Simon Critchley
Death is not the noema of a noesis. It is not the object or meaningful fulfilment of an intentional act. Death, or rather, dying, is by definition ungraspable; it is that which exceeds intentionality and the noeticonoematic correlative structures of phenomenology. There can thus be no phenomenology of dying, because it is a state of affairs about which one could neither have an adequate intention nor find intuitive fulfilment. The ultimate meaning of human finitude is that we cannot find meaningful fulfilment for the finite. In this sense, dying is meaningless and, consequently, the work of mourning is infinite (which is to say that mourning is not a Work).
Since direct contact with death would demand the death of the person who entered into contact, the only relation that the living can maintain with death is through a representation, an image, a picture of death, whether visual or verbal. And yet, we immediately confront a paradox: namely that the representation of death is not the representation of a presence, an object of perception or intuition—we cannot draw a likeness of death, a portrait, a still life, or whatever. Thus, representations of death are misrepresentations, or rather they are representations of an absence.2 The paradox at the heart of the representation of death is perhaps best conveyed by the figure of prosopopoeia, that is, the rhetorical trope by which an absent or imaginary person is presented as speaking or acting. Etymologically, prosopopoeia means to make a face (prosopon + poien); in this sense we might think of a death mask or memento mori, a form which indicates the failure of presence, a face which withdraws behind the form which presents it.3 In a manner analogous to what Nietzsche writes about the function of Schein in The Birth of Tragedy, such a prosopopoeic image both allows us to glimpse the interminability of dying in the Apollonian mask of the tragic hero and redeems us from the nauseating contact with the truth of tragedy, the abyss of the Dionysian, the wisdom of Sile aus: ‘What is best of all is…not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.’4 believe that many of the haunting images—or death masks—in Blanchot’s récits (I am thinking of the various death scenes in Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence and The Last Man, but also of the figures of Eurydice or the Sirens) have a prosopopoeic function: they are a face for that which has no face, and they show the necessary inadequacy of our relation to death. To anticipate myself a little, my question to Levinas will be: must the face of the Other always be a death mask?
However, as I show elsewhere with reference to Blanchot’s reading of Kafka’s Diaries, the writer’s (and philosopher’s) relation with death is necessarily self-deceptive: it is a relation with what is believed to be a possibility, containing the possibility of meaningful fulfilment, but which is revealed to be an impossibility.5 The infinite time of dying evades the writer’s grasp and s/he mistakes le mourir for la mort, dying for death. Death is disclosed upon the horizon of possibility and thus remains within the bounds of phenomenology or what Levinas would call ‘the economy of the Same’. To conceive of death as possibility is to conceive of it as my possibility; that is, the relation with death is always a relation with my death. As Heidegger famously points out in Sein und Zeit, my relation to the death of others cannot substitute for my relation with my own death; death is in each case mine.6 In this sense, death is a self-relation or even self-reflection that permits the totality of Dasein to be grasped. Death is like a mirror in which I allegedly achieve narcissistic self-communion; it is the event in relation to which I am constituted as a Subject. Being-towards-death permits the achievement of authentic selfhood, which, I have argued elsewhere,7 repeats the traditional structure of autarchy or autonomy, allowing the self to assume its fate and the community to assume its destiny. One might say that the community briefly but decisively envisaged in Paragraph 74 of Sein und Zeit is a community of death, where commonality is found in a sharing of finitude, where individual fates are taken up into a common destiny, where death is the Work of the community.
The radicality of the thought of dying in Blanchot is that death becomes impossible and ungraspable. It is meta-phenomenological. In Levinas’s terms, dying belongs to the order of the enigma rather than the phenomenon (which, of course, passes over the complex question whether there can be a phenomenology of the enigmatic or the inapparent). Dying transgresses the boundary of the self’s jurisdiction. This is why suicide is impossible for Blanchot: I cannot want to die; death is not an object of the will. Thus, the thought of the impossibility of death introduces the possibility of an encounter with some aspect of experience or some state of affairs that is not reducible to the self and which does not relate or return to self; that is to say, something other. The ungraspable facticity of dying establishes an opening on to a metaphenomenological alterity, irreducible to the power of the Subject, the will or Dasein (as I see it, this is the central argument of Time and the Other). Dying is the impossibility of possibility and thus undermines the residual heroism, virility and potency of Being-towards-death. In the infinite time of dying, all possibility becomes impossible, and I am left passive and impotent. Dying is the sensible passivity of senescence, the wrinkling of the skin—crispation: the helplessly ageing face looking back at you in the mirror.
In this way, perhaps (and that is a significant ‘perhaps’), the guiding intention of Levinas’s work is achieved: namely that if death is not a self-relation, if it does not result in self-communion and the achievement of a meaning to finitude, then this means that a certain plurality has insinuated itself at the heart of the self. The facticity of dying structures the self as Being-for-the-other, as substitution, which also means that death is not revealed in a relation to my death but rather in the alterity of death or the death of the Other. As Levinas writes in a late text, it is ‘As if the invisible death which the face of the other faces were my affair, as if this death regarded me’.8
This relation between dying and plurality allows us to raise the question of what vision of community could be derived from this anti- Heideggerian account of dying, from this fundamental axiom of heteronomy. If, as Levinas suggests, the social ideal has been conceived from Plato to Heidegger in terms of fusion, a collectivity that says ‘we’ and feels the solidarity of the Other at its side, what Nancy calls ‘immanentism’, then a Levinasian vision of community would be ‘a collectivity that is not a communion’,9 une communauté désoeuvrée, a community unworked through the irreducibility of plurality that opens in the relation to death. This is a point made by Alphonso Lingis:
Community forms when one exposes oneself to the naked one, the destitute one, the outcast, the dying one. One enters into community not by affirming oneself and one’s forces but by exposing oneself to expenditure at a loss, to sacrifice.10
To conceive of death as possibility is to project on to a future as the fundamental dimension of freedom and, with Heidegger, to establish the future as the basic phenomenon of time. Yet, such a future is always my future and my possibility, a future ultimately grasped from within the solitary fate of the Subject or the shared destiny of the community. I would claim that such a future is never future enough for the time of dying, which is a temporality of infinite delay, patience, senescence or différance. Dying thus opens a relation with the future which is always ungraspable, impossible and enigmatic; that is to say, it opens the possibility of a future without me, an infinite future, a future which is not my future.11
What is a future that is not my future? It is another future or the future of an Other, that is, the future that is always ahead of me and my projective freedom, that is always to come and from where the basic phenomenon of time arises, what Levinas calls dia-chrony. But what or who is the Other? Does the word ‘Other’ translate the impersonal autre or the personal autrui? For Blanchot, writing establishes a relation with alterity that would appear to be strictly impersonal: a relation with the exteriority of le neutre. It would seem that the latter must be rigorously distinguished from the personal alterity sought by Levinas, the alterity of autrui, which is ultimately the alterity of the child, that is, of the son, and the alterity of illeity, of a (personal) God.12 It would seem that although the experience of alterity in Blanchot and Levinas opens with the impossibility of death, that is, with their critique of Heidegger’s Being-towards-death, one might conclude that there is only a formal or structural similarity between the alterity of the relation to the neuter and the alterity of autrui and that it is here that one can draw the line between Levinas and Blanchot. However, in opposition to this, I should like to muddy the distinction between Blanchot and Levinas by tracking an alternative destiny for the il y a in Levinas’s work and indicating the direction that could be taken by a Blanchot-inspired re-reading of Levinas.
* * *
I show elsewhere that the experience of literature for Blanchot has its source in ‘the primal scene’ of what he variously calls ‘the other night’, ‘the energy of exteriority prior to law’ or ‘the impossibility of death’, and that this experience can be understood with reference to Levinas’s notion of the il y a.13 However, although Levinas’s thinking begins with the il y a, which is his deformation of the Heideggerian understanding of Being (an appropriation and ruination of the Seinsfrage), his entire subsequent work would seem, on a first reading, to be premised upon the necessity to surmount the il y a in order to move on to the hypostasis of the Subject and ultimately the ethical relation to the Other, a relation whose alterity is underwritten by the trace of illeity. In order to establish that ethics is first philosophy (i.e. that philosophy is first), Levinas must overcome the neutrality of the il y a, the ambiguous instance of literature.
Now, to read Levinas in this way would be to adopt what Paul Davies has called ‘a linear narrative’,14 which would begin with one (‘bad’) experience of neutrality in the il y a and end up with another (‘good’) experience of neutrality in illeity, after having passed through the mediating moments of the Subject and autrui (roughly, Sections II and III of Totality and Infinity). To read Levinas in this way would be to follow a line from the il y a to the Subject, to autrui, to illeity. However, the question that must be asked is: can or, indeed, should one read Levinas in a linear fashion, as if the claim to ethics as first philosophy were a linear ascent to a new metaphysical summit, as if Totality and Infinity were an anti-Hegelian rewriting of the Phenomenology of Spirit (which might yet be true at the level of Levinas’s intentions)? Is the neutrality of the il y a ever decisively surmounted in Levinas’s work? And if this is so, why does the il y a keep on returning like the proverbial repressed, relentlessly disturbing the linearity of the exposition? Is the moment of the il y a—that is to say, the instance of the literary, of rhetoric and ambiguity—in any way reducible or controllable in Levinas’s work? Or might one track an alternative destiny of the il y a, where it is not decisively surmounted but where it returns to interrupt that work at certain critical moments? Might this not plot a different itinerary for reading Levinas, where the name of Blanchot would function as a clue or key for the entire problematic of literature, writing, neutrality and ambiguity in the articulation of ethics as first philosophy? Is literature ever decisively overcome in the establishment of ethics as first philosophy?
Let me give a couple of instances of this tracking of the il y a before provisionally sketching what I see as the important consequences of such a reading.15
The problem with the il y a is that it stubbornly refuses to disappear and that Levinas keeps on reintroducing it at crucial moments in the analysis. It functions like a standing reserve of non-sense from which Levinas will repeatedly draw the possibility of ethical significance, like an incessant buzzing in the ears that returns once the day falls silent and one tries to sleep. To pick a few examples, almost at random: (1) in the ‘Phenomenology of eros’, the night of the il y a appears alongside the night of the erotic, where ‘the face fades and the relation to the other becomes a neutral, ambiguous, animal play’.16 In eros, we move beyond the face and risk entering the twilight zone of the il y a, where the relation to the Other becomes profane and language becomes lascivious and wanton, like the speeches of the witches in Macbeth. But, as is well known, the moment of eros, of sexual difference, cannot be reduced or bypassed in Levinas’s work, where it functions as what Levinas calls in Time and the Other an ‘alterity content’17 that ensures the possibility of fecundity, plurality within Being and consequently the break with Parmenides. (2) More curious is the way in which Levinas will emphasize the possible ambivalence between the impersonal alterity of the il y a and the personal alterity of the ethical relation, claiming in ‘God and philosophy’ that the transcendence of the neighbour is transcendent almost to the point of possible confusion with the il y a.18 (3) Or, again, in the concluding lines of ‘Transcendence and intelligibility’, at the end of a very conservative and measured restatement of his main lines of argumentation, Levinas notes that the account of subjectivity affected by the unpresentable alterity of the infinite could be said to announce itself in insomnia, that is to say, in the troubled vigilance of the psyche in the il y a.19 It would appear that Levinas wants to emphasize the sheer radicality of the alterity revealed in the ethical relation by stressing the possible confusion that the Subject might have in distinguishing between the alterity of the il y a and that of illeity, a confusion emphasized by the homophony and linked etymology of the two terms.
In Existence and Existents, Levinas recounts the Russian folk-tale of Little John the Simpleton, who throws his father’s lunch to his shadow in order to try and slip away from it, only to discover that his shadow still clings to him, like an inalienable companion.20 Is not the place of the il y a in Levinas’s work like Little John’s shadow, stretching mockingly beneath the feet of the philosopher who proclaims ethics as first philosophy? Is not the il y a like a shadow or ghost that haunts Levinas’s work, a revenant that returns it again and again to the moment of nonsense, neutrality and ambiguity, as Banquo’s ghost returns Macbeth to the scene of his crime, or like the ghostly return of scepticism after its refutation by reason? Thus, if the il y a is the first step on Levinas’s itinerary of thought, a neutrality that must be surmounted in the advent of the Subject and autrui, then might one not wonder why he keeps stumbling on the first step of a ladder that he sometimes claims to have thrown away? Or, more curiously—and more interestingly—must Levinas’s thought keep stumbling on this first step in order to preserve the possibility of ethical sense? Might one not wonder whether the ambiguity of the relation between the il y a and illeity is essential to the articulation of the ethical in a manner that is analogous to the model of scepticism and its refutation, where the ghost of scepticism returns to haunt reason after each refutation? Isn’t this what Levinas means in ‘God and philosophy’ (but other examples could be cited) when he insists that the alternating rhythm of the Saying and the Said must be substituted for the unity of discourse in the articulation of the relation to the Other?21
Which brings me to a hypothesis in the form of a question: might not the fascination (a word favoured by Blanchot) that Levinas’s writing continues to exert, the way that it captivates us without our ever feeling that we have captured it, be found in the way it keeps open the question of ambiguity, the ambiguity that defines the experience of language and literature itself for Blanchot, the ambiguity of the Saying and the Said, of scepticism and reason, of the il y a and illeity, that is also to say— perhaps—of evil and goodness?
(Let us note in passing that there is a certain thematization, perhaps even a staging, of ambiguity in Levinas’s later texts. For example, he speaks in Otherwise than Being of the beyond of being ‘returning and not returning to ontology…becoming and not becoming the meaning of being’.22 Or again, in the discussion of testimony in Chapter 5 of the same text,
Transcendence, the beyond essence which is also being-in-theworld, needs ambiguity, a blinking of meaning which is not only a chance certainty, but a frontier both ineffaceable and finer than the outline (le trace) of an ideal line.23
Transcendence needs ambiguity in order for transcendence to ‘be’ transcendence. But is not this thematization of ambiguity by Levinas an attempt to control ambiguity? My query concerns the possibility of such control: might not ambiguity be out of control in Levinas’s text?)
What is the place of evil in Levinas’s work? If I am right in my suggestion that the il y a is never simply left behind or surmounted and that Levinas’s work always retains a memory of the il y a which could possibly provoke confusion on the part of the Subject between the alterity of the il y a and the alterity of illeity, then one consequence of such confusion is the felt ambiguity between the transcendence of evil and that of goodness. On a Levinasian account, what is there to choose experientially between the transcendence of evil and the transcendence of goodness?24 This is not such a strange question as it sounds, particularly if one recalls the way in which ethical subjectivity is described in Otherwise than Being…in terms of trauma, possession, madness and even psychosis, predicates that are not so distant from the horror of the il y a. How and in virtue of what—what criterion, as Wittgenstein would say, or what evidence, as Husserl would say—is one to decide between possession by the good and possession by evil in the way Levinas describes it?
(Of course, the paradox is that there can be no criterion or evidence for Levinas, for this would presume the thematizability or phenomenologizability of transcendence. But this still begs the question of how Levinas convinces his readers: is it through demonstration or persuasion, argumentation or edification, philosophy or rhetoric? Of course, Levinas is critical of rhetoric in conventionally Platonic terms, which commits him, like Plato, to an anti-rhetorical rhetoric, a writing against writing.)
Let me pursue this question of evil by taking a literary example of possession mentioned in passing by Levinas in his discussion of the il y a, when he speaks of ‘the smiling horror of Maupassant’s tales’.25 In Maupassant, as in Poe, it is as though death were never dead enough and there is always the terrifying possibility of the dead coming back to life to haunt us. In particular, I am thinking of the impossibility of murdering the eponymous Horla in Maupassant’s famous tale. The Horla is a being that will not die and cannot be killed, and, as such, it exceeds the limit of the human. The Horla is a form of overman, ‘after man, the Horla’.26 What takes place in the tale—to suspend the temptation to psychoanalyse—is a case of possession by the Other, an invisible Other with which I am in relation but which continually absolves itself (incidentally, the Horla is always described using the neutral, third-person pronoun—the il) from the relation, producing a trauma within the self and an irreducible responsibility. What interests me here is that in Maupassant the possession is clearly intended as a description of possession by evil, but does not this structure of possession by an alterity that can neither be comprehended nor refused closely resemble the structure of ethical subjectivity found in substitution? That is to say, does not the trauma occasioned in the Subject possessed by evil more adequately describe the ethical Subject than possession by the good? Is it not in the excessive experience of evil and horror—the insurmountable memory of the il y a—that the ethical Subject first assumes its shape? Does this not begin to explain why the royal road to ethical metaphysics must begin by making Levinas a master of the literature of horror? But if this is the case, why is radical Otherness goodness? Why is alterity ethical? Why is it not rather evil or an-ethical or neutral?27
Let us suppose—as I indeed believe—that Levinas offers a convincing account of the primacy of radical alterity, whether it is the alterity of autrui in Totality and Infinity or the alterity within the Subject described in Otherwise than Being…Now, how can one conclude from the ‘evidence’ (given that there can be no evidence) for radical alterity that such alterity is goodness? In virtue of what further ‘evidence’ can one predicate goodness of alterity? Is this not, as I suspect, to smuggle a metaphysical presupposition into a quasiphenomenological description? Such a claim is, interestingly, analogous to possible criticisms of the causa sui demonstration for the existence of God.28 Let’s suppose that I am convinced that in order to avoid the vertigo of infinite regress (although one might wonder why such regress must be avoided; why is infinite regress bad?) there must be an uncaused cause, but in virtue of what is one then permitted to go on and claim that this uncaused cause is God (who is, moreover, infinitely good)? Where is the argument for the move from an uncaused cause to God as the uncaused cause? What necessitates the substantialization of an uncaused cause into a being that one can then predicate with various other metaphysical or divine attributes? Returning the analogy to Levinas, I can see why there has to be a radical alterity in the relation to the Other and at the heart of the Subject in order to avoid the philosophies of totality, but, to play devil’s advocate, I do not see why such alterity then receives the predicate ‘goodness’. Why does radical Otherness have to be determined as good or evil in an absolute metaphysical sense? Could one—and this is the question motivating this critique—accept Levinas’s quasi-phenomenological descriptions of radical alterity whilst suspending or bracketing out their ethicometaphysical consequences? If one followed this through, then what sort of picture of Levinas would emerge?
The picture that emerges, and which I offer in closing as one possible reading of Levinas, as one way of arguing with him, is broadly consistent with that given by Blanchot in his three conversations on Totality and Infinity in The Infinite Conversation.29 In the latter work, Blanchot gives his first extended critical attention to a theme central to his récits, the question of autrui and the nature of the relation to autrui. What fascinates Blanchot in his discussion of Levinas is the notion of an absolute relation—le rapport sans rapport—that monstrous contradiction (which refuses to recognize the principle of noncontradiction) at the theoretical core of Totality and Infinity, where the terms of the relation simultaneously absolve themselves from the relation. For Blanchot, the absolute relation offers a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity,30 that is, a picture of the relation between humans which is not—contra Kojève’s Hegel—founded in the struggle for recognition where the self is dependent upon the other for its constitution as a Subject. For Levinas, the interhuman relation is an event of radical asymmetry which resists the symmetry and reciprocity of Hegelian and post-Hegelian models of intersubjectivity (in Sartre and Lacan, for example) through what Levinas calls, in a favourite formulation, ‘the curvature of intersubjective space’.31
For Blanchot, Levinas restores the strangeness and terror of the interhuman relation as the central concern of philosophy and shows how transcendence can be understood in terms of a social relation. But, and here we move on to Blanchot’s discreet critique of Levinas, the absolute relation can only be understood socially, and Blanchot carefully holds back from two Levinasian affirmations: first, that the relation to alterity can be understood ethically in some novel metaphysical sense, and second, that the relation has theological implications (i.e. the trace of illeity). So, in embracing Levinas’s account of the relation to autrui (in a way which is not itself without problems), Blanchot places brackets around the terms ‘ethics’ and ‘God’ and hence holds back from the metaphysical affirmation of the Good beyond Being. Blanchot holds to the ambiguity or tension in the relation to autrui that cannot be reduced either through the affirmation of the positivity of the Good or the negativity of Evil. The relation to the Other is neither positive nor negative in any absolute metaphysical sense; it is rather neutral, an experience of neutrality which—importantly—is not impersonal and which opens in and as that ambiguous form of language that Blanchot calls literature (if I had the space and competence, it is here that I could begin a reading of Blanchot’s récits in terms of the absolute relation to the autrui).
Where does this leave us? For me, Levinas’s essential teaching is the primacy of the human relation as that which can neither be refused nor comprehended and his account of a subjectivity disposed towards responsibility, or better, responsivity (Responsivität rather than Verantwortung, to follow Bernhard Waldenfels’s distinction).32 Prior to any metaphysical affirmation of the transcendence of the Good or of the God that arises in this relation, and to which I have to confess myself quite deaf (I have tried hard to listen for many years), what continues to grip me in Levinas is the attention to the Other, to the Other’s claim on me and how that claim changes and challenges my self-conception.33 Now, how is this claim made? Returning to my starting point with the question of death, I should like to emphasize something broached early in Levinas’s work, in Time and the Other,34 but not satisfactorily pursued to my mind, where the first experience of an alterity that cannot be reduced to the self occurs in the relation to death, to the ungraspable facticity of dying. Staying with this thought, I should want to claim, with Blanchot, that what opens up in the relation to the alterity of death, of my dying and the Other’s dying, is not the transcendence of the Good beyond Being or the trace of God, but the neutral alterity of the il y a, the primal scene of emptiness, absence and disaster, what I am tempted to call, rather awkwardly, atheist transcendence.35
We are mortals, you and I There is only my dying and your dying and nothing beyond. You will die and there is nothing beyond. I shall slowly disappear until my heart stops its soft padding against the lining of my chest. Until then, the drive to speak continues, incessantly. Until then, we carry on. After that there is nothing.
1 This chapter is the development of a long discussion of Blanchot’s critical writings, whose focus in his important early essay ‘Literature and the right to death’, and where I employ Levinas’s notion of the il y a as a clue to understanding what Blanchot means by literature or writing (see ‘il y a—a dying stronger than death’, Oxford Literary Review, 15 (1993), pp. 81–131). My suggestion is that the il y a is the origin of the artwork. However, the substantive thesis that is introduced in my earlier discussion and developed here concerns the question of death and presupposes the (negative) agreement of Levinas and Blanchot in their critique of Heidegger’s conception of death as Dasein’s ownmost possibility, as the possibility of impossibility. I try to draw the philosophical consequences of Blanchot’s terminological distinction between la mort and le mourir, death and dying, where the former is synonymous with possibility and consequently with the project of grasping the meaning of human finitude, whereas the latter can be identified with impossibility and entails the ungraspable facticity of death, where I can no longer lay hold of a meaning for human finitude. My suggestion is simply that the notion of dying yields an approach to human finitude at once more profound, more troubling, less heroic and less virile than that found in Sein und Zeit, a suggestion that I make good through a discussion of dying in the work of Samuel Beckett, which will appear in my Very Little…Almost Nothing (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming). I owe my title to Gerald Bruns, whose extremely thoughtful remarks greatly aided the revision of this paper for publication. I also owe a debt to Donna Brody, former research student at the University of Essex, who first brought the radicality of the il y a to my attention and whose work has been invaluable in thinking through these issues.
2 In this regard, see Elisabeth Bronfen’s and Sarah Webster Goodwin’s interesting introduction to Death and Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 3–25, esp. pp. 7, 20.
3 This idea is borrowed from J.Hillis Miller’s Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); see especially the excellent discussion of Blanchot, ‘Death mask: Blanchot’s L’arrêt de mort’ pp. 179–210.
4 Fredrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W.Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 42.
5 See Critchley, ‘A dying stronger than death’, pp. 120–8. Please note that the reference to Kafka here is to his Diaries (cited p. 121) and not to his fiction, which, of course, often says exactly the opposite. Indeed, it would be interesting to pursue the theme of the impossibility of death in relation to Kafka’s short tale ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ and the spectral, deathless figure of Odradek (in Erzählungen (New York: Schocken, 1967), pp. 170–2).
6 Sein und Zeit, 15th edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), p. 240. Being and Time, trans. J.Macquarrie and E.Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 284. For Levinas’s most sustained critique of Heidegger on death, see the recently published lecture series ‘La Mort et le temps’, in Emmanuel Levinas: cahier de l’Herne (Paris: L’Herne, 1991), pp. 21–75. My opposition between death as possibility and impossibility as a way of organizing the difference between Heidegger, on the one hand, and Levinas and Blanchot, on the other, only tells half the story and, as Derrida has shown us, matters are rarely univocal in relation to Heidegger, particularly on the question of death and the entire thematic of authenticity and inauthenticity. For more nuanced accounts of Heidegger on death, see Christopher Fynsk, Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Françoise Dastur, La Mort: essai sur la finitude (Paris: Hatier, 1994).
7 See ‘Prolegomena to any post-deconstructive subjectivity’, in Deconstructive Subjectivities, ed. S.Critchley and P.Dews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 19–20.
8 ‘Paix et proximité’, in Les Cahiers de la nuit surveillée 3 (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1984), p. 344.
9 See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. R.Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 84.
10 Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those who have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 12. A question left unresolved here concerns the relation of death to femininity in Levinas, particularly in Time and the Other (pp. 85–8), that is, between the mystery of death and the mystery of the feminine, and whether, in the light of Elizabeth Bronfen’s work, this repeats a persistent masculinist trope (see Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992)). This also entails the related point concerning the extent to which the Levinasian account of plurality is dependent upon his notion of fecundity and hence upon his account of the child, that is to say, the son, and therefore entails a male lineage of community that fails to acknowledge mother-daughter relations (see below, n. 14).
11 I borrow this formulation from Paul Davies. In this regard, see the following passage from ‘Meaning and sense’: ‘To renounce being the contemporary of the triumph of one’s work is to envisage this triumph in a time without me, to aim at this world below without me, to aim at a time beyond the horizon of my time, in an eschatology without hope for oneself, or in a liberation from my time. To be for a time that would be without me, for a time after my time, over and beyond the celebrated “being for death”, is not an ordinary thought which is extrapolating from my own duration; it is the passage to the time of the other’ (Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A.Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987), p. 92).
12 In ‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: on the divinity of love’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. M.Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 178–89, Irigaray rightly questions Levinas as to whether the alterity of the child as the future for the father that is not the father’s future does not still remain within the sphere of the pour soi, where the child is for the father, a project beyond his powers of projection, but still his project (see esp. p. 181).
13 Critchley, ‘A dying stronger than death’, pp. 102–20.
14 See ‘A linear narrative? Blanchot with Heidegger in the work of Levinas’, in Philosophers’ Poets (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 37–69.
15 A point of clarification here: in lectures given on Levinas at Essex University in November 1994, Rudi Visker spoke of an ‘ethicization of the il y a’ in Levinas’s work. The claim is that the overcoming or surmounting of the il y a in the move to the hypostasis of the Subject that characterized Levinas’s earlier analyses is abandoned in the later work, where the il y a is accorded an ethical significance previously denied to it. Now, there is some truth to this claim, and it would be a question of giving (which I cannot give here) a detailed periodization of the il y a across Levinas’s work, noting differences of nuance in different texts written at different periods. It is certainly true to say, as Levinas says himself in Ethique et infini, that in his later work, although he scarcely speaks of the il y a as a theme, ‘the shadow of the il y a and non-sense still appeared to me necessary as the very ordeal of dis-interestedness’ ((Paris: Fayard, 1982), p. 42). The il y a is the shadow or spectre of nonsense that haunts ethical sense, but—and this is crucial—ethical sense cannot, in the final instance, be confused or conflated with an-ethical nonsense. The il y a is a threat, but it is a threat that must and can be repelled. This would seem to be confirmed by the 1978 Preface to De l’existence a l’existent, where, after writing that the il y a is the ‘principal feature’ of the book, he goes on to describe the il y a in terms of ‘inhuman neutrality’ and ‘a neutrality to be surmounted’ (2nd edn (Paris: Vrin, 1986), pp. 10–11; missing from the English translation by A.Lingis, Existence and Existents (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978)). Thus, Levinas’s basic philosophical intention does not alter, but whether his text is saying something at odds with this intention is another matter.
16 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A.Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 263.
17 Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 36.
18 See Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 165–6: ‘And this implies that God is not simply the “first other”, the “other par excellence”, or the “absolutely other”, other than the other (autrui), other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other (autrui), prior to the ethical bond with the other (autrui) and different from every neighbour, transcendent to the point of absence, to the point of a possible confusion with the stirring of the il y a.’
19 Transcendence et intelligibilité (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1984), p. 29; trans. S.Critchley and T.Wright in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 159: ‘But perhaps this theology already announces itself in the very wakefulness of insomnia, in the vigil and troubled vigilance of the psyche before the moment when the finitude of being, wounded by the infinite, is prompted to gather itself into the hegemonic and atheist Ego of knowledge.’
20 See Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 28.
21 Levinas, ‘God and philosophy’, in Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 173.
22 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 19.
23 Ibid., p. 152.
24 Levinas goes some way to discussing this question in Transcendence and evil’ in Collected Philosophical Papers, pp. 175–86, where, although Levinas recognizes the ‘non-integratability’ (p. 180) or excess of evil, the horror of evil is understood by Levinas as the horror of evil in the other man and, hence, as the breakthrough of the Good (p. 185) and the ‘approach of the infinite God’ (p. 186).
25 Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 60.
26 Guy de Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. L.Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), pp. 913–38, esp. p. 938; Selected Short Stories, trans. R. Colet (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1971), pp. 313–44, esp. p. 344.
27 Several years ago, I corresponded with Michel Haar after some discussions we had at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, where I had tried to explain my fascination with Levinas. He wrote, and I recall from a memory long troubled by his words, ‘Je ne vois pas qu’il y a éthique des qu’il y a altérité’ (‘I don’t see why there is ethics since there is alterity’). For Haar’s powerful critique of Levinas, see ‘L’Obsession de l’autre: l’éthique comme traumatisme’, Emmanuel Levinas: cahier de l’Herne, pp. 444–53.
28 I owe this analogy to a conversation with Jay Bernstein.
29 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. and Foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 49–74. In this context I shall have to pass over the interesting and difficult question of whether Blanchot’s relation to Levinas alters in The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), which might justifiably be approached as a deeply sympathetic but subtly reconstructive reading of Levinas’s Otherwise than Being.
30 Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, pp. 70–1.
31 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 291.
32 See Bernhard Waldenfels, Ordnung in Zwielicht (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1987).
33 After the thoughts contained here were already loosely formulated, I made the happy discovery that many of my claims are strikingly similar to those proposed by John D.Caputo in his attempt to think obligation without reference to any substantive ethics. See his Against Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
34 See Levinas, Lecture III in Time and the Other, pp. 67–79.
35 Blanchot’s reservations on the subject of whether the neuter can be described as transcendent should be noted here. In The Infinite Conversation, he writes, ‘One of the essential traits of the neutral, in fact, is that it does not allow itself to be grasped either in terms of immanence or in terms of transcendence, drawing us into an entirely different sort of relation’ (p. 463).