Introduction
In what follows I give a reading of Levinas’s aesthetics that draws out his non-phenomenological tendencies because, at the end of the day, I think the most fascinating aspects of Levinas’s philosophy are those that exceed his commitment to phenomenology and bring him closer to someone like Deleuze, who is often regarded as antithetical to Levinas in particular, and phenomenology in general. Motivating my reading is the fact that both Levinas and Deleuze assign a transcendental function to sensation, which is interesting because it points to a kind of partnership between the two as philosophers of immanence. However, the main purpose of this chapter is not to build bridges. I am, I suspect, even more motivated by a remark I once received from an anonymous reviewer who was disturbed upon learning that I do indeed believe Levinas and Deleuze have much in common, ontologically speaking. Here’s what the reader said: “I am not sure how to understand the transition from Levinas, who is so concerned with ethics, to Deleuze, whose commitment to [a] kind of ontological flattening…would exactly preclude a serious conception of ethics.” Now, either this reader was unwilling to concede that a legitimate plurality of readings of Levinas is possible, or they were incapable of imagining that a Deleuzean ethics is possible. Incidentally, a book published in 2011, called Deleuze and Ethics, testifies to the actuality of a Deleuzean ethics, and therefore the possibility of a promising confrontation with Levinas. 1 To accomplish my reading, I should note, it is not necessary to establish that Deleuze is a closet Levinasian, which I do not think is right. Instead, I think it is more advantageous to show that Levinas is closer to Deleuze than Levinasians like to admit. To establish this, a different approach to Levinas is needed, one that reads him as a philosopher concerned primarily with the materiality of existence.
I want to make some sense of how the concepts of diachrony, representation, and sensation are mobilized in the aesthetics of Levinas. To accomplish this, I bring Levinas into dialogue with two unlikely allies: Gilles Deleuze and, to a much lesser degree, Jacques Rancière. My claim is that Levinas’s critique of representation is arguably the most radical of those found in the phenomenological tradition, and in this respect he is philosophically very close to the Deleuze we find in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. What both thinkers share is a remarkable appreciation of the function of sensation, which is for both, I suggest, the basic element of aesthetics and the most fundamental element of experience. Sensation, however, is a problematic concept for the phenomenologist to incorporate into his analyses of experience because the logic of sensation identified by Levinas is not something disclosed phenomenologically. It is, as Deleuze says, invisible. Levinas better than any other phenomenologist achieves an integration of sensation into his philosophy, but this comes at the price of compromising the methodological integrity of his phenomenology and leaving us with the question of sensation’s metaphysical status. This compromise is what draws him close to Deleuze, and it is also what enables us to ask about the emancipatory potential of Levinasian aesthetics. The question of emancipation, which I will only hint at here, is well-framed by the work of Rancière, whose writings on the image and the spectator provide a useful context for interrogating the political dimension of Levinas’s aesthetics.
The Invasion of Shadow
One day not too long ago I was re-reading Levinas’s 1948 essay “Reality and Its Shadow” and trying to focus explicitly on what reality means for Levinas, what reality’s shadow is, and whether or not art possesses a special ability to disclose the real. Motivating my focus was a curiosity about whether or not Levinas could be considered a metaphysical realist, and if this hypothetical realism was compatible with phenomenology. This, along with some striking remarks he makes about sensation, led me to ask a few questions: What function does sensation play in Levinas’s view of spectatorship? Is Levinas’s spectator merely subjected to the work of art, just the passive recipient of aesthetic experience, or is aesthetic experience more akin to the dialogical sense-experience Merleau-Ponty envisions when he’s writing about Cézanne? While reading Levinas, however, I found myself always thinking not about Merleau-Ponty, but about Deleuze.2 Levinas consistently talks about sensation and aesthetic experience in terms that conceive the spectator as a kind of hostage to sensation, and this is precisely what brought Deleuze to my mind. Deleuze is, after all, one of the most vocal advocates of sensation in twentieth-century philosophy. Levinas writes this in “Reality and Its Shadow”: “[The experience of aesthetic rhythm] represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is part of its own representation.”3 In other texts, he uses the same language to describe our encounter with the Other; he uses this language to describe our relation to existence in early works like Existence and Existents (1947), which is contemporary with “Reality and Its Shadow.” And he continues to use this language in some important essays from the 1980s, which I discuss below. To be sure, a concern with the subject’s participatory role in its representations spans the breadth of Levinas’s work. What could it mean to say “that subject is part of its own representation?”
Not unlike Deleuze’s interpretation of the painting of Francis Bacon, Levinas understands aesthetic experience in general, not just music or poetry or dance, as the locus of rhythm. It is the rhythm of the work of art that exerts a force on the spectator; or, rather, what forces the spectator to participate in the work of art. Understanding the nature of this force and this participation is essential to conceptualizing Levinas’s aesthetics.
To say that the subject is part of its representation is not to make the Hegelian point that reason is constitutive of reality,4 or that the subject actively shapes its reality through its conceptual and perceptual grasp of the world around it; or, as Levinas would put it, that to conceptualize the other is always to reduce the other to the same. To say that the subject is part of its representation is also not to echo Guy Debord’s criticism, famously proclaimed in The Society of the Spectacle, that contemporary capitalist society presents us with nothing more than an image-mediated social relationship beyond which there is nothing real to see. “Far from welcoming any human activity that would challenge its authority,” writes Debord, the “attitude that [the spectacular society] demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.”5 Indeed, Levinas’s point is quite the opposite of both the idealist and the Situationist. The spectacle of reality is, first and foremost, not a product of mediation. For Levinas, it is an immediacy: our representation of reality—insofar as this representation is sensible—takes hold of the subject who represents, and not necessarily in any superficial or exploitative mode. (Those modes are possible, of course, and Deleuze will even attach to these modes a particular kind of violence.) The forced participation induced by the spectacle on the spectator is, in Levinas’s view, a means by which the real communicates with the spectator. The revelation of the real, however, does not occur in the represented or figurative content of the spectacle; it occurs in the body. The body is the locus of revelation, but not simply as something to which the spectacle is revealed. The body does not merely reflect what is contained in the spectacle, it becomes part of the spectacle itself. This is why reality cannot be said to reside outside of the image, the performance, the spectacle, or the represented; each of these domains contains a sensible dimension that affects the body to some degree, however minimal or redundant.
The move from acting in the world, either intellectually or practically, to beholding the world in the work of art6 would seem to entail a movement from the position of active agent to passive recipient. When I seek to use an object, I reach out and take hold of it and mobilize it as a piece of equipment meant to fulfill my desires, my projects, or my whims. The object’s alterity is destined to become synchronized with my teloi, locked into the ends I seek to actualize and rendered graspable in its presence. Intentionality, both practical or thematic, lies behind all of these acts of seizure, which is why Levinas writes in “Diachrony and Representation” (1985):
Seeing or knowing, and taking in hand, are linked in the structure of intentionality, which remains the intrigue of a kind of thought that recognizes itself in consciousness: the “at-handness” [main-tenance] of the present emphasizes its immanence as the characteristic virtue of this sort of thought.7
When I seek to know an object, I set my mind the task of rendering that object intelligible by converting it into concepts that capture its essential characteristics and modalities. To know or to use an object is to take interest in it in one way or another, and to distill its being for an ego that would see, know, or use it.8
Concepts and categories make the other manageable for the ego; the body schema makes the other useable for the embodied agent. Art, however, is meant to suspend this interestedness. It compels us, either by choice or by compulsion, to interrupt our grasp of the world in favor of the free play of our imagination. Or, at least, it offers a means of satisfying our curiosity. Whatever the case may be, aesthetic contemplation entails a disruption of our intentional life: “An image marks a hold over us rather than our initiative, a fundamental passivity.”9 This is the effect of what Levinas calls a work’s rhythm. The detour of the practical and thematic modes of intentionality introduced by rhythm, which occurs in aesthetic experience of every type, introduces a measure of diachrony into the representational life of the ego.
Diachrony—which he describes in temporal terms as a “delay” and in visual terms as a “shadow”10 —emerges immanently within consciousness, but as nonintentional; it does not come from outside and it does not point to a reality exclusive to artistic representation. It points to a reality that resonates in the body. Or rather, the body lives a time that is out of step with the ego. It signals a reality that belongs to the sensible dimension of any spectacle, and which Levinas can only describe as a kind of magical evasion of presence.11
In its simple modality, art substitutes an image of the object for the actual object. The object’s presence is substituted by the presence of an image that re-presents the object in its absence. Hyperrealism would, at the limit, entail a kind of synchronization of these presences. None of this, however, fully describes what happens when I behold an image. Levinas, we already know, settles on the concept of rhythm to depict the effect of the image on the spectator. Images possess a fundamental musicality that Levinas finds embedded in their qualities. All the action occurs in the qualities. Or rather, it is an object’s multiplicity of qualities (artistic or not) that gives it rhythm and makes it something more and something other than a unified substance, something dynamic. And it is at the level of our sensibility, that is, below the level of our apperception and the gathering of intentionality, that we are forced to participate in the rhythm of images. “The idea of rhythm,” writes Levinas,
designates not so much an inner law of poetic order as the way the poetic order affects us, closed wholes whose elements call for one another like the syllables of a verse, but do so only insofar as they impose themselves on us, disengaging themselves from reality. But they impose themselves on us without our assuming them. Or rather, our consenting to them is inverted into a participation. Their entry into us is one with our entry into them.12
Distinctive about this forced participation in the rhythm of the image—which is analogous, by Levinas’s own admission, to the way one gets carried away by a song to the point of dancing involuntarily to it—is that it entails a loss of one’s identity, “a passage of oneself to anonymity.” Aesthetic existence involves a dislocation of oneself into the shadow of reality, an unhinging of the capacity to see, know, and do. For Levinas, it is not so much that sensation is disorganized, but that sensation is ungraspable. Sensation is what enables grasping, both conceptual and practical. It is what gives birth to concepts and practices, which always lag behind the imperatives of sensation.
The ontological dimension of sensation is not necessarily proper to art, even though it is often easiest to speak about aesthetic rhythm in the context of art. Art, however, enables us to catch sight of a mode of experience that necessarily unfolds between the conscious and the unconscious. It evinces a liminal experience that lies somewhere between the potential and the actual, the latent and the explicit, the transparent and the obscure. This is why Levinas describes art as “the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow.”13 To be caught up in the rhythm of an artistic product—an image, song, dance, or poem—is to be deprived of freedom at the very same moment that one is involved in playing along with the work of art. To be caught up in rhythm is to present these opposing tendencies, the passive and the active, simultaneously in one’s body. Levinas explains in the following terms: “The particular automatic character of a walk or a dance to music is a mode of being where nothing is unconscious, but where consciousness, paralyzed in its freedom, plays, totally absorbed in this playing.”14 By the same token, to be the spectator of an image is not to take in the image distinterestedly in the sense of finding no interest in it. On the contrary, to behold an image is to take interest in it as something intriguing and something to be taken into, involved with (in the strict sense) as participant.
Involvement in the spectacle is not equivalent to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, where one finds oneself among things to be mastered or gawked at or mulled over. Nor is it a separation from the spectacle, a merely observational involvement. Aesthetic involvement is participation in what Levinas calls the “pathos of the imaginary world of dreams,” where the spectator finds herself pulled into the spectacle and out of herself—out of the here that constitutes her historical being-there, the ground of her freedom, what Heidegger calls her Dasein and what Levinas calls her position.15 Aesthetic experience is the rendering exterior of one’s interiority, a sacrifice of one’s agency to the invisible rhythm of the material world.16 The exteriorization of oneself in the work of art is not analogous to the time-consciousness of Husserl or the ecstatic temporalization of Dasein elaborated by Heidegger, both of which entail a recuperation or retrieval of oneself.17 The exteriorization of the spectator in the spectacle is induced by the diachrony of the spectacle, which involves the spectator in an impersonal, elemental past that Levinas sometimes refers to as the transcendental function of sensation, or what we might call the temporality of sensation. Levinas identifies this in numerous texts—often in reference to the other, God, or the infinite—as a past which has never been present.
Aesthetic experience is numbered among the forms of nonintentional consciousness because it involves the subject as a locus of affectivity rather than reflection, intelligibility, or directedness.18 The affective does not belong either to the extensive or the intentional; it belongs instead to the intensive dimension of reality, which is incapable of reflecting a representation or figuration. As affective, spectatorship is, in Levinas’s phrase, the very “ruin of representation.” Instead of a kind of fulfillment or satisfaction of desire, it is a form of suffering. We see that this kind of suffering, however, signals nothing other than the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic. This means that art, for instance, has the ability to affect us with an intensity that bypasses the intentional or conceptual in order to take hold directly of the senses. This is possible because both the work of art as spectacle and the body of the spectator belong to the matter of the world and trade in the very same qualities that compose the rhythm of matter. As affective, the rhythm of the work of art has the capacity—and in some instances, explicitly aims—to plunge the spectator into the darkness of being, into a nocturnal anarchy of the senses which Levinas dramatizes in Existence and Existents. Just as the night stages a confrontation with an exteriority that provides no correlation with interiority, leaving the subject with no perspective from which to grasp its surroundings, art is “a descent of the night”19 that has the power to render the I “submerged […], invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it. The disappearance of all things and of the I leaves what cannot disappear, the sheer fact of being in which one participates, whether one wants to or not, without having taken the initiative, anonymously.”20 Even though Levinas is talking here about the impersonality and indifference of being, what he ultimately is speaking about is the anonymous materiality of sensation, not as the matter of perception, but as the infinite, ungraspable yet tangible element of aesthetic events.21 While this may sound terrifying, it is nevertheless a necessary condition of aesthetic edification. To learn from the work of art is to suffer its lesson, to have oneself transformed by what it teaches.
The sensory qualities, or elements, of art are unlike the sensory qualities of an object insofar as the latter indicate a substantial unity to which the qualities point, beyond their multiplicity. In Husserl’s language, beyond the series of adumbrations that I perceive lies the noematic core of the object. In other words, these adumbrations are the stepping stones that get us to the object in its objective presence. In art we find that sensations are not a mere means that refer us beyond themselves: they are the object sought by the spectator. Sensations constitute the aesthetic event’s materiality, the reality that makes up the rhythm or musicality of the work of art.22 To look beyond art’s surface qualities is, in a sense, to misapprehend the work of art as rhythm or musicality:
To insist on the musicality of every image is to see in an image its detachment from an object, that independence from the category of substance which the analysis of our textbooks ascribe to pure sensation not yet converted into perception (sensation as an adjective), which for empirical psychology remains a limit case, a purely hypothetical given.23
It is within images that we get sensation itself. It is there encountered as something more than a pure posit of cognition or an inferred residue of perception. In images sensation operates with a function all its own: i.e. to convert the spectator—via its rhythm—into a participant in the spectacle itself. But lest we conclude that this is a function proper to art, Levinas insists that insofar as any part of the world can become an image,24 the whole of the world has the power to seize us with its rhythm. Sensation operates within an “ontological dimension that does not extend between us and a reality to be captured;” it marks the immanence of a reality we participate in anonymously and nonintentionally.25
Art is thus a doubling of reality. But not insofar as it stands in for a “real” world beyond its surface, but insofar as it is a presence that resembles and dissembles itself simultaneously.
This way of thinking about the immanence of sensation, the aesthetic event, and the exteriority involved in spectatorship is much closer to Deleuze than it is to Husserl, Heidegger, or even Merleau-Ponty. And indeed, it is this nonphenomenological dimension of Levinas’s philosophy that I find so fascinating. As he writes in “Reality and Its Shadow”: “The phenomenology of images insists on their transparency. The intention of one who contemplates an image is said to go directly through the image, as through a window, into the world it represents, and aims at an object.” 26 Phenomenology in this respect fails to take the image on its own terms, as an object bearing its own reality. Its emphasis on the significance of representation is what turns Levinas away from the phenomenology of art. There is a distinct move away from the figurative and signification in Levinas’s analyses; he cares less about what images point to or intend, and much more about how a representation’s qualities open up a fissure in its being and time. Deleuze will describe this as the “shallow depth…that rips the painting away from all narrative as well as from all symbolization.”27 Even when it attends to the qualitative dimension, phenomenology, Levinas insists, privileges the synchronization of thought and world, otherwise called “presence,” as well as the theoretical, discursive, and knowable. Even if there is in Merleau-Ponty a move away from this privileging, and a turn toward the corporeal dimension of lived experience, the correlation of thought and being in phenomenology is never really contested by the diachrony introduced into representation by sensation.28
Readers of Deleuze will recognize the line of thought that I have traced in Levinas’s work. As Deleuze interprets him, what interests Francis Bacon is the way in which the “invisible forces” of sensation mold, sculpt, “model,” or “shake” the flesh of the spectator.29 These forces are transmitted precisely through the rhythm of painting, which forms its very essence.30 Rhythm, likewise, is what animates sensation, according to Deleuze. This is why he should be read alongside Levinas.
What does rhythm accomplish in Deleuze’s aesthetics, and what does sensation have to do with rhythm? As Dan Smith explains, “Aesthetic comprehension is the grasping of a rhythm with regard to both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure.”31 This grasping, however, is not the violent grasping denounced by Levinas; this is because it is accomplished without a concept. It is instead, as Deleuze says, a submersion of oneself in the spectacle, an exploration of the rhythms that serve as the “ground” of aesthetic comprehension and the vitality of sensation. The phenomenology of perception, with its thesis of the primacy of perception, is invalidated precisely by this point. This vitality not only animates the spectacle as qualitative multiplicity, it likewise animates the spectator: “at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation only be entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing and the sensed.”32 Sensation, for Deleuze as for Levinas, works directly on the spectator and has the effect of forcing the spectator into the position of participant in the spectacle. Sensation does not need to be communicated through a sign, symbol, or concept. It is the body that comprehends, or rather accommodates, the power of sensation.33
For Deleuze, as we have seen with Levinas, sensations are not strictly identical to qualities; such an equivalence would threaten to reduce sensations to the level of mere appearance, epiphenomena, or subjective data. Sensations are more than this: they bear upon our bodies with an “intensive reality,” and it is this reality that pulls the body outside itself, renders it ecstatic and other than itself. “Sensation is a vibration,” a rhythm.34 The way the body vibrates with sensations determines how, and to what degree, it is molded and deformed by aesthetic events, and to what extent it “takes on an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity.” This excess is what Bacon aims to paint in his screams.35 “If we scream,” writes Deleuze, “it is always as victims of invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling.”36 Here again the horror of sensation rears its head. The aim of painting is to make these forces visible, which is not to represent these forces as concepts or signifying traits. Painting is meant to affect the spectator, to exert a force on sensibility that disrupts the spectator’s organic unity and which lies within the ruins of the spectacle’s representational content, that is, in its unrepresentable and ungraspable rhythms. Against phenomenology, Deleuze writes: “the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power [Puissance].” The unity of this power, or rhythm, can only be sought “at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the [different levels of sensation] are perpetually and violently mixed.”37 All of this, for Deleuze, requires a supplanting of the violence of the spectacle by the violence of sensation. What does this mean?
Pain and violence figure prominently in Deleuze’s treatment of Bacon’s painting and loom over Levinas’s aesthetics. Violence and pain are linked, for both thinkers, to the inadequacy of both thought and body to undergo what art does to us. And what art does is always at least partly a question of the intensity of its sensations. For Levinas, the force of sensation entails a disintegration of one’s perspective on the world that is analogous to the horror one experiences in the face of the “there is” (il y a), the bare fact of existence.38 There is also a marked violence involved in the act of knowing or comprehending, which necessarily reduces the alterity of what is known. For Deleuze, the violence of the spectacle is twofold. There is a violence of the represented, such as we find in the paintings and prints of Goya.39 There is also the violence of sensation, which, as we have seen, bypasses any narrative and impacts the nervous system directly.40 This is violence taken as a violation of the body. To supplant the representational violence of the spectacle with the violence of sensation means, at least in one sense, to create art that forces the body to confront realities that operate on it at the affective level and compel it to express or perform these forces in its movements—movements that push it beyond itself, into something other than itself, without destroying it or getting it caught up in banal meanings and distractions. As Deleuze writes:
When, like a wrestler, the visible body confronts the powers of the invisible, it gives them no other visibility than its own. It is within this visibility that the body actively struggles, affirming the possibility of triumphing, which was beyond its reach as long as these powers remained invisible, hidden in a spectacle that sapped our strength and diverted us.41
Levinas, too, entreats us to overcome the spectacle by wrestling with its hidden forces. But he also offers an alternative means of eliminating the spectacle. To behold an image, for instance, is to take it as a representation of an absent reality that it resembles. It substitutes one form of presence for another, both of which refer us to the same object. But the image is a reality in its own right, albeit one that is doubled. On the face of it, its figure or representative content tells a story or signifies something or other. This is merely a “caricature” of the image, one aspect of it. The rest of the image, its invisible forces, remain hidden from view even as they operate on our senses. A spectacle, then—whether an object, a work of art, or a performance—is “that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image. The original gives itself as though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in a being delayed behind being.” The diachrony of representation, the doubling of the spectacle as idol or allegory of itself, is the very structure of the sensible: “The sensible is being insofar as it resembles itself, insofar as, outside of its triumphal work of being, it casts a shadow, emits that obscure and elusive essence, that phantom essence which cannot be identified with the essence revealed in truth.”42 Reality always resembles itself, while every representation always ends up proliferating the dimensions of the real. To see straight through to the object represented is to neglect the surprises that lurk in the shadows of reality.
Horrors of Emancipation
Levinas has, perhaps, much less in common with Rancière than he does with Deleuze. Nevertheless, I think it is worth noting a modest point of convergence because it helps us shed some light on the emancipatory potential of the suffering, violence, and horror of Levinas’s aesthetics. In The Emancipated Spectator Rancière defines the spectator as one who is “separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act.”43 In Levinas’s language, a spectator would be someone who confronts, yet lacks the ability to grasp the other and, therefore, fails to reduce the other to the same. The spectator is effectively what the insomniac is for Levinas, a subject incapable of escaping, either practically or mentally, the presence of the night.44 For Levinas, the spectator’s capacity to know or act upon the other is interrupted by the other’s elusive qualities, their withdrawal from the caricature that our representations make of them.45 In other words, it is because the spectator is caught up within the doubling of the spectacle that they lack the capacity to take hold of it in thought or deed.
For Rancière, the question of the spectator is the question of who polices the distance between artistic spectacles and their spectators. In other words, who determines the extent to which the spectator may participate in and comprehend the knowledge embedded in the spectacle? Rancière suggests that it may be the artist himself, despite his deliberate attempts to engage the spectator—to make him or her enter or enact the work of art—and draw out of him or her the knowledge required to comprehend the work of art. Rancière sees in Situationists like Debord, and Marxist theory more generally, a failure to eradicate the spectator’s distance from the spectacle precisely because they (Marxists, Situationists) operate with a logic that deploys in its critique the very oppositions that must be abandoned.
The question of who actively creates art and who merely observes it trades upon a distinction between viewing and knowing that is not a purely logical opposition, but rather a product of a certain distribution of the sensible, what Rancière identifies as “an a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions.”46 Even in contemporary art, despite attempts to erode the distinction, the spectator is cast as a passive participant in the spectacle, whereas the one who stages the spectacle is charged with mastery of the spectacle’s knowledge, its “point.” Until this opposition is eroded or overcome, the spectator will never be capable of making their own sense of the work of art precisely because they will never be in the position—as spectator—of independent thinker. For Rancière, “emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting; when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.”47
As it does for Rancière, the emancipatory dimension of Levinas’s aesthetics trades on the blurring of the oppositions we maintain between viewer and knower, active and passive, creator and consumer, etc. We have seen that at the aesthetic level sensation enacts an elision of the distinction between interior and exterior as well as active and passive. The concept of rhythm accomplishes an understanding of performance that places animation neither in the hands of the one who performs nor in the forces that carry the body along. The spectator is part of the spectacle, not separated from it. This is Levinas’s logic of sensation.
For Rancière, to close the gap between spectator and spectacle, what is required is a logic of emancipation that works to undo the distribution of the sensible which cannot conceive the role of the spectator as anything other than a passive viewer. The logic of emancipation conceives the transmission of knowledge not as a one-way street, but as something that is discovered by everyone individually and on their own terms. This is possible because
between the ignorant schoolmaster and the emancipated novice there is always a third thing—a book or some other piece of writing—alien to both and to which they can refer to verify in common what the pupil has seen, what she says about it and what she thinks of it. The same applies to performance. It is not the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator. It is the third thing that is owned by no one whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.48
What is central here is the idea that meaning is what resides between individuals as something accessible by everyone, and which is, strictly speaking, common and anonymous. It belongs to no one and is accessible to anyone willing to witness, engage, and articulate the spectacle in their own way. The power of the spectator, in Rancière’s view, is the capacity “to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other.” This, Rancière concludes, “is the capacity of anonymous people, the capacity that makes everyone equal to everyone else.”49 The political critique of aesthetics, then, should not be focused on transforming spectators into actors, or vice versa. This just replays the binaries that make up the “stultifying” logic of subjection. For critique to overcome this logic, what is required is recognition of “the knowledge at work in the ignoramus and the activity peculiar to the spectator,” as well as a “blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look.”50
When Levinas says that the subject is part of its own representation, he enacts the blurring of boundaries called for by Rancière. At the center of this blurring is the experience of rhythm, the force of sensation. Exposure to this rhythm involves the kind of suffering that comes with passivity, but it also opens up the possibilities that accompany any exploration of what is other than us, more powerful, unrepresentable, or unimaginable. Aesthetic experience, as a confrontation with the invisible forces of sensation, is not unlike a trial of strength that pushes us to outperform ourselves, or to perform in ways that we are incapable of imagining for ourselves. This, I think, is the promise of the aesthetic event that both Levinas and Deleuze describe as a horrific plunge into the night. Part of the horror of this descent is the horror that comes with any kind of experimentation with or exploration of the unknown. Nevertheless, it is a necessary step toward the extrication of oneself from oneself and necessary to escape the spectacular violence that would otherwise hold us captive.
1. Daniel Smith and Nathan Jun, eds., Deleuze and Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
2. In Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics there is a marked privileging of the synchronic relation between body and world, the senses and the sensed. Levinas, by contrast, pays more attention to the diachronic elements of aesthetics. See Chapter 3 below for more on this.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 4.
4. Whereas Kant assigns a regulative function to reason, Hegel goes further in arguing that reason actively constitutes the objects of experience. See the discussion of reason in Tom Rockmore, Cognition: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 81.
5. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 15.
6. Throughout this essay I am leaving “art” intentionally vague because I am less interested in circumscribing the domain of art than I am in the way that every domain of experience involves an aesthetic aspect. In short, art is just one aesthetic domain that employs representations (as well as abstractions and affects) that bear on the body of the spectator.
7. Emmanuel Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” in Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 160.
8. Levinas, “Diachrony and Representation,” 161.
9. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 3. In both German and French the terms used to describe conceptualizing, understanding, learning, and even perceiving refer us back to the acts of grasping or seizing hold. See Levinas’s discussion in “Nonintentional Consciousness,” in Entre Nous, 125-126.
10. See Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 8. On delay as a form of “staggered time” in Deleuze and its contrast with the time theory of Bergson and Husserl, see Jay Lampert, Simultaneity and Delay: A Dialectical Theory of Staggered Time (London: Continuum, 2012).
11. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 3.
12. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 4.
13. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 3.
14. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 4.
15. See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 80.
16. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 4.
17. Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” 125.
18. Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” 127-128.
19. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 3.
20. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 53.
21. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 47.
22. Levinas, Existence and Existents, 47.
23. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 5.
24. On this point, see Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1990). Bergson, it seems, is the liaison that links Levinas and Deleuze.
25. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 5.
26. Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” 5.
27. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxxii.
28. Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” 124-125. See also Levinas’s essay “Sensibility” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, eds. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 65.
29. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xxix.
30. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xxxii.
31. Daniel Smith, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Deleuze, Francis Bacon, xv, xviii-xix.
32. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 31.
33. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 32.
34. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 39.
35. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 40.
36. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 51.
37. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 39.
38. See Levinas, Existence and Existents. Also note that the meaning and function of horror in Bacon’s paintings, as seen by Deleuze, is different from the horror of the night described by Levinas. I have not explored this difference here.
39. This kind of violence is covered thoroughly in Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2004).
40. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 36-37.
41. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 52.
42. “Reality and Its Shadow,” 6-8. Where Levinas differs from Deleuze is over the role of meaning in spectatorship. Levinas insists that even in nonintentional consciousness, or what Deleuze might call asignifying experience, there is meaning. See Levinas, “Nonintentional Consciousness,” 124.
43. Jacque Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 2.
44. See the discussion of insomnia in Levinas, Existence and Existents, 61-64 and Chapter 2 above.
45. For more on the nature of caricature and withdrawal, see the work of Graham Harman, which gathers some of its inspiration from Levinas.
46. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 12. On the meaning of the “distribution of the sensible” and Rancière’s affinity with Deleuze on the question of sensation, see Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), chapter 1.
47. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13.
48. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 15.
49. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 16-17.
50. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17, 19.