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Lyotard and Levinas: The Logic of Obligation Darren Ambrose

Abstract

Jean-Francois Lyotard’s inquiries into the logic of obligation, culminating in his

discussion of ethical phrases in Le Differend, are deeply indebted to a Levinasian

reading of that logic and his articulation of a radically new modality of ethics.

Emmanuel Levinas is one of the major figures in twentieth century European

philosophical tradition to have produced a substantive reconfiguration of ethics based

upon the idea of an asymmetrical human relation rather than mutual obligation. The

resulting ethics, outlined in texts such as Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than

Being, or Beyond Essence, is one of hyperbolic responsibility beyond norms and duty

and outside formal rules and pragmatics. In this paper I will analyse Lyotard’s

arguments concerning the logic of absolute obligation – the ‘phrases of pure

prescription’ - through a detailed reading of his relatively unknown essay on Levinas

entitled ‘Logique de Levinas’. Lyotard’s short commentary demonstrates

considerable interpretative insight and originality and represents a sophisticated

response to Jacques Derrida’s early influential commentary ‘Violence and

Metaphysics’. Derrida’s commentary is marked by its critical claims regarding

Levinas’s efforts to articulate a philosophical ethics beyond the Hegelian dialectic. As

I will demonstrate, central to Lyotard’s own interpretative efforts is an urgent

recovery of Levinas’s ethics from such an allegedly reductive reading.

In his essay ‘Logique de Levinas’1 Lyotard aims to ‘establish that prescriptive

statements are not commensurate with denotative ones – or in other words, with

descriptive ones’. As part of this effort Lyotard argues that Emmanuel Levinas is the

thinker who has done more than any other contemporary philosopher to develop an

original philosophical analogue of the purely prescriptive obligation derived from the

Judaic and Talmudic tradition. His reading of Levinas in this essay consists of an

attempt to ‘rewrite Levinas into the language of phrases’. Levinas’s thought

persistently revolves around the question of a primary asymmetrical relation to the

1 Translated as ‘Levinas’ Logic’ in The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin, pp. 275-313. An abbreviated form of this translated text was first published in French as ‘Logique de Levinas’ in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 127-150

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other, and how such asymmetry is the condition (rather than the foundation) of all

justice. This asymmetrical relation to the other (what Levinas terms ‘proximity’) is

conceived as being ‘unique’, absolutely other, and the primary signification of all

subsequent meaning.

Throughout all of his work Levinas contrasts his conception of asymmetrical

proximity, and the way it inscribes a primordial sense of obligation towards the other

within the self, with the historically developed notion of consciousness and self-

consciousness found in Kant, Hegel and Husserl. Within the Post-Kantian tradition

consciousness and self-consciousness signify intentionality, transcendental

constitution, conceptual mastery, self-possession, the sovereignty or freedom of the

rational subject, or the autonomous agent who constitutes everything that appears to

befall it. According to this tradition consciousness and self-consciousness confer

meaning on the world and on the other human subjects in it. However, Levinas argues

that consciousness and self-consciousness so conceived are not all there is to

subjectivity; they are also the condition of a primordial sensibility and passivity in

which my relationship to the world is one of proximity to absolute alterity.2 Proximity

names a totally autonomous event of exteriority as well as naming the relation

between such exteriority and the subject. In proximity the self-constituting

sovereignty of consciousness and self-consciousness is revealed as having the

structure of the one-for-the-other. In that sense it carries the anarchic character of an

intervention in the stable order of things that I constitute and inhabit. ‘Proximity’,

Levinas says, ‘is anarchically a relationship with a singularity without mediation of

any principle or ideality. What concretely corresponds to this description is my

relationship with my neighbour.’3 The subject’s relationship with this form of

exteriority is absolutely asymmetrical and not one that it brings about, or constitutes,

in any way.

This relation is conceived as anarchic because such exterior singularity just happens

or emerges despite myself, it befalls me. The other is out of my control, beyond any

stable order I might try to impose. It is in this sense a relation outside of the 2 Levinas’s most detailed account of sensibility, passivity and proximity is contained in chapter 3 of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998) 3 E. Levinas, Ibid. p. 90

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coordinates of conscious intentionality. Levinas characterises this befalling of the

other as an ‘assignation’, a being ‘approached’, a being ‘called out’, ‘summoned’, or

‘accused’. What is overturned in proximity is the sovereignty of the subject, not my

responsibility, which is assigned beyond any possibility of evasion. In the

asymmetrical relation with the other, which is, for Levinas, the human relation par

excellence, I am exposed beyond my will and ethically obligated to the other in an

absolute sense. He writes:

‘The psyche is the form of a peculiar de-phasing, a loosening up or unclamping of

identity: the same prevented from coinciding with itself, at odds, torn up from its rest,

between sleep and insomnia, panting and shivering. It is not an abdication of the

same, now alienated and slave to the other, but an abnegation of oneself fully

responsible for the other. This identity is brought out by responsibility and is at the

service of the other. In the form of responsibility, the psyche in the soul is the other in

me, a malady of identity, both accused and self, the same for the other, the same by

the other.’4

This exposure which comes through proximity provides the necessary logic of

obligation structuring subjectivity itself – ‘the word ‘I’ here means ‘here I am’’ [me

voici], answering for everything and for everyone. And it is this logic of obligation

which conditions the subject’s openness to the other and is, Levinas claims, ‘the

condition for all solidarity’.5

For Levinas this hyperbolic logic of obligation serves to overwhelm the order of

thematised propositions – ‘the simultaneity and reciprocity’ of the relations when said

or iterated within a stable language or, as Levinas refers to it, ‘ontological language’,

the language of iterated being. However, all of his philosophical work presents a

thorough and ongoing struggle to articulate this ‘non-ontological’ understanding of

this asymmetrical alterity of the other and a notion of the ethical which is ‘older than’

justice. A constant theme throughout Levinas’s work is the way in which the

articulation of ethical proximity and absolute obligation represents a betrayal of its

primordial and anarchic ‘sense’. In gaining a ‘sense’ by becoming articulated within 4 Ibid. p. 69 5 Ibid. p. 102

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linguistic propositions it also paradoxically loses its sense, ‘betraying itself, appearing

according to the intelligibility of a system.’6

Given Levinas’s own difficulties regarding the iteration of ethical sense, it is

important to realise that there is a considerable challenge faced by any attempt to

provide a commentary actually about Levinas’s particular style of philosophical

discourse. In this paper I propose to demonstrate that Lyotard’s own commentary on

Levinas’s thought, in particular the essay entitled ‘Levinas’s Logic’, represents one of

the more successful attempts to elaborate a philosophically sophisticated account of

Levinas’s iteration of a logic of obligation. In this relatively obscure essay Lyotard

clearly addresses the way Levinas’s discourse sets ‘a trap for commentary, attracting

it and deceiving it.’7 Arguably his success in understanding Levinas is in no small part

down to this crucial observation. This trap is the temptation to read Levinas’s

discourse, which is populated by contradictions, paradoxes, hiatuses and enigmatic

lacunae, as a purely speculatively enterprise, and to ignore the degree to which these

textual elements signify non-speculatively.8 However, the question of how Levinas’s

work works (non-speculatively) is also recognised by another of Levinas’s most

perceptive, and indeed earliest, of interlocutors, Jacques Derrida. In a 1980 essay on

Levinas, Derrida writes the following concerning the apparent necessity to have to

read Levinas’s work otherwise:

‘One must, even though nobody constrains anybody, read his work, otherwise said,

respond to it and even respond for it, not by means of what one understands by work

according to the dominant interpretation of language, but according to what his work

says, in its manner, of work, about which it is, otherwise said, about what it should

(be), otherwise said about it should have (to be), as work at work in the work.’9

6 Ibid. P. 69 7 J-F. Lyotard, ‘Levinas’s Logic’, p.275 8 Lyotard, in Discours, Figure criticises Derrida for his neo-Hegelian reading of Levinas in the first of his commentaries entitled ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. Here Derrida remarks upon what he calls the ‘complicity - between Hegelianism and classical anti-Hegelianism’8. For Derrida ‘as soon as he [Levinas] speaks against Hegel, Levinas can only confirm Hegel, has confirmed him already’. To clarify his point Derrida, in a footnote, cites Hegel’s Science of Logic: ‘Pure difference is not absolutely different (from nondifference). Hegel’s critique of the concept of pure difference is for us here, the most uncircumventable theme. Hegel thought absolute difference, and showed that it can be pure only by being impure.’ Lyotard argues that Derrida’s apparent rapprochement between Levinas and Hegel risks effacing the true measure of Levinas’s ethics. 9 J. Derrida, ‘At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am’, translated by R. Berezdivin in R Bernasconi & S Critchley (eds.), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 38

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I want to argue here that one of the most important elements of Lyotard’s paper on the

Levinas’ logic of obligation is his insistence upon an irreducibly non-speculative

aspect to Levinas’s fundamental prescriptive claims in works such as Totality and

Infinity and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. At work in these texts, Lyotard

discerns an aberrant logic of obligation which succeeds at not being reducible to being

merely another moment of speculative ontology. This logic functions as an excessive,

non-denotative, prescriptive logic. To continue to argue that such a logic is fatally

vulnerable to being reinscribed within speculative ontology is, Lyotard maintains,

fundamentally mistaken simply because it fails to appreciate both the way in which

Levinas is only too aware of the degree to which his ethical discourse runs the risk of

being reinscribed and reduced, and the way in which he subsequently constructs his

text in order to solicit a sense of absolute obligation to an other which is irreducible,

in the end, to speculative ontology. The ultimately irreducible element is identified by

Lyotard as a perlocutionary aspect capable of signifying otherwise, an aspect that

signifies beyond and in excess of the stable strictures of denotative discourse. This

aspect constitutes what Levinas will term the ‘dimension of height’ or the ‘divinity of

exteriority’ in Totality and Infinity10, and what Lyotard terms the ‘differend’. By

making such an identification Lyotard successfully discerns the full implications of a

distinction which, although present in Totality and Infinity, becomes increasingly

significant and developed in the later text Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence,

namely the distinction between ‘Saying’ and the ‘Said’.

By the time of Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence language seems no longer

reducible to prepositional form (the Said). ‘Language’, says Levinas, ‘is not reducible

to a system of signs doubling up beings and relations; that conception would be

incumbent upon us if the word were the Noun. Language seems rather to be an

excrescence of the verb.’11 For Levinas, ‘Saying’ – speaking a language – is

irreducible to the prepositional form of the Said, or the logical construction of

identity. Language is always in excess of this logical function of predication, and this

10 E. Levinas - ‘The idea of infinity designates a height and a nobility, a transascendence.’ (Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969) p. 41) 11 E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, p. 35

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excess is preserved in the verbality of language which serves to temporalise the

movement of the proposition. Thus, language is never a stable or self-identical

totality, and it can never purely coincide with itself. There does exist a prepositional

language (the Said) which is the language of identity reducing the other to the same,

and there is the language of temporality or of a primordial sensibility (the Saying) in

which this stable identity is disrupted and language is turned towards and animated by

something other than its self-identical totality, i.e. towards an other outside of its own

coordinates. However, Levinas does not advocate the abandonment of the stable

forms of prepositional language, the stable discourse of concepts and definitions

associated with philosophical reason.

Saying, Levinas claims, is always already somewhat ambiguously implicated or

betrayed within the realm of prepositional language, (i.e. the Said). He asks – ‘Is it

necessary and is it possible that the Saying on the hither side be thematised, that is,

manifest itself, that it enter into a proposition and a book?’12 Levinas’s answer is an

emphatic ‘yes’:

‘It is necessary. The responsibility for another is precisely a Saying prior to anything

Said. The surprising Saying which is a responsibility for another is against ‘the winds

and tides’ of being, is an interruption of essence, a disinterestedness imposed with a

good violence.’13

Saying cannot ever be thought, cannot be comprehended as ethical, unless it is in

some sense fixed or reified – fixed not just as a Said or a theme but as a philosophy.

‘Philosophy’, Levinas says, ‘makes this astonishing adventure…intelligible.’14 In his

essay, Lyotard recognises both the necessity for Levinas’s discourse to run the risk of

thematising unthematisable transascendence, and the necessity of rethinking the very

process of that elaborate negotiation. Lyotard acknowledges the necessity for the

primordial signification of the other, our anterior prescription of obligation and

response, to have to be signified within the form of an enunciated and descriptive

‘Said’. Lyotard argues that despite the obvious risks involved in the necessary

12 Ibid. p. 43 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. p. 44

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transition of the primordial prescription of Saying into a thematising discourse of the

Said, it is never simply reduced to it. The prescriptive Saying always retains a

signification that exceeds or overflows any such thematisation, enunciation or Said.

The signifyingness of the one-for-the-other (Saying) that animates the psyche of the

self, this notion of a non-denotative excess (of the trace of the other in the same), and

its relation to its necessary thematisation, together with the way in which Levinas

negotiates that impasse (in order to make his work succeed in radically displacing

Hegelian speculative philosophy) becomes the very focus of Levinas’s later work.

Levinas writes:

‘Here animation is not a metaphor, but, if we can put it thus, a designation of the

irreducible paradox of intelligibility: the other in the same, the trope of the for-the-

other in its antecedent inflexion. This signification in its very signifyingness, outside

of every system, before any correlation, is an accord or peace between planes which,

as soon as they are thematised, make an irreparable cleavage, like vowels in a

dieresis15, maintaining a hiatus without elision. They then mark two Cartesian orders,

the body and the soul, which have no common space where they can touch, and no

logical topos where they can form a whole. Yet they are in accord prior to

thematisation, in an accord, a chord, which is possible only as an arpeggio. Far from

negating intelligibility, this kind of accord is the very rationality of signification in

which the tautological identity, the ego, receives the other, and takes on the meaning

of an irreplaceable identity by giving to the other. The said shows, but betrays (shows

by betraying) the dieresis, the disorder of the psyche which animates the

consciousness of, and which, in the philosophical order of the said, is called

transcendence. But it is not in the said that the psyche signifies, even though it is

manifested there. Signification is the one-for-the-other which characterises an identity

that does not coincide with itself...It is not reducible to any synchronic and reciprocal

relationship which a totalising and systematic thought would seek in it...The psyche or

animation is the way a relationship between uneven terms, without any common time,

15 Dieresis – the division of one syllable into two, especially by the resolution of a diphthong into two simple vowels. It also refers to the sign placed over a vowel to indicate that it is pronounced separately (e.g. Noël; Chloë; Zoë; Naïve )

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arrives at relationship. Non-objectifiable, non-contemporaneous, it can only signify

non-indifference.’16

In his commentary Lyotard argues that the prescriptive statements associated with

Levinas’s pre-ontological and animating sense of ethical obligation are not entirely

commensurable with denotative (or descriptive) ones. However, as part of this

commentary Lyotard stages a so-called ‘neo-Hegelian’ response to Levinas’s work

which is akin to the Derrida’s critical response in his early commentary. This type of

staged response serves to emphasise the essential denotative (or descriptive) quality of

Levinas’s statements regarding the ethical situation in order to demonstrate the

degree to which they might be considered vulnerable to being assimilated by a certain

type of ontological discourse (or speculative dialectics). This approach insists, as

Derrida originally had, upon there being an implicit proximity between Hegel and

Levinas at the very point of their greatest apparent disjunction regarding ethical

prescription and description. The ‘neo-Hegelian’ commentary staged by Lyotard,

concentrates upon the seemingly disjunctive Levinasian principle that the ethics of

pure obligation derives from a relation with absolute alterity.

Lyotard argues (in neo-Hegelian mode) that since, for Levinas, absolute alterity and

heterogeneity are ethical, the unethical is always the ‘other’ of the ethical; so all that

is unethical is in fact ethical. Lyotard claims that if the one who suffers injustice

should protest against this apparent sophism then he only has its major term to blame,

namely his own law. If the premise states that the rule is alterity, then it necessarily

authorises retortion, enabling the same to be drawn from the other and the other from

the same. If this amounts to nothing more than persecution, it remains the fault of the

persecuted alone; he suffers only from his own law and refutes himself. For Lyotard

such is the mechanism of the Hegelian response: it is ironic and parodic by means of

its ‘I understand you’. Indeed, one is able to see an example of the Hegelian

mechanism in a section of the Phenomenology of Spirit entitled ‘The Law of the Heart

and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit’. Here a form of self-consciousness claims to know

with certainty that it operates as the principle of necessity, i.e. that it has the

universality of law immediately within itself, ‘and because the law is immediately

16 Ibid. p. 70-1

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present in the being-for-self of consciousness, it is called the law of the heart.’17 Hegel

sets about discovering whether self-consciousness’ realisation actually corresponds to

its ‘Notion’, ‘and whether in that realisation it will find that its law is its essential

nature.’18 Hegel demonstrates, with more than a hint of irony, that in fact the self-

consciousness that sets up the law of its own heart inevitably meets resistance from

others, precisely because it contradicts ‘the equally individual laws of their hearts; and

these others in their resistance are doing nothing else but setting up and claiming

validity for their own law.’19 For Hegel the only universal that actually emerges is the

universal resistance and struggle of all against one another, with the result that ‘what

seems to be public order, then, is this universal state of war’, where what is meant to

have the status of universality, through its own contradictory logic, ends up nothing

more than ‘the essenceless play of establishing and nullifying individualities.’20

Levinas’s defence against such a persecuting (Hegelian or neo-Hegelian) commentary

resides in his claim that the absolutely other is not merely the other of the same,

whereby the other is always played out or exchanged in an economy of being as

being’s other. The absolutely other is otherwise than being. In this way the ethical

cannot relate dialectically to, or be identified with, the unethical in the neo-Hegelian

sense, precisely because the two terms do not exist upon the same plane. The neo-

Hegelian approach seemingly presupposes a unified synchronous temporal plane in

which the two terms would inevitably dialectically relate. However, for Levinas the

absolute other is always diachronically prior to the same rather than the result of an

immanent development from the Same. It is precisely this anteriority of absolute

alterity which forbids their mutual opposition from ever becoming totally

synchronised.

However, Lyotard claims that Levinas’s riposte is not completely irrefutable, and at

this point adds a warning concerning the inherent lure or trap in Levinas’s discourse.

For Lyotard the lure consists precisely in seducing the reader to refuse the riposte

regarding the diachronous anteriority of alterity and to insist upon the inevitable

17 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by AV Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by JN Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p.221 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. p.227 20 Ibid. pp.227-8

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collapse of Levinas’s notion of the absolute other in the ironic manner of the neo-

Hegelian reading.

Such a refusal, Lyotard argues, remains on self-consciously Hegelian grounds by

claiming that it is not enough to plead the exclusive disjunction of the otherwise than

being, i.e. that the absolutely other is other than all that is. Whatever terms Levinas

uses to state such an exclusive disjunction, and no matter how radically and

emphatically negative it may be, to even use or invoke it necessarily implies a positive

assertion in the very act of enunciation. Hence we are always able to infer an

affirmative expression from the most negative expression.21 For Lyotard we only ever

have to bring into play the notion of the ‘enunciative clause’. Through enunciative

clauses we are able to maintain that a non-being or the otherwise than being ‘is’, since

we are able to state that a non-being or the otherwise than being ‘is’ a non-being or

‘is’ otherwise than being. These enunciative clauses, which permit such inferences,

would seemingly constitute the unexpressed premises of Levinas’s particular form of

argumentation, i.e. throughout all that is said to be, or not to be, something is -

synchronicity of terms is restored.

For Lyotard all philosophical discourses, no matter how historically diverse, make use

of this enunciative clause, even if only covertly. It appears as if Levinas’s work,

which endeavours to discover and articulate a diachronous sense of the otherwise than

being, must inevitably abound with such synchronous statements. Indeed, Lyotard

goes on to characterise the lure or trap in Levinas’s discourse as the temptation to

regard the palpable and evident thematisation of the absolute and diachronous

transcendence of the absolute other in the work as discernible evidence of the

enunciative clause that would so convincingly ruin it. Hence, such a reader is tempted

by the thought that if they are able to detect the presence of an enunciative clause then

they are able to demonstrate that Levinas’s other is other only insofar as there is an

21 In his early commentary ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, published in Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes by A Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), Derrida suspects that Levinas risks merely repeating a gesture intrinsic to all forms of empiricism or absolutely heterological metaphysical thought (a gesture understood well by Hegel himself), namely that it ‘always forgets, at the very least, that it employs the words “to be” (p. 139) For Derrida Levinas’s arguments amount to the claim that a non-violent language is a language that does without the verb “to be”, it is a language without predication, ‘a language of pure invocation, pure adoration, proffering only proper nouns in order to call to the Other from afar. In effect, such a language would be purified of all rhetoric…purified of every verb.’ (p. 147)

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assertion that maintains its absolute relation and exteriority. Such alleged ruination of

Levinas’s work is characterised by Lyotard as the inherent temptation of how to read

the work. His work seemingly solicits ruination as part of the way it would seem to

work.

However, Lyotard argues that Levinas’s work not only contains this lure of

‘ruination’, but has another ‘face’ or ‘path’ that always already evades a Hegelian

form of persecution. To discern this other face Lyotard engages much more closely

with the actual logic of how Levinas’s work seemingly works. Within this analysis of

Levinas’s logic he selects an assertive statement regarding the relation between self

and other from Levinas’s Totality and Infinity. This statement is taken from the

second section of the book entitled ‘Interiority and Economy’ where Levinas sets out

his account of how ‘radical separation’ is the necessary condition for the passage of

the ‘metaphysical’:

‘The interiority that assures separation must produce a being absolutely closed over

upon itself, not deriving its isolation dialectically from its opposition to the other. And

this closedness must not prevent egress from interiority, so that exteriority could

speak to it, reveal itself to it, in an unforseeable movement.’22

Lyotard isolates two important statements made by Levinas here and characterises

them thus:

1) The self does not proceed from the other (i.e. it does not derive its self-identity

from a dialectical opposition to the other).

2) The other befalls the self (i.e. the other reveals or manifests itself in an

‘unforseeable movement’).

Lyotard labels these statements ∼P and Q, respectively23

22 E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p.148 23 Lyotard, Ibid. p.278

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Levinas claims that if the self were in fact to proceed from the other, either through

contrast or opposition, (so P), then the other would not be a revelation and would have

no marvels to teach. No transcendable occurrence would be able to touch the self; the

self would simply be a matter of perpetual self-identity where everything became a

matter of maieutics.24 Levinas contests the claim that an absolute immanence of the

self would be capable of discerning the revelatory quality of the approach of the other.

Indeed, such immanence is likened by Levinas to the journeys or adventures of

Ulysses, i.e. adventures ultimately traversed on the return journey home. Immanence

is the purely self-determining movement of self-relation whereby its encounters with

otherness are ultimately disclosed as nothing more than effaced or occluded elements

of its own self-relation. It remains fundamentally maieutic despite perhaps claiming

that it traverses real exteriority. Within immanence exteriority is never anything other

than an element ultimately wholly within the travails of interiority. Writing of Hegel’s

immanent philosophy of spirit and self-consciousness, Levinas claims that is best

characterised as ‘the freedom of play where I take myself for this or that, traversing

avatars under the carnival masks of history.’25 Thus, the logic of Levinas’s position is

as follows:

If P, then ∼Q – if the self proceeds from the other then that other cannot ever

befall the self; if the self derives its own identity from its dialectical opposition to the

other, then the other never truly manifests itself as an other in any kind of

unforeseeable or revelatory way.

In the passage of Totality and Infinity cited by Lyotard, Levinas claims that the

manifest transcendence of the other is conditional upon the separation and closure of

the self. Thus:

If ∼P, then Q – if the self does not derive its own self-identity from a

dialectical opposition from an other, then the other exists as an unforeseen alterity in

its own separate realm – otherwise than the self.26

24 Maieutics - a dialogue that endeavours to give birth to knowledge already contained in the interlocutors. 25 E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, p. 125 26 In The Differend Lyotard writes, ‘The other can only befall the ego, like a revelation, through a break-in’, p. 110

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However, Levinas also claims that the other befalls the self; it manifests or reveals to

the self in spite of the latter’s apparent self-sufficiency. Thus:

If ∼P, then ∼Q – if the self does not derive its self identity from a dialectical

opposition from an other, it still cannot prevent the other from befalling it, it cannot

‘prevent egress from interiority, so that exteriority could speak to it.’ So the structural

contradiction would seem to suggest that the self cannot completely derive itself free

from any opposition to an other, to do so would actually entail the impossibility of the

other ever befalling it.27

There is a sense in which if the self does not actually proceed from a relation to the

other in some way, then the other cannot ever befall the self. However, Lyotard

claims, far from exteriority inverting itself into interiority and interiority into

exteriority, as with Hegelianism, Levinas proposes a group of statements (and most

crucially a set of relations between statements) that are able to hold the exteriority of

the other and the interiority of the self as separate. Yet, (and this highlights for

Lyotard Levinas’s real struggle with Hegel), this group of statements is not greatly

different from expressions and relations that could themselves be drawn from Hegel’s

own dialectical discourse. Lyotard claims that the ‘lapsus’ or hiatus constituted by if

∼P, then ∼Q,when juxtaposed with the first two relational expressions of if P, then

~Q and if ~P, then Q, puts the Levinasian group of propositions very close to what,

in Hegel, is called contradiction and the dialectical process of aufhebung. This occurs

in spite of Levinas’s subsequent assertion following the statement Lyotard isolates

from Totality and Infinity:

‘The whole of this work aims to show a relation with the other not only cutting across

the logic of contradiction, where the other of A is the non-A, the negation of A, but 27 This point had already been forcibly made by Derrida in his early commentary on Levinas. He argues that if there is no recognition of otherness or difference as otherness or difference in relation to one’s self-identity, then otherness or difference cannot actually be said to occur or exist. For Derrida, for something to be other or different it is always structurally necessary for it to be in relation to an identity. Derrida argues that Levinas’s discourse is necessarily and inescapably entangled within Hegel’s dialectic of Identity and Difference by virtue of the fact that it is a discourse; it cannot be ‘beyond’ or ‘exterior’ to dialectic since such a dialectic expresses something intrinsic to the very nature of all discourse. For Hegel the essential identity between ‘thought’ and ‘being’ is evidently intrinsic to language itself.

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across dialectical logic, where the same dialectically participates in and is reconciled

with the other in the unity of the system.’28

In his essay Lyotard begins to question whether the connotations of the two ‘musts’

that punctuate this passage from Levinas’s work are ‘exhausted’ when translated into

forms of propositional implication that Lyotard terms ‘alethic propositional modality’

(e.g. ‘It is necessary that…’) or ‘epistemic propositional modality’ (e.g. ‘It is certain

that…’29). He argues that the type of neo-Hegelian response to Levinas’s work rests

upon the reduction of the ‘musts’ to merely propositional or denotative (descriptive)

discourse and he asks whether or not it is possible to escape this neo-Hegelian

reduction by reading such ‘musts’ otherwise. They may well, he suggests, express an

alternative modality which is otherwise than denotational or propositional modalities.

Such a modality, a modality signifying otherwise, is what Lyotard terms

‘illocutionary’ (i.e. directed towards the addressee of the message), and is ‘almost

conversational’.30 For Lyotard this illocutionary modality transforms the ‘musts’ in

Levinas’s discourse from denotations or propositions into direct appeals from the

author to his reader with a view to obtaining his agreement about the three

propositions. Failing this the ‘conversation’ which constitutes his discourse will have

been interrupted. Lyotard writes:

‘The “necessity” expressed by this must bears upon the pragmatic nature of Levinas’s

discourse: if you, the addressee of that discourse, accept P (i.e. that the self proceeds

from the other), then you must refuse Q (i.e. that the other befalls the self), and you

will not be on my side - you will be a Hegelian.’31

For Lyotard in denotative or propositional readings the scope of the ‘must’ is kept

merely at the level of statements. However, he argues that by making a different,

pragmatic or ‘perlocutionary’ interpretation of it (i.e. ‘one that relates to the locutory

situation that defines the message’s relations of addresser/addressee’32) we are obliged

to take into account the very act of enunciation. The enunciative clause thus returns

28 E. Levinas, Ibid. p.150 29 J-F. Lyotard, ‘Levinas’s Logic’, p.279 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

15

even in such statements; and it returns, Lyotard argues, with the usual effect of

rendering the properties of particular statements, (i.e. the statement of disjunctive

exclusion), almost negligible, in favour of the enunciative assertion. However,

Lyotard claims that despite the necessity of the act of enunciation the perlocutionary

statements in Levinas are not ever absolutely reducible to mere assertion. Such

irreducibility, he claims, is indeed something that Levinas’s discourse ultimately

shares with Hegel in that neither thinker’s assertions are reducible to the level of mere

assertion. Both thinkers display a more subtle enunciative modality which has

perlocutionary application, and it is the pragmatic force of ‘statement elements’ such

as the musts in Levinas’s work that seemingly bring his thought again into proximity

with Hegel’s. Lyotard claims:

‘Levinas says, “The interior and the exterior must be exterior”, Hegel says, “The

interior and the exterior must be interior”. Propositionally the two statements are

contraries. But they have the same perlocutionary form: for the discourse of ethics to

hold together [Levinas’s work], the claim for the exteriority of the interior relation is

just as necessary as the claim for its interiority is for the discourse of Phenomenology

[Hegel’s work]. In this respect the two discursive positions are not different.’33

Further to this, Lyotard suggests another proximate element. He argues that both

enunciative demands, both of the ‘musts’, (but Levinas’s infinitely more than

Hegel’s), are not clearly formulated. Rather, they are inserted into statements as

‘modalities that govern their parts (P and Q)’34, as opposed to being enunciative acts

which govern the attitudes of the protagonists of philosophy. Lyotard argues that for

both thinkers ‘they are “speculative” statements in which the form of the statement

implies the instance of the enunciation while hiding it.’35 If this is indeed the case then

Levinas’s statements can be placed on a par with Hegel’s only to the detriment of

Levinas, simply because it would finally imply that the absolute exteriority of the

other, (as expressed by statements P and Q and the three subsequent relations),

despite Levinas’s insistence upon that absoluteness, can only be so by virtue of the

enunciative modality of what Lyotard now terms the ‘constative-representative’ or the

33 Ibid. p.280 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.

16

‘must’. It is a ‘must’ only relative to the enunciative clause. In such a situation the

Levinasian discourse must inevitably become enveloped within the Hegelian

discourse, since it is the discourse which explicitly needs the enunciative clause to be

inserted, in order to form speculative statements. Such a situation, Lyotard argues,

represents the ultimate temptation into which Levinasian discourse leads those who

have not broken faith with the Hegelian speculative project.

Lyotard, in elaborating his neo-Hegelian reading, is attempting to indicate the extreme

degree to which Levinas’s work seemingly operates as a trap. This trap is the lure of

reading Levinas’s discourse as if it were inherently speculative when it is not; the lure

of treating it as if it were merely reducible to a particularly Hegelian form of

discourse, when it is radically otherwise. Speculative discourse, Lyotard argues, is a

discourse of the same, i.e. a discourse consisting of immanent self-relation, and as

such is opposed to other terms designating ‘other kinds of discourse, such as those of

the poet, the politician, the moralist, the pedagogue, and others.’36 The speculative, for

Lyotard, is a kind of discourse placed under a unifying law of truth - we judge it as

true or false. Speculative discourse functions in a reductive way, seeking to reduce

everything other to the same. The problem particular to the speculative project is to

determine which sub-genre of discourse describes the criteria of truth or falsity that is

valid for all the different discourses of the denotative genre. However, Lyotard claims

that Levinas’s ethical discourse signifies a non-denotative genre, and as such it

perpetually resists speculative reductive envelopment. For Lyotard, the logic of

Levinas’s discourse is not explicitly governed by the mere truth or falsity associated

with the realm of denotative statements. It attempts to signify otherwise. ‘The passage

from the ethical phrase to the phrase of knowledge’, he writes in The Differend, ‘is

done only at the price of forgetting the former.’37

For Lyotard within Levinas’s work the non-denotative genres of discourse appear to

be reducible to two types; those that are placed under the rule of the just/unjust and

those governed by aesthetic value. Being deeply suspicious of the latter, Levinas

attempts to place the ‘deontic’ genre at the very heart of philosophical discourse,

which does not simply consist in describing rules determining the truth or falsity of 36 Ibid. p.281 37 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 111

17

statements, but with those that determine their ethical sense. The value of Lyotard’s

brief commentary on Levinas ultimately resides in his subtle recognition that the well-

formed expressions that concern Levinas do not need to be well-formed in the terms

required by propositional logic. In their ‘deep structure’, regardless of their surface

forms, properly Levinasian statements are powerful ethical imperatives. If ethics

becomes the unique concern of philosophical discourse, it is then in the position of

having to comment not on descriptions (denotative statements) but on prescriptions.

Indeed, the ‘glory’ of Levinas’s thought for Lyotard resides in its ability to liberate the

criterion of validity of ‘orders’, that is, the criterion of their justice, from any sense of

justification by truth functions. Its strength lies in its ability to undermine the

reductive mechanisms of Hegelianism and to establish a notion of ethics outside of, or

otherwise than, denotative discourse, and which is actually able to provide the

profoundly ethical sense or orientation for subsequent denotative discourse. Hegelian

speculative philosophy serves only to reduce the non-denotative to the merely

denotative, thereby eradicating any of its primordial ethical sense. Levinas’s absolute

other occurs without the need for the type of knowledge given through denotative

discourse, and as such it obliges me to act without telling me how to act. The face of

the other actually manifests and reveals this obligation because it carries the

possibility of subsequent ‘expression’, what could be actually said to be my

responsibility. In Totality and Infinity Levinas writes:

‘In language we have recognised teaching. Teaching is a way for truth to be produced

such that it is not my work, such that I could not derive it from my own interiority …

In effect, the being who speaks to me and to whom I respond or whom I interrogate

does not offer himself to me, does not give himself so that I could assume this

manifestation, measure it by my own interiority, and receive it as comes from

myself.’38

The face of the other obliges the self (the same, interiority, economy), in its self-

sufficiency, to open onto possibilities that it could simply never derive from itself.

The other truly befalls the self and is a genuine revelation of difference. For this

38 E. Levinas, Ibid. p.295

18

reason any attempt to totalise the prescriptive manifestation of the other into an

immanent form of denotative discourse, what Levinas terms the ‘unrelating relation’39

between ‘separated’ interlocutors, must acknowledge how it inevitably marks a ‘new

scission in being, since he would still tell this total to someone.’40 Immanent

philosophy as such can never claim the last word, it can never ultimately totalise,

since the other, the interlocutor it attempts to encompass ‘has already escaped it’41,

interrupts it, disrupts it and displaces it. The other refuses to be totally thematised qua

Hegel since for Levinas the other always manifests and ‘expresses itself’ on its own

terms42:

‘In contradistinction to plastic manifestation or disclosure, which manifests something

as something, and in which the disclosed renounces its originality, its hitherto

unpublished existence, in expression the manifestation and the manifested coincide;

the manifested attends its own manifestation and hence remains exterior to every

image one would retain of it, presents itself by stating his name, which permits

evoking him, even though he remains the source of his own presence…This

presentation of the exterior being nowise referred to in our world is what we have

called the face. And we have described the relation with the face that presents itself in

speech as desire - goodness and justice.’43

Ethical obligation to the other, Lyotard argues, occurs within Levinas’s work as the

very condition for all subsequent discourse, and as such, ethics, goodness and justice

are absolutely prior to all knowledge, reason and politics.

The primary obligation must take the form of a fundamental estrangement of the self,

of a ‘scandal’ for the self, in the face of the other. The self is not truly obligated to the

other unless one comes to see that the other is absolutely other. This can only happen

when the receiving self is no longer a self, when the self is estranged, made a stranger

to itself, scandalised, profoundly shocked or a ‘hostage’ to the other. All knowledge is

posterior to obligation; ethics is becomes my obligation, my responsibility, my being

39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. p.296 43 Ibid.

19

‘hostage’ for-the-other before I am able to think and act. In order to circumvent the

lure of merely identifying Levinas’s work with speculative philosophy, Lyotard

attempts to identify the Levinasian sense of absolute obligation with a phrase that puts

its addressee in the position of always already being obliged, that is, of being solely

the addressee of the phrase and not the addressor of a reaction.44 The addressee is

always already obliged and has always already responded, prior to any response he is

able to make. Such a response prior to response is the very structure of subjectivity for

Levinas; the subject is always already obliged; me voici, ‘Here I am’. For Lyotard

such an obligation and response must take place through the feelings of the addressee,

(indeed Levinas will, in Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, describe the

structure of obligation and response as the persistence of ‘cellular irritability’ or the

pain of the unique elected subject gnawing away at itself or being too tight inside its

own skin). If it took place through thought rather than sensibility there would be a

phrase which would involve an ‘I’ posited outside the peculiar logic and structure of

obligation and response, an utterly closed self-sufficient ‘I’ that would be able to say

‘I think that I must…’ or ‘I think that I am here…’.

For Lyotard, the non-denotative ethical genre, as expressed in Levinas’s work,

consists in a set of prescriptive phrases that immediately put me, or my self, in a

position of absolute obligation with regard to the other, and as having already

responded to that obligation, without explanation and independent of one’s

subsequent thoughts or actions. For Lyotard, as he will go on to explore in his 1983

work The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, this ethical genre is incommensurable with

all other genres. To render its non-denotative aspect as denotative in the attempt to

make it commensurable with all other genres is the enduring mistake of the neo-

Hegelian commentators who refuse to read it or recognise it as being anything other

than speculative discourse.

44 In The Differend Lyotard reiterates and clarifies this point – ‘The violence of the revelation is in the ego’s expulsion from the addressor instance, from which it managed its work of enjoyment, power, and cognition. It is the scandal of an I displaced onto the you instance. The I turned you tries to repossess itself through the understanding of what dispossess it. Another phrase is formed, in which the I returns in the addressor’s situation, in order to legitimate or to reject it – it doesn’t matter which – the scandal of the other’s phrase and of its own dispossession. This new phrase is always possible, like an inevitable temptation. But it cannot annul the event, it can only tame and master it, thereby disregarding the transcendence of the other.’ (p. 110-11)

20

In his later reflections on ethical phrases Lyotard produces what is arguably one of the

most powerful speculations on how we might begin to understand the type of ethical

writing presented by Levinas. These speculations go straight to the very heart of

Levinas’s problematic efforts to signify and bear witness to a deep logic of affective

obligation via proximity to the other, and to the associated problems of commentary

by the other that is his reader:

‘Instead of being the description of an experience, conducted by an I in quest of self-

knowledge, perhaps Levinas’s writing is the testimony of the fracture, of the opening

onto that other who in the reader sends a request to Levinas, of a responsibility before

that messenger who is the reader. It is not a question of writing ‘in the second person’,

under the regimen of the you, but of writing to the other, under his or her law.

Levinas’s text would be the confiding of a hostage. It is in him that the liability would

be assumed...It is what is witness to the fracturing of the I, to its aptitude for hearing a

call...As soon, however, as one begins to speak about what one reads, as soon as one

compares what one has read with what one has requested or thought one requested,

doesn’t the reader, become commentator, inevitably turn into the persecutor of the

work? From the sole fact that one thinks one knows what one requested and supposes

the works’ responsibility to be commensurable to the nature of one’s request, is it not

necessary that one then place oneself, while commentating, back under the regimen of

descriptive, under the temptation of knowledge? How can a commentary not be a

persecution of what is commented upon?’45

The very act of commentary by a reader presupposes that the reader knows in some

sense what the work is actually about, or supposes that they know it to be knowable

and translatable into a set of descriptive propositions. The request put to Levinas’s

text by such a commentator has the effect of closing down the enigmatic and

revelatory quality of Levinas’s writing through its insistence upon there being a

content or sense to the work that can be translated into a knowable set of denotative

propositions. In The Differend Lyotard concludes by stating an understanding and

writing down Levinas’s ethical phrase:

45 Lyotard, Ibid. P. 114

21

‘The you is never the I, and the I is never the you. In its wording, the ethical phrase is

annihilated. Its secret, the asymmetry of the pronouns, is divulged and neutralised in

their being autonymically grasped in the third person.’46

Through such neutralisation one is led inevitably to a place of deep uncertainty and

scepticism. Has Levinas really ever been understood, can he ever be said to be

understood when the performativity of his ethical phrase is translated into the realm of

denotative knowledge. In this moment of profound uncertainty and incomprehension,

which comes from the realisation of a certain loss within the denotative, are we not

stripped of the illusion of sovereignty over the ethical phrase? Are we not forced to

confront the absence of knowledge in such moments? In such moments do we not

catch just the slightest glimpse of the otherwise than knowing, the moment prior to

intellection that is the welcoming of the stranger, a moment of ecstatic and anarchic

openness that precedes (and exceeds) any commentary upon the nature of that other

and their request. Perhaps it is this immediacy of welcome that is glimpsed within and

from out of the exhaustion of knowledge. Perhaps it is here that the immediate and

diachronous ethical prescription occurs. In acceding to Levinas’s text I respond,

indeed have responded, to a perfomatively inscribed prescriptive obligation that has

always already happened; in commentating upon it perhaps I simply betray and

reduce it.

46 Ibid. P. 114

22

Bibliography

J Derrida, L’ecriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967) in English as Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes by A Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)

J Derrida, “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici” in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas Paris: Editions Jean-Michel Place, 1980) in English as ‘At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am’, translated by R. Berezdivin in R Bernasconi & S Critchley (eds.), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11-48

GWF Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes (Hrsg. Hoffmeister, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952) in English Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by AV Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by JN Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) E Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Livre de Poche; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971, first edition 1961) in English as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)

E Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978, 1st edition 1974) in English as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998)

J-F Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Éditions Klincksieck, 1971)

J-F Lyotard, ‘Logique de Levinas’ in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, translated as

‘Levinas’ Logic’ in The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwells, 1989)

JF Lyotard, Le Differend, in English as The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, translated

by G.V.D. Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)