way of writing, a way of giving oneself over to the world [une façon d’écrire, de se commettre avec le monde]” (OB 8; AE 21) that would be typically Nietzschean, the ex-ception is maintained, just as the subjectivity that stands for the exception is not betrayed in the “said” [le dit]. And if, as we saw in the preliminary “Note,” one of the purposes of Otherwise Than Being is to hear (or give a hearing to) a god not contaminated by Being, then the rupture of subjectivity—which in Nietzsche is maintained or radicalized by “a way of writing”—would not fail to resonate with what Levinas means by the name “God.” In this context, “God” would not name a theological or ontotheological reappropriation of that thought, but instead that which ex-empts (s’excepte) itself from any logos contaminated by Being. God would be the ex-ception; not only that which remains unsayable, ungraspable, and out of reach, but that which interrupts the possibility of taking or “seizing hold of,” the possibility of keeping or even sheltering. “God” would thus be the name of the “Outside.” It would denote an exposure without shelter [sans abris], something that links us once again to the references to the “death of God” that we noted in the final chapter “Outside” (in the section “Otherwise Said”).1
There is no contradiction between what Otherwise Than Being proclaims at the outset, with the name of God, and what is stated at the book’s end, with the “death of God.” Not only can Levinas’s “God” cohabit with Nietzsche’s “death of God,” it even solicits Nietzsche’s event and its reflection—at least, so far as Nietzsche’s affirmation goes along with “a way of writing, a way of giving oneself over to the world that sticks like the ink on our hands” (OB 8; AE 21), as Levinas writes about Nietzsche. In Levinas, “God” would remain the name of a bursting apart or a rupture [éclat]. Naming this god does not reascribe us to Being or to the circumstances to which the ontological difference returns us. Naming this god creates disorder, allowing the anarchical rupture to come to pass, as irreducible to principles as it is to language. As the name for the Outside, “God” comes from the “otherwise said” [de “l’autrement dit”]. It is there that we will situate the problem of a proximity between Levinas and Nietzsche. Now, we have already heard Levinas evoking Nietzsche with the “laughter that refuses language” (OB 8; AE 22). Can this gaiety be assimilated to or echo what Levinas calls anarchy, or a “god not contaminated by Being”? Does the rupture of anarchy not have to do, always, with the “irreducible face-to-face with the Other”? And what about the other in Nietzsche? If we suppose that Levinas would ultimately share a common end with Nietzsche—that of bursting language open [d’éclater le langage] and engaging thought in an “otherwise said”—why then have recourse to the name of God?
To ask ourselves how it is with the other in Nietzsche comes down to asking ourselves whether we can thematize an ethics in Nietzsche. The question is slippery because, while Levinas’s work allows us to describe the adventure and the intrigue of ethics, in Nietzsche, if there is an ethics, it could well have more than one definition. Levinas’s madness, as well as his violence, proceeds from the irreducibility of the relation to the Other, from which alone ontology can flow, but which also leads Levinas to interrupt his language as he attempts to state it, even if otherwise. Moreover, while what is extraordinary about his ethics resists reduction to language, it also defines the point of departure of a language that culminates—without halting for an instant—in inspiration. For this reason, it seems to me that while readers may well feel violated by this language in the sense that they are torn out of the primacy of reason, they will not fail to hear a language in Levinas’s work. In a sense, while it is ethics in Levinas that resists by saying “no” to reductions—that is, reductions to neutral being or to “the neuter”—this violence is affirmative from the outset. It is the violence of an anarchical “yes,” which keeps the work of the negative in check. Levinas’s words tear the “self” from its freedom and its self-grounding. However, in being ripped out of the ground, that self is already engaged in Saying. By contrast, Nietzsche’s violence begins by calling the reader into question, not by proceeding initially from the irreducibility of a relationship—that is, from the sincerity of Levinas’s “yes”—but rather from the critical instability that not only disarms and defies the reader ever to find such an affirmative priority (even an anarchic one), but even, and sometimes often, humiliates him in the attempt. Nietzsche not only destabilizes; he refuses such readings. What is more, the difficulty of speaking about Nietzsche—of circumscribing his thought or setting forth its truth content—is caused precisely by the disorientation provoked by the solitude to which the philosopher lays claim. We are wounded as we confront Nietzsche’s warnings to the reader; not just anyone would be his reader, whereupon he adds, with a contempt that sometimes resembles that of distress, since he never stops calling: “that everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too” (TZ “Of Reading and Writing”: 40). We sometimes wonder, then: were we elected to read Nietzsche? This is the impression created by these warnings that, while appearing to refute their (democratic) totality, in fact remove his writings from the totalization that such a reading would produce. Indeed, in Nietzsche’s warnings there is an invitation to elect oneself. Hence, in “Of the Way of the Creator,” (TZ 88–91), Nietzsche asks the one who believes he must follow the path of solitude: “show me your strength for it and your right to it” (TZ 88). This exhortation corresponds to the second metamorphosis invoked at the beginning of Zarathustra, the one that changes the camel into a lion (TZ 54–55). While the camel is a figure of humility and submission that says “yes” to the other because it does not have the strength to be its own beginning, to the lion it is given not only to break with ancient values but to create new ones. Solitude, then, is not a path that one follows by duty, but rather by will. We therefore do not receive Nietzsche passively, yet the critical attitude must come to grips with its own irony: Nietzsche exhorts us to solitude and to beginnings. However, the latter remain conditioned by the enigma of the “I will,” in which the “new force” and “new right” come together. If therein lies the primacy of a solitude that, by exempting itself from the self-immanence of the community, elects itself and gives itself its own right, then we seem far from Levinas with Nietzsche. But it is here that a moment of Nietzsche’s laughter intervenes: does it suffice to elect oneself in order to will? Should we not suppose that to will “oneself,” free from alterity and in this way from all duty, holds us in the pessimistic attitude that always needs negation as a foundation for its own positivity? The question asked in “Of the Way of the Creator”—“show me your strength for it and your right to it”—is still critical. It is not there that we find the bursting open [l’éclat] that Levinas perceives in Nietzsche, his extreme youth, or “the laughter that refuses [even so much as] language?” The “I will” of the lion could be only a secular posture that rebuilds its world and thus its language through the simple negation of the sovereignty of the other or of God. The transformation of the “You must” into the “I will” could be circumscribed as the “self-surpassing of morality” [“l’auto-dépassement de la morale”] into willing. Now the lion is only a transitional figure of the will, whose freedom “remains tributary to the object to be negated”—God. As Nietzsche writes, “But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert. It seeks here its ultimate lord: it will be an enemy to him and to its ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon” (TZ “Of the Three Metamorphoses”: 54–55).
The figure of the lion attests to the critical attitude toward the “Thou shalt,” which for Nietzsche denotes an attitude that negates the “self.” But the “I will” of the lion remains too stable as long as it still knows what it has to negate. It is upon this stability that the third metamorphosis is inscribed, enigmatically: the metamorphosis of the lion into a child. Nietzsche queries: “But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion cannot? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes” (TZ 55). Nietzsche’s chosen readers—if at this point we may still speak of election—are not the possessors of force. It is this force that Nietzsche destabilizes by simultaneously destabilizing both its reception and its self-grounding [son auto-fondation]. Should we then attempt to read Nietzsche in light of what makes the negation of duty by power impossible, and in terms of what causes this opposition to fail? Would the figure of the child—which is the one that to my mind would have attracted Levinas—permit us to glimpse something like an ethics in Nietzsche?
I thus come back to my initial question concerning ethics, but with the following distinction: the relation to the other cannot constitute fair access to an ethics in Nietzsche. As I already indicated, for Levinas the face-to-face with the Other is irreducible; it even presents itself as an opening—onto “nothingness,” solitude, and the “neuter.” Levinas’s gesture thus consists in tearing loose the fixity and solipsism of the “I can,” thanks to the “Thou shalt” to which I am ordered by the irreducibility of this relation. Now, we have just noted that Nietzsche makes the opposite move. In the metamorphosis of the camel into the lion, it is the transformation of the “Thou shalt” into the “I will” or the “I can” that is at stake. Yet, if the lion is a transitional figure, then this is because the “I can” contained in the lion’s “I will” is not Nietzsche’s last word. Hence, the chiasmi of “Thou shalt”–“I can” and “I can”–“Thou shalt,” which might have opposed Levinas and Nietzsche, leads us on the contrary toward a point of encounter between them. This occurs precisely in the destitution of the truth of the “I can.” Further, if the “I can” is not Nietzsche’s last word, this is because it is rooted in the same negative essence of the will [as the camel’s “I must”]. As I argued, Nietzsche’s “I can” still depends on the object to be negated: God. It is thus defined as a “power of killing” or of “being able to kill” [pouvoir tuer]. The power of the lion is therefore dialectical. Discerning a common point between duty and willing, or between moral alienation and freedom’s self-grounding, allows us to think—and this, already with Nietzsche—a difference between the moral and the ethical. Nietzsche attacks morality because morality—as is clear from the opening of his Gay Science—is defined as the devaluation of existence through its goals, which subordinate life to reasons that remain separated from existence itself. As Nietzsche there writes, for the so-called “emissaries of God,” “there is something to life,” simply because “there is something behind life, beneath it” (GS 74). Thus, love, life, and the will are always subordinated to the principle by which they are explained and which provides them with an end or a telos. Yet despite its self-determination, the lion never ceases accounting for itself: it is its own end. Therefore, in the figure of the lion, we again find the same schema that allowed us to think the difference between the moral and the ethical—though here it is transposed into a figure. In bringing to light the identity of these schemata, something like what I am trying to conceive as a Nietzschean ethic emerges; it would call itself, precisely, a “gay science” or “joyful wisdom.” This wisdom obligates us infinitely to the present, thanks to the destitution of its ends: “My thoughts,” writes Nietzsche in the same work, “must show me where I am: but they will not reveal to me where I am going” (GS §287).
Recall now how Nietzsche justified the metamorphosis of the lion into the child: “What can the child do that even the lion cannot?” asked Nietzsche. He answered, “The child is innocence and forgetfulness” (TZ 55). In the language of The Gay Science this is stated as, “I love [the] ignorance of the future” (GS §287). The child can forget himself because he confronts what he does not know and cannot negate. The lion knows what it negates, and this knowledge is the point of departure for its will. The child loses knowledge of itself. The child is innocence, but this innocence is the point of departure of an affirmation that is free from negativity, to the degree that it no longer has ends and can therefore become pure welcoming in the “ignorance of the future.” In this way, the third metamorphosis can be thought of as an ethical affirmation. The “gay science” does not require power—which is always defined by negation—but innocence, where the future—which is unknown—is affirmed simply as unknown and where this ignorance is not indifference but love (“I love the ignorance of the future”).
This is, in fact, the same ethical schema that we find in Levinas. In Levinas, the Other, irreducible to knowledge, is not only the unknown but, inasmuch as he is the one “over [whom] I have no power [celui sur qui je ne peux pas pouvoir],” as Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (TI 39; TeI 28), the Other is also the one through whom time is released from its negativity. It is thus that in Time and the Other, for instance, the alterity of the Other is compared to the alterity of death, which is to come and over which I similarly have no power. Unlike death, which is annihilation, the Other is a “future that I can assume.” The Other is not taken on according to some rule or some duty that precedes his coming but only by the Infinity in which I find myself always already engaged. As infinite, the Other is indeed the one over whom I have no power. But because of this he is also the one who deprives me of that fixed ground of negativity by which the “me” [le “moi”] returns to the self or “to its home [chez soi]”—thereby opening me to the Infinity of time. Indeed, in Levinas, the “Thou shalt” thus does not have a moral meaning. It denotes the modality of departure in a summons [la modalité de départ de l’assignation]. To be obligated to the Other, to respond to the Other, is not to have duties. It is to be torn up from oneself, to be in that situation that deprives me of my freedom as a subject but opens me to Infinity. The face-to-face with the Other is not what limits my freedom as a subject. It is what, in summoning my freedom, interrupts the negativity of time, in-spiring time with Infinity and pre-engaging it in this Infinity. The Other thus plays the same role in Levinas’s philosophy as Nietzsche’s “ignorance of the future,” whose “joyful wisdom” was love. The other summons me; he shows me where I am, but only insofar as, being irreducible to “grasping,” to comprehension, he does not reveal to me where I am going, yet takes me there nonetheless. Different from morality, an ethics is not negation but affirmation. In Levinas, it likewise assumes the meaning of a “gay science,” although Nietzsche had already opened to its unconditionality by showing that duty and power shared the same negative essence and by wagering, with the child, what the lion could not.
I have attempted to show that Nietzsche and Levinas meet at the precise midpoint of the chiasmi that might simply have reflected their opposition. Nietzsche and Levinas converge where the fixity and the negativity of the “I can” burst open. The fact that we can not, that we are power-less [qu’on ne puisse pas pouvoir] is thus the condition of cheerfulness, innocence, and lightness. But this is a lightness that summons and orders us such that it makes subjectivity play the exceptional role of a host, taking leave of what had allowed it to determine itself. We can now weave Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s vocabularies together and say that the innocence of the child, wagering the Infinity or the ignorance of the future, is already “responsibility.” In Levinas, responsibility infinitizes humans, not in or through its force but in the breakdown of its negativity. In Nietzsche, the “self-surpassing of morality” is not an end in itself. “And life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘I am that which must overcome itself again and again‘” (TZ “Of Self-Overcoming”: 138). As soon as this “self-overcoming” comes to pass under the auspices of Infinity, the “Übermensch” becomes “the traveller”: “You are treading your path of greatness; now it must call up your courage that there is no longer a path behind you” (TZ “The Wanderer”: 174). As in Levinas, this departure permits no turning back into the security of the self: “your foot itself has extinguished the path behind you” (TZ 174). There are no stops in the newly acquired—or rediscovered—direction of a force both ownmost and possible: “above that path stands written: ‘impossibility’” (TZ 174). Thus, “innocent” in Nietzsche does not mean “uncommitted” but rather “disinterested,” out of the erasure of the footprints or the self. “Responsible” in Levinas does not mean “moral” but welcoming, in the summons that brings about a departure.
In seeking something like a cheerfulness common to both Nietzsche and Levinas, we have also found a shared gravity, a seriousness that we know best in Levinas as patience and expiation. This gravity introduces a new element common to Nietzsche and Levinas: a certain pathos of writing. Indeed, something like suffering is expressed by both philosophers even as it is exhibited in their thinking itself, as its ethos. But this common element points to a difference that cannot be reduced once and for all. Of course, this difference directly engages the question of ethics and, with it, that of philosophy. One might think that the primacy accorded to the other person in Levinas interrupts Nietzsche’s critical insatiability. In effect, in Levinas the face-to-face with the Other does not seem to leave any space for awaiting, whereas with Nietzsche we find ourselves awaiting an affirmation. Thus we read, in Daybreak, that to think is “to become silent, to become slow,” which looks like a new warning to the reader. By this hypothesis, we might then infer that Levinas’s pronouncing the name “God” promises that the infinite process of critique will come to an end.
Levinas’s thinking would then slide into optimism, because it would in fact have proceeded from it. But could we not invert these hypotheses? Could we not say that it is indefinite awaiting that risks mystifying what was just called “the impossible”? In this respect—though it is not my intent to remain with Nietzsche on this—the messianic configuration of the impossible, which in Levinas is betrayed in the “said” [le dit], at least escapes the risk of mystification. The other person is indeed the one to whom I am obliged to respond, and this without delay or expectation. Now, although I do not subscribe to binaristic hypotheses here, I believe we can argue that there is, in Levinas, a revolt against the comfort that the idea of an indefinite awaiting can confer. This is one of the reasons why Levinas subscribes to the “death of God,” who, as a moral god, is also the god of the promise of a coming end [la promesse d’une fin à venir]. But if it is the other person who interrupts this indefinite process of awaiting, then why God?
The answer to this question might not belong to a belief but to a difference of style. As I stated, Nietzsche lays claim to solitude and more than once challenges any patience accorded to the neighbor.2 Conversely, Levinas never ceases repeating that “the Saying,” that is, meaning or (the opening of) discourse, comes to me from the other person, from his approach, which is also his imminence. We thus see Levinas’s style and thought turning around a series of oxymorons, which concern the relation between the neighbor and the distant one, but also that between youth and aging, lightness and gravity. Gravity, for example, resides in my exposure to the other person, which is undergoing, traumatism—but this exposure is also to be torn out of oneself; it is a departure, an opening of time and fecundity. In turn, aging is the separation or gap with regard to oneself that we encounter in effort, but in this gap of time, the infinite also comes to pass as a rupture or breakthrough of anarchy, a loss of time, an interruption that precedes all remembering. This allows Levinas to speak of an underside to interiority [d’un revers de l’intériorité], of the overturning of the economy of the Me by the for-itself [pour soi], of exposure at the surface of the skin, and thus of youth, sincerity, a fissioning of the secret—which we can once again call innocence. But these oxymorons proliferate out of the anarchy (i.e., the irreducibility to any beginning, origin, or presentation) that the face-to-face with the other person articulates. In effect, it is insofar as the face of the other person is not reducible to its form that he is beyond the said, Most High. This amounts to saying that starting from the Other, time is infinitized, it is futurized: time opens itself in the very dynamic of its prolonging. Yet in this way, as we can see, the other person only receives its meaning as neighbor insofar as its meaning (“kath auto,” as Totality and Infinity puts it [TI 65, 67; TeI 37, 39]) is “exteriority,” unpresentable, anarchic.
There is, therefore, a double rupture. On the one hand, language is not conceived here according to the differential scheme of “signifier-signified,” which abstracts language from its signification; instead, language is thought in its materiality. On the other hand, the subject is not separated from its word [parole], which it would use as a tool to elaborate a thought; rather, the word is given to the subject in the same way that its exceptionality is given to that subject, that is, as irreplaceable singularity and uniqueness. How to understand this double rupture?
The Other, as infinite, as the stranger, tears me out of the certainty of my identity but does so by preceding me, as it were. In this way, having no further refuge, I find I am the unique one. Uniqueness is thus conferred through exposure, but exposure is at once suffering, undergoing, and an offering. Torn out of the fixed ground of my identity, I come forth, I can say, “Here I am.” If it is the other person who inspires me with the word, he inspires me not only in the trace of this departure, such that my own word is a laying bare, a suffering, and an offering—but in the trace of this departure my word is infinitized, thus laying bare my exposure and causing the infinite to reverberate in the Infinity of my word. Hence, there would be nothing impossible to say—nothing unutterable—nothing that could not be said; or again, there is nothing but the unsayable to say. And thus, against what I argued earlier, I do not believe that God would be the name of the outside [dehors], or of exposure, but rather that God states the laying bare of every exposure. And it is not impossible to utter this name, so far as the name becomes the infinite to be said. It is simply that the irreducibility of the “face-to-face” and the primacy that the Other inaugurates represent a step into the impossible, into the otherwise said [dans l’autrement dit]. It is a venture that “does not hesitate to assert the impossibility of statement while venturing to realize this impossibility by the very statement of this impossibility” (OB 7; AE 20).
In fine, after what I have just argued, “God” does not have a theo-logical sense in Levinas. “God” does not denote the unsayable, or a Supreme Being, but instead the exception in all its exposure. Levinas’s God thus announces the downfall of the theological as a discourse on God. But how is it that this downfall does not carry with it that of philosophy itself ? And, to pose yet another question, in what sense is the “death of God,” such as Nietzsche states it and Levinas takes it up, a philosophical event?
In The Gay Science, Nietzsche proclaims, through the “death of God,” “a sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin and cataclysm.”3 Yet if these ruins proclaim a radical change in the way we apprehend truth, then “who today could guess enough of it?” asks Nietzsche. If this event destroys our grasp of the truth, it can no longer be conceived in the present as a finite event. It follows that such an event can only open us to its awaiting, freeing the horizon from limitation. Far from submitting to a passive awaiting, this horizon “appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright” (GS §343, 280)—invites us without awaiting to “venture out again . . . to face any danger” (GS §343, 280), that is, it invites us to keep the promise of this unknown. The “death of God” is a departure, the same departure that gives body and materiality to [qui donne corps] Levinas’s language; except that in Levinas it is the Other, “Autrui”—who is both the unknown and the signification of this departure—that is explicitly thematized as “the one-for-the-other, where the other is not assumed by the one” (OB 50; AE 85). To this, Levinas adds a specification that describes the ambiguous understanding we might have of God in Otherwise Than Being. First, Levinas states that signification as departure “supposes the possibility of pure non-sense invading and threatening signification” (OB 50; AE 85). This departure is really “for nothing”; it has no point. No sense is guaranteed at the end of this departure, which agrees with the meaning of “the death of God,” understood at the end of Otherwise Than Being as the death of “worlds behind the scene” (“arrière-mondes”: cf. OB 185; AE 284). There, Levinas writes, “without this madness at the outermost limits of reason, the one would take hold of itself and in the heart of its passion, recommence essence” (OB 50; AE 85, trans. modified). We can thus see that this “for nothing” is the madness on whose cord Otherwise Than Being balances and that inhabits its language, which shows how little this is an optimistic book. However, in another text (“Secularization and Hunger”),4 Levinas speaks of exposure as “some other side of Nothing,”5 which then suggests that while signification, understood as “departure,” is for nothing, it remains that this disinterestedness, despite its ex-ceeding and ex-crescence, cannot itself be reduced to nothing. It exempts itself from the alternative of Being and Nothingness. Thus, Levinas’s “God” does not bring about the destruction of philosophy as this God announces nothing theological or extraphilosophical and echoes like the other side of nothingness. Instead, this God is indissociable from the “death of God,” indissociable from the “for nothing” by which Nietzsche thought the gaiety of such an event in the modality of a departure: “the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an open sea—” (GS 280).
To summarize briefly the intrigue of the proximity discerned between Nietzsche and Levinas—especially, between the “death of God” and what Levinas hears of its echo—we can say that, in Otherwise Than Being, “God” does not represent the impossible relationship between Saying and the said, nor even the injunction not to reduce the former to the latter. This is because God is unsayable in this logic. Instead, the name “God” denotes the overbid set on every said, by which Levinas refuses simply to give in to the impossible, as though silence should be preserved or held fast. The meaning of the “Saying” in Levinas commits him to do or to state the impossible. It is that “step beyond” [pas au-delà] that Levinas also calls “Goodness” [le “Bien”]. In this sense, if responsibility is infinite, we are always already engaged in its fulfillment, which is not its end or its realization but rather its “overbid” [sa surenchère]. Through the distant one [le lointain], Levinas shows the gratuity and anarchy—impossible to say—of responsibility and of its law. Through the neighbor [le prochain], Levinas exposes or elects us, as already committed “by the Saying to overbid,” that is, precisely to say the impossible, and to exceed every aporetic law of responsibility. Where metaphysical foundations are destroyed and no measure or meaning can stand as the guarantor of existence, “the Good” or “Goodness” glimmers like the underside of “Nothingness”; “Goodness,” understood as the “pre-” that our exposure to the Other always sought to say. Thus Levinas can write: “From the Good to me—assignation: a relation that survives the ‘death of God’” (OB 123; AE 196, trans. modified).
But if Levinas’s Other survives the “death of God,” then is Nietzsche’s God condemned to an eternal death? This question cannot have a response inasmuch as Nietzsche’s word does not have a definite truth. But what we can state is that in Nietzsche, death does not lead to a self-sufficient relationship. Let us remember how Nietzsche’s truth summons any pride and contempt: “Now solitude itself yields and breaks apart and can no longer contain its dead. The resurrected are to be seen everywhere” (TZ “The Greeting”: 292). Neither solitude nor death is Nietzsche’s last word, precisely because Nietzsche’s words happen as an indefinite rupture: “What does your truth matter, Zarathustra? State the truth that you have in yourself and be broken.” Now, while this break is not embodied by a responsive dimension, or beating of thinking and writing, it opens to it. Nietzsche’s writing indeed is not a response but an address; it does not play host to the neighbor. Nevertheless it calls to the distant one, to the friend: “It is you I am calling! Do not cover yourself in the caverns of your withdrawal and your mistrust! Be at least the reader of this book such that, thereafter, by your acts, it can be destroyed and forgotten.”6 To take one’s distance, then, and to forget: therein lies the “star truth”7—the demise and the future—of friendship.
NOTES
1. The final section of Otherwise Than Being is titled “Autrement Dit”; I protect the French adverb in translating this as “Otherwise Said,” rather than “In Other Words”—Editor. Translated by Bettina Bergo.
2. For instance in Zarathustra, “De l’amour du prochain.”
3. See, for example, GS §343, 279.
4. Emmanuel Levinas, “Secularization and Hunger,” trans. Bettina Bergo, in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 20, no. 2, and 21, no. 1 (1998): 3–12.
5. Levinas, “Secularization,” 10: “It is an incessant recommencement of hunger struggling against the same stony surface . . . yet in this way as if calling to some other side of Nothing [l’envers du Rien]. A call without prayer”—Trans.
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, trans. Michael W. Grenke (South Bend, Ind.: Saint Augustine’s Press, 2004): five lectures presented in 1872 at the University of Basel.
7. See GS §279.