Abstract
As we look back today to that obscure but for none of us insignificant period of (post) structuralism, it would seem that none of the slogans which at that time were intended to sweeten its message can still claim any credibility. Far from being dead and buried, like some purloined letter, the‘author’seems to have been with us all along, barely hidden by the folds of those quotations marks from where he was laughing behind our backs. And far from taking over the place of the subject,‘structure’has, so to speak, only displaced it: much to our surprise, the‘eccentric’subject is still a subject — it is precisely its dependence on something which it did not itself institute or constitute that has prevented it from dying a peaceful death. Forcing the subject to abdicate from the centre did not entail the subject’s destruction2. Quite to the contrary, this decentring has managed to revitalize the subject, and the unexpected result of its rejuvenation is simply that its accusers are now themselves accused: relieved of the heavy burden of a centre where it stood constantly accused of falling short in its every endeavor, the subject seems to be thoroughly enjoying its new freedom to linger wherever it pleases, as long as it is not in the centre, and to exploit its elusiveness to harass whoever came in its place with new, apparently insoluble questions and problems. Granted, discourse functions without a meaning-giving subject underlying all knowledge; but then what could it mean that I know?
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Notes
This is an ironical reference to my earlier analysis of Foucault’s use of quotation marks (cf. chapter 2 nl2). On Heidegger’s quotation marks, see: J. Derrida, De l’esprit: Heidegger et la question, Paris, Galilée, 1987.
Cf. J. Lacan’s intervention in the discussion following Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’: “structuralism or not, it seems to me it is nowhere a question, in the field vaguely determined by that label, of the negation of the subject. It is a question of the dependence of the subject, which is quite different…” (Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie, 1969(64), p. 104, my transi).
An expression which comes up regularly in Lyotard’s more recent work (cf. the references in my: ‘Dissensus Communis: How to Remain Silent after Lyotard’, in Ph. VAN Haute — P. Birmingham (eds.), Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics, Kampen (The Netherlands), Kok Pharos, 1995, pp. 7-30. The considerations about’ silence’ that follow are intended as a provisional development of the problematic presented there).
J.-Fr. Lyotard, “Grundlagenkrise”, Neue Hefte für Philosophie, 1986, pp. 1-33.
Cf. the title ofthe penultimate chapter of his controversial The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Cambridge, Polity, 1987: “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centred Reason”, and chapter 3 above.
I am citing the brochure for the symposium, “Interpretaties van subjectiviteit” (= “Interpretations of Subjectivity”), where this chapter was first presented (University of Amsterdam, April 1995).
Levinas calls the word “God” the “first word” in, among other places, ‘Language and Proximity’, in CPP, pp. 125-126.
On this distinction, cf. Dieter Henrich’s brilliant piece: ‘Ethik der Autonomie’, in ID., Selbstverhältnisse, Stuttgart, Philip Reclam Jun., 1982, p. 14 and passim.
J.-Fr. Lyotard, “Levinas’s Logic”, in ID., The Lyotard Reader (ed. A. Benjamin), Oxford, Blackwell, 1989, p. 297.
For a perspicuous overview, cf. D. Henrich, l.c.
J. Habermas, ‘Morality and Ethical Life’, in Id., Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, Polity, 1990, p. 197 and cf. p. 66.
J.-Fr. Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester U.P., 1988, nr. 176 (I will henceforth refer to this work as “D”, followed by the number of the paragraph being cited). Habermas is not mentioned in this passage, but he is clearly the target.
J. Habermas, o.c., pp. 197-8. Habermas sees here a possibility of working Kant’s Faktum der Vernunft into communicative theory — clearly this implies a distancing from Kant that does not contradict the symmetry noted here, but qualifies it to a significant extent.
Cf. the title of Levinas’s collection Humanisme de Vautre homme (=Humanism of the Other Man), s.l., Fata Morgana, 1972; cf. also OB 128 (ordinary humanism is “not human enough”). For his part, Lyotard discusses humanism in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, Cambridge, Polity, 1991.
Besides the work just mentioned, cf. especially Lectures d’enfance, Paris, Galilée, 1991 (specifically the exordium on the idea of “infancy”), and Moralités postmodernes, Paris, Galilée, 1993.
J.-Fr. Lyotard, “The Grip”, in I(upD., Political Writings, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 148-58. Lyotard refers here to the etymological origin of “mancipium”: “Manceps is the person who takes hold, in the sense of possession or appropriation. And mancipium refers to this gesture of taking hold … we are held by the grasp of others since childhood, yet our childhood does not cease to exercise its mancipium even when we imagine ourselves to be emancipated … we are born before we are born to ourselves. And thus we are born of others, but also born to others … subjected to their mancipium which they themselves do not comprehend. For they are themselves children…” (pp. 148-49 partim).
In considering suspension as the actual absence of a de iure possible ‘yes’ or ‘no’, Habermas is taking the sting out of finitude: see my remarks in the introduction to this volume and my attempt to explore some of the consequences of this Habermasian position for multiculturalism in my ‘Transcultural Vibrations’, Ethical Perspectives, 1994(1:2), pp. 89-100, esp. 94-95.
J.-Fr. Lyotard, ‘Levinas’s Logic’, l.c., p. 307.
The characterization of Levinas’s ethics as ‘postmodern’, introduced by Marc-Alain Ouaknin in his rather facile Méditations Erotiques. Essai sur Emmanuel Levinas, (Paris, Balland, 1992) and taken over by Z. Bauman in his Postmodern Ethics (Oxford, Blackwell, 1995, e.g. p. 84) is, I believe, profoundly misleading. Surely one is doing an injustice by painting black perhaps the only cow that stands out in the night of our present time.
Levinas would have no problem with this qualification — cf. for instance TI 210: “In positing the relation with the Other as ethical, one surmounts a difficulty that would be inevitable if, contrary to Descartes, philosophy started from a cogito that would posit itself absolutely independently of the Other. For the Cartesian cogito is discovered, at the end of the Third Meditation, to be supported on the certitude of the divine existence qua infinite, by relation to which the finitude of the cogito, or the doubt, is posited and conceivable. This finitude could not be determined without recourse to the infinite, as is the case in the moderns …” Cf. also Derrida: “But by the force of a movement proper to Levinas, he accepts this extreme ‘modern’ audacity only to redirect it toward an infinitism that this audacity itself must suppose, according to himself; and the form of this infinitism is often quite classical, pre-Kantian rather than Hegelian” (Writing and Difference, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, p. 104.).
Ph. Van Haute, “‘Fatal Attraction’: Jean Laplanche on Sexuality, Subjectivity and Singularity in the Work of Sigmund Freud”, Radical Philosophy, 1995 (nr. 73), pp. 5-12. Laplanche’s idea of the “enigmatic signifier” seems to me to give support to the ontological base structure that Lyotard is implying in the quote I gave in note 16. Although Levinas never takes account of such a structure (for reasons that will become clear in this chapter and that we will further explore in the third part of this volume), Levinas would surely wonder whether every enigma refers back to the sexual/erotic enigma described by Van Haute, and if there isn’t an asymmetry between that register and the register of the Infinite which provokes metaphysical Desire.
In this and the following sentence, I refer to a number of ideas from Lacan’s important seventh seminar: L’thique de la psychanalyse (1959–1960) (Paris, Seuil, 1986, esp. p. 361 — “tragique” — and passim). What Lacan means by “ne pas céder sur son désir”is explained, although with other (not insignificant) accents, in: R. Bernet, “Le sujet devant la loi (Lacan et Kant)”, and P. Moyaert, “Sur la sublimation chez Lacan: Quelques remarques”, both in S.G. Lofts & P. Moyaert (eds.), La pensée de Jacques Lacan: Questions historiques, Problèmes théoriques, Louvain/Paris, Peeters, 1994. In this seminar Lacan repeatedly uses words such as graviter or tourner autour de (“gravitate around”) to indicate our (decentred) position with respect to das Ding (o.c., pp. 72, 77…).
For this expression, see Jacob Rogozinski’s excellent “Vers une éthique du différend”, in H. Kunneman & H. De Vries (eds.), Enlightenments: Encounters between Critical Theory and Contemporary French Thought, Kampen (The Netherlands), Kok Pharos, 1993, pp. 92-119, esp. p. 102.
For a lucid presentation of the way this link is severed in Lacan and Freud: P. Moyaert, Ethiek en sublimatie: Over de ethiek van de psychoanalyse van Jacques Lacan. Nijmegen, SUN, 1993, pp. 92-119.
TI 198: “The Other is the sole being I can wish to kill”.
E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Némo, (transl. R.A. Cohen), Pittsburgh, Duquesne U.P., 1985, p. 121.
E. Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, s.l., Stanford U.P., 1998, p. 164.
Ibid., p. 165 (“detestable I”).
‘The Trace of the Other’, in M.C. Taylor (ed.), Deconstrucüon in Context: Literature and Philosophy’, Chicago/London, The University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 353.
Of God Who Comes to Mind, o.c., p. 165.
E. Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Paris, Vrin, 1992, p. 249.
The Trace of the Other’, l.c., p. 353.
J.-P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, New York, Philosophical Library, s.d., esp. Part 3: “Being-for-Others”.
E. Levinas, ‘Transcendence and Height’, in A. Peperzak, S. Critchley, R. Bernasconi (eds.), Emmanuel Levinas. Basic Philosophical Writings, Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana U.P., 1996, p. 29.
E. Levinas,’ signature’, in Id., Difficile Liberté: Essais sur le judaïsme, Paris, Albin Michel, 19631, p. 326. (This version of “Signature” is not included in DF).
E. Levinas, ‘Un Dieu Homme?’, in ID., Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à l’autre, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1991, p. 73.
Ibid.
On the distinction between an ethical and a real resistance: E. Levinas, ‘Freedom and Command’, in CPP, pp. 15-23; and TI e.g. 199; OB 198n2.
Here I have altered the English translation which reads “paralyzed” for “transi dans sa nudité” (Humanisme de l’autre homme, o.c., p. 52). In preferring “frozen” to “paralyzed”, I am following Adriaan Peperzak in his annotated Dutch translation of Humanisme (Humanisme van de andere mens, Kampen/Kapellen, Kok Agora/DNB-Pelckmans, 1990, p. 78, which paraphrases “transi” as “shivering with cold”). The change is not unimportant given the point I shall be making.
‘Transcendence and Height’, l.c., p. 18.
Note that, according to Levinas, Christianity can for essential reasons only make an incomplete contribution to this universality: “If Europe had been spiritually uprooted by Christianity, as Simone Weil complains, the evil would not be great. And it is not always the idylls that have been destroyed by Europe’s penetration of the world … but is Europe’s misfortune (malheur) not due to the fact that Chnstianity did not sufficiently uproot it?” (DF 137/195, transl. corr.). Though I hope to have made it clear from which standpoint I am myself arguing — but isn’t it a surprising alliance? — in light of this quote (which is in no sense a hapax) one can only wonder at the success with which Levinas’s ethics has been assimilated in Christian circles (for two noteworthy exceptions: U. Dhondt, ‘Ethics, History, Religion: The Limits of the Philosophy of Levinas’, in P.J.M. Van Tongeren, et al. (eds.), Eros and Eris: Contributions to a Hermeneutical Phenomenology. Liber Amicorum for Adriaan Peperzak, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1992, pp. 273-80 and I. Verhack, ‘Over de moralisering van het “verlangen naar de Oneindige” bij Levinas’ (= On the moralization of the ‘Desire for the Infinite’ in Levinas), Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1999 (61:2), pp. 235-69).
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Visker, R. (1999). Dis-Possessed How to Remain Silent ‘After’ Levinas. In: Truth and Singularity. Phaenomenologica, vol 155. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4467-4_6
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