The possible offense of contradicting the despair of those who were going to their death.

Introduction While there is a substantial secondary literature devoted to Emmanuel Levinass major philosophical works, it seems to me that the interviews, of which there are many, have a special importance, which has been largely overlooked. This goes against the thinking of many professional philosophers, who look with suspicion on interviews as being only peripheral, and perhaps unworthy of building a case on or arguing from, precisely because they do not constitute part of the solitary reflective thought of a philosopher who has chosen to pass on a corpus of work representing his or her definitive contribution. And although I certainly do not want to suggest that interviews, often rather brief, should be granted the status the other works, I do think that there is urgency in the message Levinas wanted to communicate through dialogue. I give particular importance to those relatively late interviews (in the 1980s), because they seem to me to express something like an attempt to epitomize a last word: the essential, if you like, of a lifetime of reflection. There is a doctrine that emerges, with slight variations, but always returning to the same themes. Let me add, on a personal note, that I have found the interviews particularly useful in making sure I have gotten a specific aspect of Levinass thinking right, because the same ideas are taken up again and again, each time with a slightly different orientation and wording. This is particularly the case when the interviews fall within a time period of, say, five years. In such cases it is sometimes even possible to see the emergence of a new concept and its subsequent metamorphoses. And the cumulative effect of studying them is to be left with a series of Abschattungen, the relief of a presumptive mental landscape, a conceptual reality in the round. I will make extensive use of three such interviews: an interview with France Guwy (1985) and two others the following year, with Franois Poiri, and with Anne-Catherine Benchelah (1986). I translated the Guwy interview very recently. It is available in a large volume of essays edited by Hent de Vries, titled Religion Beyond a Concept, published by Fordham University Press earlier this year.1 The interview itself, titled What No One Else Can Do in My Place, (pp. 297-310), was originally named L'asymtrie du visage (The Asymmetry of the Face). The second interview is much longer, and is available in English, translated by Jill Robbins et al. in the collection of interviews with Emmanuel Levinas titled Is it Righteous to Be?, published by Stanford University Press in 2001.2 The third interview is titled The Proximity of the Other, and appears in English (my translation) as Chapter 6 of Alterity and Transcendence.3 These interviews all took place about ten years before the philosophers death in 1995. I will refer to them in the present context as the Guwy interview, the Poiri interview, and the Benchelah interview. The main themes I will draw from them are (1) a critique of hope for a reward, (2) the implications of ethical asymmetry, and (3) what is left when the hope for a reward is removed from faith. Perhaps at the conclusion of these three investigations we will be better situated to interpret with certainty what is at stake in the rather puzzling expression, quoted from the Guwy interview, which constitutes the theme of my talk: The possible offense of contradicting the despair of those who were going to their death. Once I have exhausted the resources of these interviews I will turn my attention to Otherwise than Being (1974), in which the groundwork for all the views in the interviews is contained. Finally, in a postscript, I will make some remarks about the nature of that last major philosophical publication. 1. A critique of hope (for a reward) I quote, from the Guwy interview (RBC 303). Of the three theological virtuesfaith, hope, and loveI wonder whether hope does not compromise faith. Hope is too involved in reward. Jewish messianism, too, is involved in that hope. Some might be surprised that the three theological virtues come up at all in this interview. After all, they occur not in the Jewish Bible but in the New Testament (1 Corinthians, 13:13). I mention this in passing, but do not consider it a major point. Levinas was quite conversant with Christian theology, and had many positive interchanges in international conferences in both France and Switzerland with Christian theologians. The fact that he makes a specific reference to Jewish messianism in the context of hope, or rewardthe hope for a rewardshows that he is speaking beyond the specificity of any particular religious tradition. Hope is too involved in reward. Hope then is clearly to be understood as the expectation of a reward for good actions, or (in Judaism) for mitzvot. And the last sentence of the interview makes it clear that he does not draw as a logical conclusion that the expectation of a reward might detract from the goodness of a good deed, but suggests an insight that is extra-philosophical. I quote: it is not impossible

but that is beyond philosophythat those who dont count on any reward are worthy of a reward. Why does Levinas insist that it is beyond philosophy? It may be beyond any sort of logical deduction, but it is at least not inconsistent with his own philosophical teaching. The preceding sentence states: But I often think that in analyses the emphasis must be placed on disinterestedness in interhuman relations. Now, those who have some familiarity with Levinass works (which I rejoice in knowing is the case here), know the frequency and importance of the term dis-interestedness, usually hyphenated in order to bring out the etymology dis-inter-and esse, to make the point that what is here called virtue is in fact, ontologically speaking, a movement that is expressed as early as 1935, with the publication of Levinass first published personal expression of his philosophy, On Escape, (De lvasion)a movement that will be expressed as otherwise than being, beyond essence, or a movement toward the outside. What we know about the Levinasian notion of goodness or kindness corroborates the idea of disinterestedness: not a systematic or premeditated disinterestedness, but the rejection of calculation in such matters, to the point of rejecting the application of a sociological rule of action, or a theory of good acts. The Benchelah interview quotes from Vassily Grossmans Life and Destiny at considerable length. Levinas marvels at Grossmans description of this goodness, or this kindness (bont) that escapes all ideology and (I quote Grossman) could be described as a goodness without thought. Then Levinas elaborates: Why without thought? Because it is a goodness outside all systems, all religions, all social organizations. Gratuitous, that goodness is eternal. Now back to Grossman: It is beautiful and powerless, like the dew. This description of goodness places Levinas in opposition to what he sometimes refers to as moralism ( le moralisme). He states categorically in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (p. 11): No one is good voluntarily It [i.e., the good] has chosen me before I have chosen it. That statement should probably be taken together with that other rebarbative truth: the other is referred to as the undesirable par excellence (Guwy, RBC 307); undesirable, that is, from the point of view of the order of nature and the conatus essendi, in that the other limits me, hampers or obstructs my plans. Therefore it seems vain to attempt to construct within Levinass thought any sort of utilitarian, or deontological, or psychological theory of goodness, even of the existential variety such as may be decanted from the work of Martin Buber. I believe it would be more accurate to speak of a phenomenology of ethics in Levinas. What distinguishes it from a non-phenomenological description of ethics is that it incorporates the aspect of should into the description, thus blending together those modalities of appearing that Husserl carefully distinguished as discrete Einstellungen. But leaving issues of categorization aside, there seems to me to be an analogy between Levinass suggestion that those who do not count on a reward are worthy of one and the following cases of intuitive recognition through disguise. (1) The myth of Philemon and Baucis, a poor old couple who welcome strangers to their cottage, not knowing they are the gods Zeus and Hermes in disguise, (2) the biblical story of Abraham and Sarah extending hospitality to three weary travelers, angels in disguise, (3) Matthew 25:35 et seq., the parable of God appearing in the guise of the poor and needy, a parable cited by Levinas. Levinass phenomenological version of this is God commanding/beseeching me via the face ( le visage) of the other/stranger. These situations of disguise seem to be devised specifically to illustrate a purity of faith unalloyed with any hope for reward. The point in all three examples is not to show a surprising ability to recognize the true identity beneath the disguise or misleading exterior, but rather to suggest something like an ethical clairvoyance. Levinas says of the example from Matthew that it is not to be interpreted in a metaphorical sense, but in a Eucharistic one. The stranger is a purer vehicle for ethical action than the neighbor, because the there is no suggestion of an eventual quid pro quo. The face of the stranger, the foreignness of the foreigner, are an aspect of alterity itself. But to return to the issue of the relationship between hope and faith. I quote again from the Guwy interview, this time including three sentences that introduce the quoted passage at the beginning of this section. God after Auschwitz no longer has any justification. If there is still a faith, it is one without theodicy, without our being able to justify God. I do not say it easily, but it is an ethics without hope, which is not made to be preached. Of the three theological virtues faith, hope and loveI wonder whether hope does not compromise faith. Hope is too involved in reward. Jewish messianism, too, is involved in that hope. (RBC 302-3).There are three observations to be made about Levinass distinction between hope and faith. First, the notion of hope as compromising faith implies that faith without hope might be a purer form of faith. Reality is, after all, the set of all true beliefs, so that belief seems to have as its field of reference precisely that world of being that Levinas does not wish to equate with all meaning, or all truth. That was the burden of the opening pages of his God and Philosophy (1975). Secondly, but also with a tendril in the prior thought, hope is too involved in reward. Too involved, because the notion of just reward brings the transcendence of the act back to the selfish self, cancelling the movement beyond self by a movement with the opposite vector, reestablishing the original state of repose. Such a calculus is appropriate in third-party distributive and retributive justice, but not in the relation to the other, to which Levinas would like to supply a philosophical form through his innovation of asymmetry in my relation to the other. Third, whatever this dissociation of hope and faith may offer by way of qualitative improvement of the latter, it has been precipitated by something outside the intrinsic meaning of the terms hope and faithnamely the Holocaust, which has rendered theodicies untenable. An oblique reference to the Holocaust is not difficult to discern in the following quote from the Benchelah interview. Are we entering a moment

in history in which the good must be loved without promises? Perhaps it is the end of all preaching. May we not be on the eve of a new form of faith, a faith without triumph, as if the only irrefutable value were saintliness, a time when the only right to a reward would be not to expect one? The first and last manifestation of God would be to be without promises. (Alterity and Transcendence, 109). A faith, then, without triumph. Not perhaps without affinities to those thoughts expressed by William Butler Yeats, in To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing. And I quote: Bred to a harder thing/Than Triumph, turn away/And like a laughing string/Whereon mad fingers play/Amid a place of stone,/Be secret and exult,/Because of all things known/That is most difficult. But now it is time to bring together certain strands of the preceding, and to add a complication. Levinas says in all three of the interviews I have been drawing from that this is not a faith that can be preached. An ethics without hope, which is not made to be preached (Guwy, 302); Perhaps it is the end of all preaching (Benchelah, 109), the beginning of faith is not at all the promise, and faith is not at all something that one can preach, because it is difficult to preachthat is to say, to propose to the othersomething without promise. But one can preach it to oneself, one can ask it of oneself: I am not saying that I always manage to consent to it. It is necessary to recall what I was saying to you about symmetry and dissymmetry: to tolerate Auschwitz without denying God, it is perhaps permissible to ask that of oneself. But perhaps also: there would even be an offense in contradicting the despair of those who were going to their death. One can wonder whether one is permitted to speak even to oneself of a religion without promises (Poiri, 78). We have in the text itself a moment in which Levinass thought reaches forward, beyond its own previously established premises. Levinas has just explained, by the application of his asymmetry principle as it applies to the I-You situation, why it is an offense to ask of the other what I can only ask of myself, and why I can require of myself a faith without promises. But then, a new idea, going further in the same direction. Il est peut-tre permis Perhaps it is permittedto require it of oneself. Out of this perhaps a new idea is about to emerge, which seems to transcend the principle of asymmetry. Mais peut-tre est-ce encore But perhaps it is something else (I hear an unspoken autre chose, introducing a second hypothesis, not in addition to, but replacing the former one.) Il y aurait par l mme there would be in so doing (i.e., in requiring of oneself a faith without promises) une offense de contradire au dsespoir de ceux qui allait leur mort. An offense in contradicting the despair of those who were going to their death. Why this repentir, this second thought? I understand it as a condemnation of the abandonment of the dying other. I look to the piece From the One to the Other: Transcendence in Time (1983) to help myself here. It is included in Entre-Nous, in English, p. 148). The face is an order to me signified, not to remain indifferent to that death, not to let the other die alone. That is to say, to be answerable for the life of the other, or else risk becoming the accomplice of that death. It is the order not to leave the other alone in his death-bound solitude ( Entre-Nous, 146) that is the possible offense. A faith without promises is a faith that cannot be disappointed, having already discounted, by abstaining from hope, any potentially unfavorable outcome. It has an element of the Stoic teaching, isolating me from what I cannot control, thus minimizing my suffering, and rescuing me from the fate of the faithful who are not protected by this philosophical shield. All this leads to Levinas reversing his earlier statement, or at least casting serious doubt on it. He concludes his thought on this topic in the Poiri interview with the following words. On peut se demander si mme soi mme on peut se permettre de dire cela : une religion sans promesse. One may even wonder whether it is permissible to say that to oneself: a religion without promises. Here we enter that I-You world in which there is no limit to my responsibility, in which the other is always to be placed above and before me, and in which there is but one other: the incomparable you. For although Levinass philosophy has clearly distinguished the world in which the third person enters as well, that is to say, the real world, from the one in which there is only you and me, philosophy in a general sense must, it seems, reject the notion of an I-You realm. This is because the statements philosophy makes must be able to be assessed precisely by their truth-value in the third personal realm as well. Levinas shows admirably how it is possible to derive the notion of equality, of the straight line, from that of justice, which is an ethical concept. The I-You realm is not that of justice, however, but of love, or compassionof raamim, a word derived from reem, meaning womb. The I-You is probably the womb of humanity. But philosophy, whose language is Greek, that is to say, an attempt at least at universality, is preeminently a language that can speak to all. Universality is a trade-off: warmth for light. I borrow this metaphor from Levinas himself, who responded to a question from Roger Burggraeve in 1975 about the difference between his philosophical and his Judeo-Talmudic texts as follows. The difference is in the manner. What is conveyed in the Jewish writings by warmth must be conveyed in philosophy by light (Burggraeve, Emmanuel Levinas Et La Socialit De LArgent [Peeters, 1997], 98). I have suggested that the I-You realm (a term I use for the sake of convenience only, although it tends to evoke the work of Buber more vividly than that of Levinas) is a realm in which a strictly philosophical approach is difficult, and asserted (after Levinas) that it needs the completion of the third person or third party to rejoin the real world. But it is now time to take a more systematic look at that world in which there are only the two of us. To do so, we can best organize our thoughts around a concept that Levinas used specifically to give philosophical expression to the dynamics

of this inherently hostile environment for philosophyasymmetry. 2. Asymmetry The centerpiece of ethical thought is justice. The ideal of justice from its earliest expression in the laws of talion (whence retaliation) was based on reciprocity and an underlying equality. Such equality of rights, or equality before the law, has been the motor of socio-political development in the Western World. It implies symmetry in interhuman relations. By God! exclaims Walt Whitman in 1881, I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms (Song of Myself 24). I recall a conversation in which my philosophy teacher Fred Olafson said, in expressing his reservations about my enthusiastic support of Levinass analyses: Im an equality man myself. The idea of a fundamental asymmetry in human relations was clearly not a congenial one. Perhaps it was his skepticism in this regard that encouraged me to delve further into the matter. How could Levinas, who wrote so convincingly of the importance of the rights of man not also be an equality man? The first mention of asymmetry in Levinas occurs near the end of an early work, Existence and Existents, first published in 1947. Although there are important differences to be noted, this first version of asymmetry heralds the one that appears in all three of the interviews we have been considering. It bears an obvious and important affinity, by the way, with that curvature of intersubjective space that inflects distance into elevation (TI 291). This early use of the term comes up as Levinas contrasts the Heideggerian notion of the we, or Miteinander, in which the collectivity is together side-by-side rather than facing one another, to his own I-You realm, which is the originary one. I quote: It is the fearful face-to-face situation of a relationship without intermediary, without mediation. Here the interpersonal situation is not of itself the indifferent and reciprocal relationship of two interchangeable terms. The Other as other is not only an alter ego. He is what I am not: he is the weak one whereas I am the strong one; he is the poor one, the widow and the orphan. There is no greater hypocrisy than the one voiced in the expression: Charity begins at home. Or yet again, the Other is the stranger, the enemy and the powerful one. What is essential is that he has these qualities by virtue of his very alterity. Intersubjective space is essentially asymmetrical (EAE 98, trans. modified). Thus far, this asymmetry presents no particular aspect differentiating it from later uses of the concept, though it is worth noting that the biblical expression the widow and the orphan indicates a non-philosophical inspiration. But as the passage continues, the notion of Eros is introduced, and the passage ends with: Asymmetrical intersubjectivity is the locus of transcendence in which the subject, while preserving its structure qua subject, has the possibility of not inevitably returning to itself, the possibility of being fecund and (to anticipate what we shall examine later) having a son (EAE 100). Levinas went so far as to think of paternity as a philosophical category in a work published less than a year prior to Existence and Existents, a short work titled Time and the Other. We cannot pursue this topic here, but must be content with noting that while the motif is an important one in Totality and Infinity, in which the themes of Eros, fecundity, filiality and fraternity are developed quite extensively, they do not, to my knowledge, reappear in the last major work, Otherwise than Being (1974). Levinas explains in 1982 (the interview Philosophy, Justice and Love, included in Entre-Nous): I used to think that otherness began with the feminine. That is, in fact, a very strange otherness: woman is neither the contradictory nor the opposite of man, nor like other differences (EN 113). The asymmetry of I-You intersubjectivity expresses Levinass critique of the reciprocity of the I-You relation in Martin Buber. In the Benchelah interview, Levinas states his reason for his objection as follows. The other whom I address is he not initially the one with whom I stand in the relationship one has with one who is weaker? For example, I am generous toward the other without that generosity being immediately claimed as reciprocal. Although Buber is one of the first thinkers to put the accent on an I-You relation in conjunction with an I-That, this concept of reciprocity bothered me, because the moment one is generous in hopes of reciprocity, that relation no longer involves generosity but the commercial relation, the exchange of good behavior(AAT 100-101). But the description of the I-You world becomes more compelling, and in a sense less livable, as the vocabulary moves in the direction of obsession, besiegement, and the hostage. My responsibility for the other is the principle of my individuality. In what is possibly the most frequent quote in Levinas, the philosopher adopts the language of the novelist Dostoyevsky: We are all guilty of everything and toward everyone, and I more than all the others (RBC 304). What comes into the picture to relieve this almost unbearable burden is the third party. The third is of course the other of the other, all those to whom we refer in the third person. If the I-You realm is under the aegis of mercy and love, the third person world is the world of justice. And while mercy tempers justice, justice limits my infinite, my unreasonable responsibility for the other. From the point of view of genesis, it is clear that in Levinass view the I-You world is originary. Hence what motivates justice, what gives the effort to be fair its purpose and meaning, is love. But how can love be implemented when it goes beyond the binary relation of I-You? Only by setting up institutions and laws to regulate strife between third parties. (Such regulation was not necessary between me and my other, since I was always in the wrong, even though I may have committed no wrongdoing.) But now, by the grace of God and by ricochet, so to speak, I do have some rights, and can take shelter in the law. Although these two realms as I have been calling them, were differentiated (by me, but

also by Levinas) for purposes of analysis, they never truly existed apart from one another. Nevertheless I am tempted to put Levinass realms to further use. From a socio-historical point of view, I believe that religious institutions present certain characteristics that can be better grasped if we consider them as extensions of the I-You realm. This would help us to make sense out of the odd situation of ethical practices within religious groups. While they are in a sense the institutionalizing of the source of ethics, they must at times be corrected, and their ethical practices regulated, by a system of laws related to the principle of justice that is more reliable outside such institutions, just as third-party or objective justice must limit and correct the exorbitant world of the I-You realm in the Levinasian analysis. The preceding exposition of asymmetrical intersubjectivity in Levinas was necessary in order to make clear the impossibility of preaching to the other. The other is all that I am not. Our status could not be more different. But not only is this difference an absolute obstacle to my taking on the role of requiring anything of the other, or of preaching: the content of what I could preach in a post-Holocaust world involves that faith without promises which it is difficult to preach because it is without hope. It is clear from the context in which this without hope appears that the phrase should be construed specifically as without hope of a reward. But the promises in the Bible of rewards for good behavior seem to constitute a considerable part of faith in both Judaism and Christianity. What is left? 3. What is left when hope for a reward is removed from faith First, in tracing the way in which God appears to man, or comes to mind, Levinas finds that it is not through God that we arrive at goodness, but rather through goodness that God comes to mind. What seems to me essential, he says in the Guwy interview (RWC 308), is that man can move toward God starting out from His goodness, instead of moving toward goodness starting out from God. The fact that I am in goodness is more important than a goodness that simply comes to take its place among the recommendations of a dogmatics. This primacy of goodness/kindness over theology is reinforced by Guwy, who paraphrases Levinas. The only humanity that is worthy of the consolation of religion and the messianic promises is a humanity that can do without them (Guwy 309). Thus we are brought back to the notion of goodness preceding God, and of the purity of a faith that is disinterestedexpecting nothing in return. From an ontological point of view, this disengagement of hope from faith purifies the latter because hope (or at least hope of the kind we are considering here, i.e., hope for a reward) is enmeshed in being. But what if the reward is not envisioned as a reward in this world (of being) but in an afterlife? Let us consider the structure of the notion of reward. The reward is necessarily subsequent to the act worthy of reward, just as wages are normally meted out after the services are provided. But while the temporal lapse between the two may be quite long, as in the case of a promise of rewards in a promised afterlife, the structure remains the same, and is not essentially different than that of the delayed gratification involved in amassing capital for future use, as Max Weber demonstrated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. One could argue that the workers belief that he or she will receive a salary at the end of the week or month is based on such a probable faith in the continuity of an existing state of being into the very near future that it can hardly qualify as faith at all, whereas the belief in an afterlife transcends everyday experience to such a degree that it truly does constitute faith. But the fact remains that the quid pro quo structure remains unchanged by the temporal (or a-temporal?) magnitudes involved. Thus we arrive at a puzzling conclusion. This purified faith (disambiguated from tangible hope) is based on the premise of not believing in an afterlife in which the books would at last be balanced. Good actions would then be truly gratuitous acts, in the sense of unrecompensed ones. However useful the awarding of sweets may be in pedagogy, in a religion of adults, as Levinas terms Judaism, such motivation must eventually be dispensed with. It is not so much a question of what is left. It is rather that everything has been slightly altered. See in particular the last paragraph of Otherwise than Being, and its allusion to the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes . . . The original les arrire-mondes is the standard French translation of Nietzsches Hinterwelten, confirming that the reference is indeed to the death of God announced by that philosopher. That paragraph summarizes what has been altered: the substitution of the hostage discovers the trace, the unpronounceable inscription, of what, always and already past, always he, does not enter into any present, to which are no longer suited the nouns designating beings, or the verbs in which their essence resounds, but that which, as a pronoun, marks with its seal all that a noun can convey (OB 185). The trace is the trace of transcendence, in which the Other appears. And we have already seen the role of the face of the Other in Levinass philosophy, and noted that questions addressed to God are not answered, but referred to the face of the Other. The return to ethics is a return as if to the source, but in the company of philosophys legitimate son, skepticism. Legitimate to the point that Levinas finds in skepticism the secret of diachronythat absolutely necessary aspect of a new sort of truth, which goes beyond the requirement obtaining within being: synchrony, the simultaneity of truth. What exactly does Levinas mean when he takes skepticism as the model of his new modality of expression? He means that skepticism makes positive use of the very principle it refutes in order to refute it. Its paradigmatic form is There is

no truth, a proposition it presents as true. The moments of the spinning of this or analogous paradoxes cannot coexist in a world in which meaning and being overlap or coincide without remainder. Consider note five of Chapter One of Otherwise than Being: The meanings that go beyond formal logic show themselves in formal logic, if only by the precise indication of the sense in which they break with formal logic. The indication is the more precise to the extent that this reference is conceived with a more rigorous logic. The myth of the subordination of all thought to the comprehension of being is probably due to the revealing function of coherence, whose law-like character formal logic sets forth, and in which the divergence between meaning and being is measured (OB 187, my emphasis). Thus skepticism, the motor of the Enlightenment and bugaboo of institutionalized, traditional faith, becomes Levinass ally, in some respects. More precisely, it is not skepticism itself, but what Levinas takes to be the principle of its workings, namely diachrony. Diachrony, the denial of the theoretically possible correlation of all times in a possible presence, features a past that was never present, and justifies the repentir, the unsaying of the said, both of which remain without one cancelling the other out, in a way that is reminiscent of the retention of conflicting opinions in the Talmud. What Levinas is seeking/creating in the pre-original, the an-archic, the proto-ethical milieu of Otherwise than Being, is clearly prior to the bifurcation in Western philosophy of the is and the ought. If one of the two can be thought of as having priority in Levinas, it would doubtless be the ought; but ethics as we know it does not really constitute the milieu of the pre-originary that Levinas struggles to express, and out of which he will draw both ethics and ontology. The interviews are an invaluable source for us to see what Levinas is getting at. Having gotten our bearings from those less formal texts, we can return to what I consider to be Levinass most profound and challenging work, Otherwise than Being; for I have come to believe that without having explored this work it is not possible to understand fully why it may be an offense to contradict the despair of those who died in the Holocaust, even silently, to oneself, by espousing a revised theodicy. To achieve that understanding we must begin by recalling that in the trace of the death of a certain god there appeared the face of the Other. God does not answer our questions but refers us to the face of the Other. But that face is not the physiognomy of the physical face. It plays a decisive role in Totality and Infinity, and a less prominent one in Otherwise than Being. The latter work abounds in terms of a more abstract nature. When the face is discussed in Otherwise than Being, its problematic status as non-phenomenon is thematized. As Levinas explains to Philippe Nemo in the 1983 interview Ethics and Infinity, I do not know whether one can speak of a phenomenology of the face, since phenomenology describes what appears (EAI, 85). Perhaps Levinas felt that he had sufficiently developed that concept in the earlier work, or perhaps he felt that his philosophical use of the term was taken too literally. This last hypothesis I make based on a remark made by Levinas to me in the course of conversation that took place in June of 1991, in which he remarked that he did not like the cover of Entre-Nous because it bore the depiction of a face. In any case, the terms used to describe the Other in Otherwise than Being are less susceptible to such misinterpretation, being more abstract, or at least less visualizable, than the vocabulary of Totality and Infinity, and perhaps more distanced from phenomenology. Unless we are to include the collapse of phenomenality in phenomenology. The face has now become a non-phenomenon because it is less than a phenomenon (OB 88). It is by this further, more metaphysical description that Otherwise than Being uncovers new ground, or goes further than Totality and Infinity. The motif of unfounded guilt, for example, is pursued, through a discussion of the significance of the Book of Job. Jobs error, shared with his friends the false comforters, was in thinking he must have done something wrong (that he has forgotten) to have brought his suffering upon himself. It is as if he assumes he had been there at the beginning of the world. He is the subjectivity of a subject come late into a world not issued from his projects (OB 122). At this level, the proximity to the Other takes on such proportions that the opinions or maxims under which one operates are secondary to a simple accompanying of the Other. The phrase to contradict the despair of the death-bound Other moves us into the world exposed in Otherwise than Being, a world anterior to freedom and hence anterior to the realm of ethics as it has been traditionally elaboratedas responsibility based on freedom. The death of a certain god, the god of promises, has caused me to revise if not abandon my theodicy, but the appearance of the face of the Other imposes responsibilities that go even beyond what they would have been during the reign of the god of promises. It is therefore my conclusion that it is not my failure to continue to believe in the promises, but the added responsibility that I have for the Other, that makes it a dereliction of responsibility to separate myself from him or her. Postscript We have taken a philosophical nose-dive from the platform of an initially puzzling utterance in the Poiri interview, specifically from the somewhat catachrestic phrase to contradict despair. This led us eventually into the pre-thetic world evoked and even somehow described by Levinas in Otherwise than Being. That world is so novel, philosophically, that the first healthy philosophical impulse is to attack it. But can an attack on a philosophy understood in the Levinasian sense, i.e. a task of betrayal whose success would be an indiscretion toward the ineffable (OB 7,

translation modified)be successfully launched? So many of the tenets of Western philosophy have been put into question by it that without taking them into account we would seem to be merely holding our ears and shouting back. At the other extreme, there is the risk of passively entering a world of concepts so foreign to us as to elicit no questions, let alone prolongations in our personal research. While the translation of Totality and Infinity presented some challenges to the translator, Al Lingis produced a philosophically reliable and accurate English version. He has also given us what may be the best than can be done with a far more arduous text, his Otherwise than Being. But the latter work, which explicitly takes up the problem of expression of the otherwise than being, is, in addition to being a philosophical work, a literary one. I quote: Otherwise than being. At issue is the enunciation of the explosion of a destiny that reigns within being, the fragments and modalities of whichdespite their diversitybelong together, that is, do not escape the same order, do not escape Order, as if the threads, cut through by the Fates were to reattach themselves to one another (OB 8). I have modified Lingiss translation considerably, to give an example of the dynamism of that figurative language, a dramatization of abstractions that do not lie flat and well-behaved on the page as in philosophical texts in general. It is not a question of embellishment but of architectonics. The sentence structure is not elaborately fitted into subordinate clauses. As in a vision, the elements of what is seen are presented boldly, often as sentence fragments, or simple agglomerations of substantives whose interrelations are implied but not fixed, and left for the reader as a standing invitation for complicity: elements to be brought into living connectivity within his or her understanding. The example given above of the textuality of the weave in Levinass last great work contains a reference to the Parca, or Goddess of Fate, one of three, whose function it was to mete out the lives of mortals. They are the same as the Moira, the Greek equivalents, upon whom Parmenides comments (Fragment 8, 34-41): For there neither is nor shall be anything outside of being, since Moira bound it to be whole and immovable. Later in Otherwise than Being, (105), in a passage devoted to the concept of recurrence, Levinas describes the drawing out of essence as coming out like a colorless thread for the distaff of the Parques, [that is, the Fates] a break in the same, the clarity in which consciousness plays. As he goes on to speak in the same paragraph of recurrence as disclosure of being to itself, he returns to the metaphor of the spinning of the threads of fate. To present the knot of ipseity in the straight thread of essence according to the model of the intentionality of the for-itself, or as the openness of reflection upon itself, is to posit a new ipseity behind the ipseity one would like to reduce. It is not my intent here to pursue the philosophical ramifications of this mise en abyme of consciousness, but merely to show that this work itself will stand, a literary/philosophical pice de rsistance, by the way in which it is wroughtthe way its meanings are inscribed within its form. Among the French authors who have recognized and drawn attention to the specific stylistic qualities of Otherwise than Being are Maurice Blanchot (in The Writing of Disaster, 1988, trans. 1995 by Ann Smock), Guy Petitdemange (Philosophie et violence, in Autrement que savoir, 1988), and the late Jacques Rolland,(Parcours de lautrement, 2000). It is well known that in the field of translation there are two distinct stages. The first one is to naturalize what is foreign, in order that the relatively unknown foreign author may win acceptance in the readership of the new linguistic milieu. Later, as the author becomes better known, a greater degree of violence is permitted against the language of arrival, since readers, now convinced in advance of the likely relevancy of the work, are willing to move to the edges of what is allowable in their native tongue, or even a bit beyond, fairly confident as they are of an ultimately worthwhile result. I am not a prophet, but I sense that this particular work of Levinass will invite many future translations. I say this on the basis of the amount of commentary, both in Europe and in this country, which has served to elucidate, like a series of elaborate footnotes to a translation yet to come of this still deeply enigmatic work, whose implications are just now perhaps coming into view. No translation can replace the original, of course, but a series of approximations does the work of teasing out ever more of the latency of what it has taught us to call the Said, inducing it to rejoin that Saying of which it is itself a felicitous betrayal. Many opinions, much discussion, flash off the flint of a literary/philosophical form that is there once and for all. The work of the establishment of the French text is for the most part, as far as I know, completed. The legacy of Levinasian thought is securely consigned to texts that have, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, almost their whole lives before them. This by virtue of the renewal that is interpretation, one form of whichgenerally a rather conservative form, and rightly sois translation. And how many lines of Otherwise than Being cry out, like the Book of books itself: Interpret me! Michael B. Smith North American Levinas Society Seattle University, September 2008

1 Referred to hereafter in parentheses in the text as RBC. 2 Referred to in parentheses in the text as IRB. 3 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (Columbia University Press: New York, 1999). Referred to in parentheses in the text as AAT.