The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution more

The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 1 The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal I. The Ambiguous Face: Language or Immediacy; History or Perception? Shouldn’t we distinguish between a logical or transcendental priority and a chronological priority? One always can and undoubtedly always must ….Philosophical discourse has as its rule to discover its rule: its a priori is what it has at stake. It is a matter of formulating this rule, which can only be done at the end. J.-F. Lyotard, The Differend, 60-611 La pensée de l’origine—c’est la tradition….La vérité sur l’origine—la relation avec l’origine = accueil d’un enseignement. Vérité n’est pas ici adæquatio rei ac intellectus—mais tradition. Vérité = simultanéité. Se débarrasser de la vérité = dévoilement. Levinas, Carnets de Captivité. Notes philosophiques diverses, 1959 (frag. 76)2 The face is arguably the most important “concept” and “moment” for Levinas’s thought. It is both of these—both concept and pre-linguistic “moment”—and in that respect it engenders a tension throughout his work between an original mode of time, the interruption,3 and a set of discursive strategies that “dramatize” situations, from living in the world, creating a dwelling, to facing the other. Between Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being, or: Beyond Essence (1974),4 the presentation of situations unfolds between the mise en scène of preeminently sensuous concepts and their deconstruction. At the heart of the 1961 work was the face, as expression and voice— 1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, tr. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; French original 1983). 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de Captivité, suivi de écrits sur la captivité et notes philosophiques diverses, Vol. I, eds. Jean-Luc Marion, Rudolph Calin, Catherine Chalier, (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 2009). “The thinking of the origin—is tradition….The truth on the origin—the relationship with the origin = welcoming of a teaching. Truth is not here adæquatio rei ac intellectus—but tradition. Truth = simultaneity. To rid ourselves of truth as disclosure, unveiling.” 3 In 1959, before publishing Totality and Infinity, Levinas was exploring the meanings of simultaneity as the time, or temporality, for the interruption by the other: an ‘I’ would thus be simultaneously ‘conscious’ and affectively wrenched out of the complacency of its intentional consciousness. See the Carnets de captivité, Op. cit., p. 409ff. 4 The two great works of Levinas, respectively: Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999; French original 1961); Otherwise than Being, or: Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998; French original 1974). Hereafter TI and OB in the text. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 2 teaching. The 1974 essay presents a less phenomenalist, less illuminated encounter, called “substitution.” The germinal tension in philosophy, between description as experience purified or appropriately bracketed, and description as a conceptual or linguistic exercise finds an unparalleled response in Levinas’s thought. Not that it disappears; yet the tension between a philosophy that thematizes the “present” as though the fragile time of its writing did not exist, and a logic that insists upon the priority of a lived time—of speaking and acting—over every conceptual a priori, is certainly present in Levinas’s work, as in recent existentialism and phenomenology. Yet Levinas deploys a vast effort to dismantle the tension and to develop a first philosophy in and as pre-philosophical experience—both of “being” as an indeterminate field, and of the Other as a face that addresses me. The encounter with a face is inevitably personal; with a seminal pathos whose sources lie beyond criteria of verification—perhaps even those of demonstrative plausibility. If Levinas works outside demonstrative plausibility, it is because his task does not reduce to the norms of logical and transcendental categories. A dual stance outside and inside of philosophical plausibility is, I think, inevitable when the question that guides us is: Can we hope for anything from philosophy after the Shoah and the stultifying repetitions of genocide—hope for anything beyond the resistance of critique, satirization or local pragmatic abstentions? The question “Can we hope…” motivates Levinas’s work. It depends on the dubious “now” whose enactment sets it (the “now”) between use and mention in Levinas’s later work. And it depends on the phenomenological flow of time, unaware of its own form, which integrates interruptions, moments of passion, into a regularity that makes them ultimately “thinkable.” Finally, Levinas’s “Can we hope…” depends on a deliberate interpretative and rhetorical strategy, overlain on his phenomenological descriptions, which stylistically overflows the predication that creates the conviction of a correspondence (or adequation) between consciousness and its object—i.e., philosophical “truth.” And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to the one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 3 elaborating at this very moment. This reference to an interlocutor permanently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematizing and enveloping all things….In the writing the saying does indeed become a pure said, a simultaneousness of the saying and of its conditions. A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being written and printed….They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said” (OB, 171). The interpretive descriptions and sustained claim to an immediate now, which is both conceptual and performed, depend on an encounter whose own ambiguity lies in its figural and objective qualities: the face moves between a stability of meaning (what it “looks like”) and an activity (speaking to, or gazing at us) that elicits passion. This double valence—really, this multivalence—allows Levinas to draw out of psychological experience a philosophical enseignement about simultaneity: first philosophy may be pure logic or metaphysics, under the principles of identity and causality; but first philosophy is also—paradoxically and necessarily—the lived fact of intersubjectivity—as generative performance and perception: “institution.” This does not mean dualism; it comes to light as a specific kind of recollection. To the fastidious reader, this dynamic simultaneity of perception and performance, pulls Levinas’s thought between philosophies of naming and predication, and phenomenologies of perception. The tension between logical firstness and experiential primordiality may be undecidable, but it impels Levinas—who finds himself, as phenomenology also has done recently—to venture a wager about an intersubjective, but prelinguistic, pre-conscious a priori.5 In 1961, the metaphoric site of the a priori is the face, as force and as an abyss. By 1974, the entire concern with a site is shifted toward openness and embodied passions that recur or “iterate,” and provoke us to speech or action. It is not necessary that these passions be “caused” by an other outside me; they have something of a memory without objects or scenarios. It is their intersubjective quality that counts, however, such that in or through these passions the Other matters more, occupies “me” more integrally, than do my 5 To resolve the tension that asks: Which really is first?–linguistic meaning, sentences, or narrativity, explaining and grounding our concepts? –or a broadly understood perceptual experience apt to root human language in human bodies and intersubjectivity? Levinas steers a course between phenomenology and phrases, phenomenology and history; finally, phenomenology and writing itself. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 4 interests. The argument that this intersubjective openness—beyond visual perception and extending to the inside-outside structure of the epidermis itself—is neither mechanically caused, nor an affair of faculties, deepens the ambiguity of Levinas’s wager. It is in abiding with his dual ambiguity, not without philosophical absurdity, that Levinas’s enterprise is just—a self-conscious wager against the grey comedy of philosophical failures—all those failures attaching to the lifelessness of formalism, or exhausting themselves in hyper-complexity, or setting a pallid hope in the underdetermination of discursive events to come. There is a philosophical search for origins in Levinas. It takes the form of a quest for the originary experiential conditions of embodied subjective life (1961), and it moves toward a meditation on sensibility as pre-conscious meaning-in-formation (1974).6 To repeat, the later development of an interpretative phenomenology draws sense from what is often relegated to psychology: Levinas traces the preconscious dynamics of embodied sensibility, “sensation” (pains, pleasures) as sensibility broadly understood—as entwined with and flowing into emotions like anguish, remorse and joy. Before these are conscious “objects” for us, before they are understood, they are active. This subtle genealogy of vulnerability, as the continuous blending of sensibility-affectivity, describes conditions under which human language comes to be, as words offered to someone, as address and unpremeditated performance. No doubt, affect is a variable state, a tone or mood, the result of a number of internal and external factors, generally difficult to sort out according to identifiable causes. And, no doubt, affect cannot be reduced to sensations like pleasure or pain, any more than affect stands separately from these. Yet affects are active in us, multiply engendered and self-modifying. Something feels them above all, and it—so far as “it” is a stable entity—undergoes and endures them. Call this it “me” without all the social and intellectual prostheses of an “I” identifying itself across its profiles and activities, and we find a self as if negotiating affects and sensations as they arise, carry on, or alter (in) us. Multiple processes, some of which resemble floods, while others erupt like haltings or blows, affects characterize our embodiment. They also point to the complexity of memory: do we remember a strong passion? When, precisely, and as what—as tied to an 6 Respectively, in Totality and Infinity, and then in Otherwise than Being. see note 4. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 5 object? And what is this remembered object—something recognized, something that points-toward another lost object, a screen-like thing? It is to these questions that Levinas returns in his 1974 work, to argue for the legitimacy of speaking of meaning that is essentially pre-linguistic and that facilitates the expression of language as communication. Even in this later work, the enigma that the human face persists, as if indeterminate objects like expressions somehow motivated affects that we recognize as they recur—and notably, as what we never master. It is temping to see in this depth archaeology a departure from Levinas’s phenomenology of world, dwelling and exteriority, as developed during the 1950s. The 1974 exploration of “proximity,” the caress, and the flesh shifts his look to a metaphoric depth dimension, which the 1960s had prepared. Otherwise than Being7 works through the other pole of the philosophical ambiguity, making it an amphibology, a twodirectional indication. Thus, language and conceptuality remain the sole reality with and through which we think. A certain nominalism cannot be refuted. Phrases or discourse are the realities that, we insist, bespeak immediacy, and they are more than mediations, they present by forging emergent things, concept-events. Yet, despite the naïveté of their posits and their “logics” of development, psychologies repeat a difficult counter-lesson; viz., that contemporary with linguistic meanings are occurrences, woven through and overlain with affects, which never fully integrate experience as its clear-cut attributes or qualities. The subject of consciousness and intentions lives from forces and processes that it endures as itself,—as the pathos of itself, precisely; as self-affection.8 Related to what we call drives—as well as desires—affect-sensations, affect-memories and passional associations have no single identifiable origin (outside of pyschoanalytic reconstructions), though in a logic of embodied a prioris they stand as primordial. Primary, yet repetitive: the framework or structure of these complexes is that of recurrence. They belong as much to our infantile development as to our everyday life “now.” They color experiences like a tonal wash—this, even when the transparency of an experience ought to be uncomplicated. Affective memories cast into question the 7 See Otherwise than Being, Chapter II “Intentionality and Sensing,” pp. 21-59; also Chapter III “Sensibility and Proximity,” esp. pp. 75-97. 8 The term comes from Michel Henry, see, among others, his Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, tr. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993; French original, Généalogie de la psychanalyse: le commencement perdu (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1985). Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 6 univocal quality of an experience, and even the simple neutrality of focusing consciously on an object to situate it in time and space. Inhering in this way in the consciousness we call cognitive, which is both conceptual-linguistic and perceptually constructive (creating and recreating its world of intentional objects), certain affects, certain memories, above all, certain of their interfaces, resist being integrated into the steady flow of time-asconsciousness and of higher-level conscious acts of identification. Whatever concept we use to denote these interfaces, it is their way of abiding and recurring, and their problematic origin, that justifies referring to them as an “other-in-thesame,” where the “same” means “me,” me alive in a world. With the concept of the “other in the same” (OB, 69 n. 3), Levinas completed the deep pole of his ambiguity, wherein language and concepts are, in a limited way, preceded by a trace (an affective inscription) and a series of affects and sensations that occur when we are near other human beings. An affective trace may provoke action, a riposte, a flight. But we discover it—though never its origin per se—in responding daily to other humans. In those contexts (they are clearly con-texts, an emotionally jarring confluence of meaning-streams, both ours and something else that is becoming-ours), the other is not yet conceptually identified, autonomized as ob-jectum, before my gaze. Levinas will venture that before the other is conceptually situated, here, now, or as-X, something of his/her nearness affects. Is this immanence; is it a drive misunderstood? Does it belong to a real, recurrent memory, perhaps to some harm undergone by a victim? In that case, memories are not properties “of the past,” and now-moments are simultaneously cuts, discreet times, and temporally indeterminate clouds of affectivity, like Freud’s “reminiscences” at work in and as suffering bodies. All this sections the logic of unfolding unified time. Above all, it cuts across neat sedimentations of our pasts, even our accumulated histories and cultural conditions (OB, 70-72). For Levinas, there is something extra-linguistic that incites us to speech; it founds and disrupts the very production of sentences about things… even about itself. II. A History of the Face in Levinas En transformant la solitude en une forme de l’In-der-Welt-Sein Heidegger s’interdit de voir dans la solitude une insuffisance le néant du fait même de l’être et la voie du salut. Le mal de la solitude n’est pas le fait d’un être se trouvant mal The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 7 dans le monde; mais le mal du fait même de l’être—auquel on ne peut pas remédier par un être plus complet, mais par le salut. Salut n’est pas être. Levinas, Carnets de Captivité, septembre 1937 (Carnet 1)9 The face is the only “thing” that metaphorically breaks through existence. In this sense the face is the “salut” Levinas was thinking through in 1937, against Heidegger’s conception of world, da-sein, and eventing. But why “salvation”? Because the “life” proclaimed in the 1930s vitalisms conceived persons as sums of forces; the disclosure occurring in the movement of the ontological difference revealed, for Levinas, a philosophy of the neuter, nostalgic for Antiquity; and the new political thinking of interwar syndicalism lay claim to Marx applied now to the Nation, the Volk, rather than the proletariat-victim of economic injustice. “Salut n’est pas être,” because Being is either Heraclitian fire, change, or a voiceless summons to confrontation with oneself, as nothingness. Levinas’s early writings, from “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1933) to On Escape (1936), are polemically important.10 They recognize acutely how the vitalist, existentialist, and Nietzsche-inspired philosophies (the so-called philosophies that nourished “Hitler-ism”) seduced readers, saturated with neo-Kantian formalism in the interwar period, with the promise of reintegrating soul and body in an original living “situation” of culture and heritage. On Escape extended the intuition of “Reflections,” challenging the eigent-lichkeit or propri-ety of a mortal being, resolutely out-ahead-ofitself-toward-its-most-proper-possibility, its truth: mortality. The modest essay responded to Heidegger’s existential analytic with a rhetorical question: Would an immortal being seek to escape its condition? Ecstatic, or forward-casting temporal consciousness, the consciousness of the pro-ject, would not be more “authentic” to human existence than the lessons learned from anxieties of engulfment, suffocation, with the resulting the urge to 9 In transforming solitude into a form of Being in the world, Heidegger does not allow himself to see in solitude an insufficiency the nothingness that is the very fact of being and the path of salvation. The suffering of solitude is not the fact of a being finding itself unhappily in the world; but the suffering of the very fact of being—which one cannot remedy by a more complete being, but by salvation. Salvation is not being. 10 Levinas, On Escape/ De l’Évasion, tr. B. Bergo (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2003; French original, 1935, republished in 1985. For his “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” see Critical Inquiry 17 (1990): 62-71; first published in Esprit in 1934. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 8 wrest free of existence itself. The popular escapist literature of the time pointed to a sense in which “being”—as what-is, all-that-is—suffocates us in its waves of repetition (Baudelaire’s exhausting days passing into agonizing nights)11 and in its finiteness. We feel condemned to carry on as we age, as we grasp bitterly that hoping too comes to an end. The young Levinas multiplied regional phenomenologies of sensibility and passions, proposing a host of phenomenological “dramatizations”12 that defied distinctions between what is proper to us versus what is improper or deceived about our situation. Being, or existence, is all that is, to be sure, and it is finite—how could we assert the contrary? Yet being, lived by one who is there, gives rise to innumerable aspirations to transcendence. At its most banal, transcendence was escape-from, getting out of being through pleasure, participation, fantasy… Escape fails and in this failure, joy, anguish, even boredom reveal a fold: the tautology of existence, which—for Levinas as opposed to Heidegger—casts doubt on the revelatory, alethic potential of moods; even of light. The ultimate collapse of escape in pleasure; its dissolution in intoxication or sleep,13 does reveal the pain of solitude in being. No mere mode of In-der-Welt-Sein, solitude is not insufficiency but nothingness, or like unto nothing. By the 1940s, Levinas will argue, The world and knowledge are not events by which the upsurge of existence in an ego, which wills to be absolutely master of being, absolutely behind it, is blunted. The I draws back from its object and from itself, but this liberation from itself appears as an infinite task. The I always has one foot caught in its own existence. Outside, facing everything, it is inside itself, tied to itself. It is 11 12 Charles Baudelaire, Lettre à Narcisse Ancelle, Paris, le 30 juin 1845. The term is from Didier Franck, citing Levinas’s own “Preface to Totality and Infinity” (p. 28) in “Audelà de la phénoménologie” in Franck’s collection of essays, Dramatique des phénomènes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001). In his “Preface,” Levinas writes: “we come upon events that cannot be described as noeses aiming at noemata, nor as active interventions realizing projects…they are conjunctures in being for which perhaps the term ‘drama’ would be most suitable, in the sense that Nietzsche would like to use it when…he regrets that it has always been wrongly translated by action.” For Levinas, the encounter with a face, and those relations that resembled this encounter, in the life of a family, for instance, entails passivity and affect before action, because the action of responding is not voluntary. An ongoing, if largely undeclared reading of Nietzsche was ongoing with Levinas, I believe. 13 Compare this, from the 1930s, with Levinas’s remarks about intoxication and escape in OB, 87 n. 21 (in the English, the note is at p. 192): “It is perhaps by reference to this irremissibility [of responsibility] that the strange place of illusion, intoxication, artificial paradises can be understood. The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother [phantasized]. The possibility of going off measures the distance between dream and wakefulness. Dream and illusion are the play of a consciousness come out of obsession, touching the other without being assigned to him.” The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 9 forever bound to the existence that it has taken up. This impossibility for the ego not to be a self constitutes the underlying tragic element in the ego…riveted to its own being. (Existence and Existents, 88, trans. modified) In the midst of experiential monotony, punctuated by attempted evasions from self and existence, which we pursue now with resoluteness, now with mania, the event that carries with it a rich novelty, and the possibility of a less fatalistic relationship with our future, is the other person. In the 1940s, the Other is presented in relation to desire, fecundity, and the future of new generations. The difference that the Other enacts and incarnates, is sexuate difference. It is possible that Levinas always believed that ‘Being’ was dualistic and ontology, regional; existentially at least, it was distributed between the sexes who remained, ultimately and reciprocally, inscrutable yet enduringly attracted by forces neither external nor immanent. Nevertheless, by 1961, otherness, or alterity, opens to different operations and sites, with “feminine” otherness participating in the (bio-)logic of generations and an open future, the normativity of kinships, and the (socio-)logic of creating a site from which to elude the forces of nature. But Totality and Infinity pursues a more direct, even categoric, otherness—in the sense of impromptu non-erotic encounters—that becomes the focus of our intersubjective connectedness; this simply means that the spontaneity of speaking-to another, or of accounting for oneself and inviting an other to take a place or a thing, becomes the primary sense of Levinas’s seminal concept of responsibility. This non-sexuate otherness is embodied by the face. Responsibility is non-innate, non-inborn spontaneity. It is the heart of Totality and Infinity. Simultaneously an act and an affect, in Levinas’s sense “I” neither produce it willingly, nor is it the result of some causality exerted by an external force of existence. Non-voluntary and non-object forming, many argue that responsibility is the core of a Levinasian ethics (cf. OB, 94 n. 35, at p. 193). This may be right, if ethics refers to an ethos or the character and values of an acting subject. 14 Yet responsibility immediately 14 See, for example, Totality and Infinity, Op. cit., pp. 197 and 200: “the other absolutely other—the Other —does not limit the freedom of the same; calling it to responsibility, it founds it and justifies it. The relation with the other as face…is desire, teaching received, and the pacific opposition of discourse….The ‘resistance’ of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical. The first revelation of the other, presupposed in all the other relations with him, does not consist in grasping him in his negative resistance and in circumventing him…I do not struggle with a faceless god, but I respond to his expression, to his revelation….The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity…without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 10 unravels doctrines of virtues and deontologies, as it corresponds to an ideal or Idea of practical reason only insofar as it is narrated and systematized in a treatise, read and pondered post facto at the level of possible prescriptions. Enacted without premeditation, however, it is what comes to pass in-between, in a site neither mine nor the Other’s. Almost a correlation (though not one of H. Cohen’s three correlations), 15 it proceeds from the phenomenological suspension of object-construction and subjective-selfidentification, which are recursive or after the fact. Described as immediate encounter, it makes a claim for an immediate, recurring experience that has no identifiable source or psychic genealogy. For this reason, it stands apart from the concepts that would let us work it into the schemata of practical reason and its interests, or again into the calculation of well-being for sensuous subjects. Actually, Levinas calls the encounter with alterity “religion” (TI, 40), before he speaks of ethics;16 underscoring the interrelation and employing a contested etymology (“religio”). But the 1961 work, Totality and Infinity, was still concerned with working out what it is that, in our experience, provokes the search for transcendence, a “beyond” to the everyday, and the sense of goodness as enacted before we ever contemplate it purified of empirical elements. The search for an order of reasons—rather than a mechanical cause—for responsibility shifts the locus of phenomenological unveiling or seeing-in-light, alètheia, from world and site to the other person. In so doing, it argues for the intersubjective primacy both of human speech and the conception of the good. Similarly to Heidegger’s deformalization of logical time, integrated into interpretative phenomenology thanks to the latter’s reading of Paul’s expectant awaiting (kairos) and Kierkegaard’s anxiety prior to freedom and action, Levinas turned to existential sources to deformalizing communication and language. He found in the lived “connection” to the other person the existential source of the prophetic call to return to righteousness or justice. In other arousing my goodness.” 15 Levinas’s appraisals of the concept of correlation vary. In Totality and Infinity, he ventures, at one point: “Irreversibility [in the relationship between me and the other] does not only mean that the same goes unto the other differently than the other unto the same.…the radical separation between the same and the other means precisely that it is impossible to place oneself outside of the correlation between the same and the other so as to record the correspondence or the non-correspondence of this going with this return,” see p. 36. 16 Levinas writes, “We propose to call ‘religion’ the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality.” The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 11 words, Levinas found, in the prophetic voice, an early “religious” interpretation of the call of the other to one who undergoes it as a “me” (the prophet), and of “my” testimony to its embodied meaning.17 This is his initial intuition about the possibility of dismantling the edifice of logicism or conceptual positivism in the form of a plausible account of the lived conditions that gave rise to a certain writing—but, above all, to a certain voice. The intuition is, to be sure, inspired by Heidegger; but it seeks to go beyond him in a way that only a tradition for which “god” remains outside of institution and instantiation could do; simultaneity must denote transcendence and a law.18 While the call Levinas presents as exceeding the “capacities” of our sensibilityaffectivity receives the name “god,” it does so within a tradition. It could be argued that, by coming to call an experience of non-sense and overwhelming investiture “God,” one is stating a tautology. But here, as against Heidegger’s Pauline investigation,19 the name rejoins the Other as non-appearing appearance, as expression, within a Maimonidean “negative” theology. Practically understood, the summoning voice should be considered, simply, as the face. To the degree, then, that intersubjective connectedness, as spontaneous response, can be parsed into a “me” affected-by X, and an other that affects, we can say that the face arises at the intersection of Levinas’s genealogy of dialogue (or spoken address), and his phenomenology of the dispossession of the voluntary subject (responsibility will also flow into a more calculated call for justice as reparation, restitution, or doing better than equaling one’s part). 17 Epistemologically, both Heidegger and Levinas provide informal phenomenological genealogies of what have been interpreted, by their authors, as religious experiences: the awaiting the return of the Christ, and the witness of the prophet, calling on the community to abandon iniquity and embrace justice. Existentially, both philosophers understand Pauline time or prophetic witnessing (respectively) as modalities of an experience, indefinitely endured and repeated, of existence as anticipation and stretching-forward, and of interruption by something I cannot grasp, which calls me in a way nothing else can summon. 18 And this, perhaps even before it denotes two crossed fields of existence and responsibility, on the one hand, and flowing time-consciousness and interruption by an other, on the other hand. That is one possible meaning of Levinas’s emphasis on “tradition” in his Carnets (“La pensée de l’origine—c’est la tradition”). 19 See Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, tr. B. Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), Part II, Chapt. 2: “Levinas’s constant reduction of Heidegger’s thought to the tradition from which it diverges, like the assimilation of Being, its central term, to the mere being-ness, on which ontology focuses, finds its principal incarnation in the word by which Levinas ‘translates’ Heideggerian Being: essence, a word that likewise will allow Levinas to confuse Heidegger’s Being with its other,” p. 142. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 12 Imre Kertesz captured the spontaneity of responsibility flowing into justice in a moving moment in his Kaddish for an Unborn Child: However sick a joke this may sound, Auschwitz proved a fruitful enterprise, so…I will tell you a story, and then you explain it to me, if you can….lying on the wooden contraption that passed for my stretcher, I could not take my dogeyes off a man, or rather skeleton, who…was only ever referred to as “Teacher” and who had picked up my ration too, and then the entrainment, and of course, time after time, the roll call doesn’t tall, and a yelling and commotion and a kick, then I feel myself being snatched up and dumped in front of the next wagon, and it’s a long, long while since I saw either “Teacher” or my ration— that’s enough for you to picture the situation precisely…there was still a chance of staying alive. Except that with the ration gone this all at once looked extremely dubious, while on the other hand, and I clarified this cold-bloodedly to myself, my ration would precisely double “Teacher’s” chances—so much for my ration, I thought…Yet what should I see a few minutes later? Calling out and looking frantically all around, “Teacher” was staggering towards me, a single issue of cold rations in his hand, and when he glimpses me on the stretcher he quickly places it on my stomach; …it seems that astonishment must be written all over my face because he, although already scurrying back—if they don’t find him in his place they will simply beat him to death—he says, with clearly recognizable signs of indignation on his little face, already preparing for death, ‘You didn’t imagine for one moment?” So much for the story…although there’s no getting round the fact that “Teacher,” for example, did what he did in order that I should stay alive, to look at it purely from my viewpoint…”20 III. What, then, is a Face? 20 Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for an Unborn Child (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Hungarian original published 1990, pp. 41-42. Kertesz subsequently qualifies “Teacher’s” gesture as “freedom…primarily because ‘Teacher’ did not do what he ought to have done….what he ought to have done according to rational calculations of hunger, the survival instinct and madness, and the blood compact that the dominating power had entered into with hunger, the survival instinct and madness…he did something else…that no rationally minded person would expect from anybody” (p. 46). Clearly, Kertesz wants to connect human “freedom,” and beautifully so, to the exceptional act, which continues to see it from Kertesz’s perspective (because he forgets that he faced, “dog-eyed,” the dying man with the two rations). He sees fit, as if some doubt persisted in his own interpretation, to add that his wife responded that Teacher’s was “a natural and decent human gesture” (p. 47), to which he adds “these words upset me…all my emotions suddenly compacting, becoming almost uncomfortably immanent and confused.” Neither answer, per se, is the “right” one. The difficulty is attempting to grasp the exceptional gesture; finding a level of experience to which to attribute it. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 13 En partant de l’Holocauste, je pense à la mort de l’autre homme, je pense à l’autre homme…Je me suis demandé, vous le savez peut-être, ce que signifie le visage de l’autre homme. Levinas, “La philosophie et la mort”21 If, in regard to this sculpture [the famous “Cube”], we were able to slide so quickly from the objective claim that one of its [thirteen] faces is ‘blind’ against the ground, to the perhaps subjective metaphorization of a general value of blindedness [aveuglement], or even entombment, it is also because metaphorizing these values accompanied…every discourse produced by the work’s interpreters, and by the author himself….In one passage, in 1962, [Giacometti] evoked his perpetual difficulties in producing a sculpture that could give us the whole [le tout] of a head, for example… Georges Didi-Huberman, Le cube et le visage. Autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti22 In 1933, the year Levinas wrote his “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”—Alberto Giacometti’s public and private worlds collapsed simultaneously. Long obsessed with capturing faces in their concrete—and disturbing—materiality, he had produced a series of futuristic deformalized heads, each of which found its “face” progressively simplified and reduced to an indication of dense material movements. With the death of his father, however, his experiments with faces moved from traits inscribed in stone, to what was his ultimate gesture of mourning: the enigmatic Cube—one of the few works he allowed to be cast “permanently” in bronze—which was neither really cube, nor a surrealistic object, nor a constructivist exercise. Irregular, bombé, blemished, Giacometti fashioned twelve unequal facets with a small, inconspicuous thirteenth one, sunken into the ground. This “Cube” began to figure in many of his sketches. Faceless, it represented the most rarefied of his abstract heads. Yet its anti-geometrical irregularity beckoned, like so many changing expressions. Upon the face sunken into its ground, or grave, were scratched some childish traits that corresponded faintly to the lost other, his father. A synecdoche? Above all, it was the artist’s struggle adequately to render, to construct (and to destroy, in order to protect), in a multi-dimensional form, the human face—as event, memory, and as a fleeting but iterative presence. 21 In Levinas, Altérité et transcendance, Preface Pierre Hayat (Montpellier : Fata Morgana, 1995), p. 166 : “On the basis of the Holocaust, I think of the death of the other man; I think of the other man….I have asked myself, as you know perhaps, what the face of the other man signifies.” 22 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le cube et le visage. Autour d’une sculpture d’Alberto Giacometti (Paris: Éditions Macula, 1993), p. 13 (my translation). Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 14 It is not disingenuous to ask, What is a face? Superficially, the task of writing a face into a phenomenology of intersubjectivity does not readily bring to mind the struggle to translate affective memory into matter, whether plaster or bronze. But in both cases, it entails the movement between mourning (experienced as inadequate) and creation (of a sculpture, of descriptions that teach us to see faces differently). In these complex acts, the writing, as also the fashioning, must enact as directly as possible the absurdity of the effort. If phenomenology already steps beyond itself, so to speak, with Heidegger’s interpretation of Being, it very clearly does the same with the face, which is not so much an intentional object as a living performative, according to Levinas.23 And yet the disclosure of the face answers, with philosophical probity, the question, Why do we speak? with: To whom do we speak? Despite this, we still have a poor sense of what it is to see a face, so the (epistemic) risk of speaking of pre-noematic objects and pre-cognitive meaning, continues to elicit the skepticism that charges that we simply end up living (worse, believing) what we venture to say or write; as though a poetics had laid claim to the destiny of phenomenological inquiry. Levinas does not directly address the problem of logical versus practical a prioris in 1961. The face he describes is typified by certain expressions of dispossession. As a perspectival construction, or the perception of an alter ego, the face could be brought from the threshold of phenomenality into the clarity of an (ideally) whole “object.” Yet the argument for performative efficacy—i.e., we are impacted by it before we recognize the color of its eyes—is what carries the day. Given the wealth of modes and types of perceptions, Levinas can argue, plausibly, that we “see” the quality of nudity before seeing a statut civil (TI 66-67). As this quality, nudity, the face is both obscure and it breaks through (more) cognitive visual orders, with their horizons and objects intended and firmed up through the visibility of “profiles” [phenomenology speaks of Abschattungen]. However, the face is, itself, “breakable.” Eyes can be put out; an 23 Thus Totality and Infinity: “Ethics is the spiritual optics….The work of justice—the uprightness of the face to face—is necessary in order that the breach that leads to God be produced—and ‘vision’ here coincides with this work of justice. Hence metaphysics is enacted where the social relation is enacted…” p. 78; and thereafter, “inevitably across my idea of the Infinite the other faces me—hostile, friend, my master, my student. Reflection can, to be sure, become aware of this face to face, but the ‘unnatural’ position of reflection…involves a calling into question of oneself, a critical attitude which is itself produced in the face of the other and under his authority,” p. 81. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 15 intrusive face can be thrust aside. And it is an open question whether anything else can so terrify or accuse us that we want to torture or obliterate it. In that sense, murder is neither killing nor “mere” destruction, but a human affair— probably part of a vast region of refusals of the other, whose “evidence” might have inspired a more Manichean depiction of sensibility by Levinas. Yet with nudity comes a law, because this nudity or denuding requires no supplementary representation in its time, which is the affective “instant.” Thus, a normativity different from Sartre’s rustling behind me, which informs me of the defeat of my momentary contemplative sovereignty, arises in Levinas’s instant of “facing.” In 1961, the face is already a source-point of dialogue and, by extension, discourse. It gazes at us and speaks, as if inviting response (TI, 67). Of course, these “events” are imaginative reconstructions, and in that sense there is, always, an indirect aesthetic, or dramatization, in Levinas’s work—indeed, we should really speak of an aesthetic of enseignement or welcome (TI, 295). But can a teaching, identified with reception-of-teaching, and with tradition, be reconciled with the claim to experiential plausibility in the re-staging of an event supposed to shape us, broadly, with an intersubjective psycho-hylism or embodied, intersubjective “soul” (cf. OB, 191 n. 3)? I think what we can accept is that a face, at different times, so fills my field of perception that, in the space of an instant, it is me. That is, ontological claims about it as same or as other, prove undecidable. Moreover, its “power” or efficacy lies in that it, while other than I, is “me” in an instant, which thereby becomes an inaugural instant, the (recurring) moment of a sort of birth unto speaking-to… We are by now familiar with phenomenologies of original pre-philosophical experiences. The heart of the claim is that this moment—of substitution, not conjunction —is forged on the ambiguity at the heart of Husserl’s phenomenology of time (and) consciousness. In effect, if time flows in a regular fashion, independently of a fixed ground, and if time as consciousness, deploying an orderly flow and carrying along with its dense, moving “present,” elements retained and anticipated, each with a selfmodifying yet definite “temporal marker” (e.g., just-past, past for five minutes, one week past), then the force of time’s formal regularity is responsible for the unity of time as experienced conscious life. But what feeds this flow? Is it possible to account for what propels immanent “time” from moment to moment? Husserl asked. His response was Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 16 originary sensibility, upwelling within the body or coming in from without the body. In 1965, Levinas pondered the claim to the equi-primordiality, in the experience of inner “time,” of sensation as upwelling instants that enter consciousness as we become aware of them, and time as evenly flowing, neutral consciousness: formal “timeconsciousness.”24 In the years between 1965 and the publication of Otherwise than Being in 1974, Levinas would increasingly focus on the pre-intentional activity of sensibility “in me,” before it becomes awareness-of something, for (my) intentional, or cognitive consciousness. His figure of the “other-in-the-same” belongs firstly to the sensibility that erupts, only to flow ultimately into “intentional” emotions, like remorse, anxiety or joy. But the other-in-the-same, a somewhat immanent way to conceive the impact of alterity on an embodied being, precedes intentionality; it occurs even as it is on-the-way to full consciousness. In that respect, “substitution” should also be understood as the other-in-the-same (OB, 25), even as it is changing—through the structuring power of on-going time consciousness—into an identifiable sensation and thus into full consciousness. If it is fair to speak of full consciousness at all (e.g., when, or “full” for how long?), the metaphoric “moment” of substitution remains hard to pin down. It was attached earlier to the face, filling my field of vision on so many sensory “planes” that even as I saw the other, I “felt” that other through her/his expression. The face, then, would be coextensive with substitution, and it is one of the practical points of attachment for the latter as event. But the figure of substitution gains increasing autonomy in Levinas’s later work. This is important, because substitution, or “the one-for-the-other” can be reconstructed as having 24 See Levinas, “Intentionalité et sensation” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1967, 1982), pp. 143-162; esp. 160-61, where he urges: “‘One may imagine that one knows, when one does not know’—therein lies, according to the Sophist, the greatest incomprehension. Yet, men hold fast to it, stating acceptable and technically efficacious propositions in its regard. The aiming of the being [de l’être], absorbed in the Being [dans l’être] that it imagines it grasps, assures us a culture that functions in a satisfying fashion. Yet, ignoring its [own] ignorances this aiming is unconscious and irresponsible. Open to all interpretations and without defenses, it can be cheated [flouée]. Psychologism, whose critique served as the one-time cause for the birth of phenomenology, represents the prototype of this alienation: over logical thought the suspicion began to hover that its was accomplishing something altogether different from what it claimed to accomplish….Are we not duped by social and subconscious influences? Who is pulling the strings? Husserlian phenomenology seeks the source of all meaning by untangling the threads of the intentional interweave [l’enchevêtrement]….An original and neutral terrain is necessary, which is found, for Husserl, in the depths of intersubjectivity, where all meanings—that of interiority, exteriority, corporeity, spirituality, etc.—shines with their first light of sense…” (my translation and italics). Hereafter EDEHH. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 17 you in the place of me (OB, 99), which makes it the model, at a sensuous corporeal level, for the substitution that is linguistic: setting a “signifier” in the place of a supposed “referent.” There is not space here to interrogate this nascent “theory” of the conditions of enacted, embodied signification.25 But we have to admit that the sheer dynamism of signification—so far as it is setting an “ideality” (a word or a concept) in the “place” of some “thing”—appears pointless if it is held apart from intersubjective interconnectedness, desire and embodiment—and pointless gratuity affords us no explanatory advantages. Substitution moves in two directions. Starting from the onset of a face that I do not quite see as a proper object, substitution is like an affective “other-in-the-same.” Understood from the embodied perspective on sensation-coming-into-(intentional)consciousness, substitution may be described as “me” in formation, where the sensuous and affective coming together (“me” as cognitive consciousness) is, for a moment, “forthe-other”; not interested in identifying the other per se, but feeling-with that other. In each case, the face remains crucial as a paradox: it is massively visible, a hyper-visibility; it overwhelms. Yet this visibility is not firstly thetic; not theorein. We do not firstly see it as a collection of features likes eyes, nose and mouth. So Levinas will argue in his claim for expression as an intersubjective process engendering speech. How can he sustain such a claim? It is not unimportant, because the question of the reach of responsibility, as something so spontaneous that it appears reflexive, is at stake. How could we contest that, even if the incursion of the face is momentary and “merely” sensuous, even if affective saturation holds us in and as the Other, we do not instantaneously “see” its race, its sex? If these two “perceptions” occur close together, as well they may, a more vexing question comes to light. Since it is clear that, at some early “time” in our history, we learn to perceive a face as a face, how much of the expression we are supposed to see as the face of the other, is actually, necessarily, learned? What is the relationship between culture and history, even our personal history, and the phenomenology of immediate preintentional sensibility? 25 However, Didier Franck has done this beautifully in his L’un pour l’autre: Levinas et la signification (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007), to whom I am indebted for his analyses. See, for example, chapters 7 and 8: “Contact et proximité” and “Le retard de la conscience,” pp. 77-95. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 18 IV. The Face as Expression; Art as Expression: Supposing the Face were a Work of Art? It is not hard to imagine being duped by an existential desire—say, to conceive some quality of humanity that might resist—enduringly, if not heroically—being reduced to “animality” under less than human circumstances. There is not much in “history” or “actuality” to validate such resistance; especially if one attaches one’s existential desire to conceiving a “first philosophy.” Some receptions of Levinas argue that the claim for expression, in me as sensibility becoming-conscious, need not entail intersubjectivity. It need not “contain” the trace of a de facto human passage. The status of sensibility before it reaches consciousness belongs to those pre-conscious constructions that work with unknowable entities. Such work builds models or perhaps serves utopias. Would we not prefer to encounter another, often, with a welcoming response that erupts from us passively and even before we see their race, sex, ethnicity, age? Yet if there were such pure encounters, then how should we explain the comparable spontaneity of identification, that nearly reflexive, mimetic gesture that consists in making someone seen into a “like me,” and approaching him/her on precisely that basis? Psychological interrogations of substitution, assuming acts of identification and projection, might well supplement Levinas’s thought, but they rarely have the constructive power of his descriptions. Paradoxically, the phenomenological “how” proves constructive over a psychological “why”; at least, so far as the former does not confront the tasks of clinical epistemology. Nevertheless, the psychologist and the artist grasp the hierarchy of classifications that localize or simplify the other—to the point of caricature sometimes—as though in breaking through the perceptual system of objects-and-horizons, the face also carried with it homogeneous features pointing to a type, or something again that obtruded, intimating a comical or monstrous alterity. These do not call for science; on the contrary, political—and group-psychological—desires to posit essences beneath beings created anthropometries, criminal anthropologies, composite portraiture (Galton) evincing ethnic “natures” or “souls.” The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 19 Perceptual acts of classification rely on a dualism in sensibility, whereby expression is fixed as if it were a sign. Whether as æstheticization or as reduction, the perceptual double concerned Levinas as the contrary of living expression, rather than a process of projection. The sensible is the being, insofar as it resembles itself, insofar as, outside of its triumphal work of being, it casts a shadow, emits that obscure and elusive essence, that phantom essence which cannot be identified with the essence revealed in truth. There is not first an image—a neutralized vision of the object— which then differs from a sign or a symbol because of its resemblance with the original; the neutralization of position in an image is precisely this resemblance.26 A certain freezing of expression proceeds to the creation of an object that can be intended and made perceptually “adequate” in much the way that truth is defined as adæquatio rei et intellectus. This logic obscures the ambiguity of the face, though the loss is as predictable as it faithfully delivers to us the usual operation of our intentional constructions of objects: Thus a person bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature, its picturesqueness. The picturesque is always to some extent a caricature….This situation is akin to what a fable brings about. Those animals that portray men give the fable its peculiar color in as much as men are seen as these animals and not only through these animals; the animals stop and fill up thought …An image, we might say, is an allegory of being (RIS, 6). In his characterization of beings whose way of being is that of resemblance, Levinas traces a boundary between phenomena that give themselves in a relative transparency, those that give themselves as they simultaneously withdraw, and lastly, those whose selfpresentation occurs along deictical lines, pointing to some resemblance. Moreover, because he is not convinced of the value of allegory as allo- (other) legein (speaking), the sign for him should be “pure transparency, no wise accounting for itself” (RIS, 6). The beings that give themselves in the original, even as they withdraw, refer to the quality of the face—and the polemic with Heidegger’s Ereignis is intended as a genealogical recapitulation. Finally, being, whose self-presentation is predominantly resemblant, 26 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” (1948) in Collected Philosophical Papers, tr. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1993), p. 8. Hereafter RIS. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 20 belong to the logic of “this as that.” While this suggests substitution, it is here allegorical representation, and the domain in which art would move, improperly anamnesic or connected to memory: In the vision of the represented object, a painting has a density of its own: it is itself an object of the gaze. The consciousness of the representation lies in knowing that the object is not there. The perceived elements are not the objects but are like its “old garments”….These elements do not serve as symbols, and in the absence of the object they do not force its presence, but by their presence insist on its absence. They occupy its place fully to mark its removal, as though the represented object died, were degraded, were disincarnated in its own reflection. The painting then does not lead us beyond a given reality, but somehow to the hither side of it. It is a symbol in reverse (RIS, 7). Following this tripartite logic of presentation, we find transposed to art the outlines of Levinas’s own extension of intersubjective phenomenology. The transparency of the sign as given, situates it in the ethical force of my response to another. Levinas insists that such responses proceed all the way to making oneself a sign, signifying with one’s entire body, toward-X (OB, 48, 49). In the self-presentation that simultaneously gives as it withdraws, we understand the logic of the face as expression. The withdrawal in question is less a matter of willed or conscious self-hiding, than it is an intimation of the density of human expression, to which unconditional access is debarred. Most interesting is the “symbol in reverse,” wherein what is “like” its object-source is set down in its place, “as though the represented object died, were degraded, were disincarnated…”27 The political character of some portraits—Daumier’s cartoons—not to mention the insidious quality of racist caricatures account for the fact that the theatrical, the filmic, or the iconic caricature always cohabits with a conceptual armature of diminutives, infantilizations, even monstrous productions, typical to the 19th century’s sciences of faces, heads, and flesh, but posing a legitimate danger to discursive critique event today (cf. the missile-turban). The same politicized character forges social imaginations, aggrandizing, containing or vulgarizing the “originals” in their phenomenality. And, of portraiture, Levinas will go so far as to say that “the poet and the painter, who have discovered the ‘mystery’ and 27 Could it be that, for Levinas, to be pulled into the future, as we are, while observing a horrible accumulation of human disasters, induces æstheticized mourning, rather than one informed by the “energy” of a present open to some degree of responsible action (“Teacher”)? However that may be, the caricatural, precisely because of its connection to a subtle, semi-conscious perception, is a tool of choice for ideology or for critique. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 21 ‘strangeness’ of the world they inhabit…are free to think that they have gone beyond the real. [However,] the artist moves in a universe that precedes…the world of creation, a universe that the artist has already gone beyond through his thought…” (RIS, 7).28 In his play on “before” and “beyond,” Levinas means that the freezing, rearrangement, and exaggeration of selected qualities or beings, also focus the mind. They refashion for us a world of myth where, in the best of cases, we work critically to reconstruct the intentionality, the procedure, and even the laughter of the artist-creator. And this is why satire is corrosive: it draws from the moving complexity of the real, which gives and withdraws, a few leitmotifs, arranges them in unanticipated associations, thereby reworking their narrative and conceptual context, creating, as Freud knew, a collective personage or subject—only, here, the author may not be a part of the collectivity. This, too, works both ways: “revenge is gotten on wickedness by producing its caricature…Evil powers are conjured by filling the world with idols which have mouths but do not speak. It is as though ridicule killed…” (RIS, 12). We can imagine here the impact of racist imagery and discourse: in producing a caricature of the living other, the racist imagery—which dialectically denatures embodied perception even as it short-circuits everyday seeing—saps reality of its objects without annihilating them. Dragging out aspects of another’s body, face, or manner, caricature reassures some perceivers and participants that the other corresponds, fully, to their idea of her/him. A mouth as form, a mouth as the plastic evidence of eroticism or lubricity can hardly terrify if it cannot respond. The unforgettable contortions of the impoverished old man, his face electrified in “affect-like” spasms under the electrodes and camera of physiologist, Duchenne de Boulogne, provide us something like the inventory of human emotions, certainly. But the expressions produced go beyond that—notably, in the artificially inflected series of “shots” reproducing agony and horror. This is why the art of mourning does well to seek other avenues, like Giacometti’s “Cube,” than mimetic representation, to render the quiet value of another human being. Caricature, consolation, and excitation: Levinas is not wrong to insist that these dimensions of art are both essential to it and essentially equivocal. Art must be humanized through critical exposition, he argues. What must be emphasized, above all, is that the mythic realm 28 The ambivalence of these created universes perhaps evoked the mimesis of the golem, the Tower, or a self-proclaimed messiah. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 22 created by art runs parallel to the condensations that make discursive conceptuality (concept-creation) possible. In this particular respect, perception and theorization are parallel processes. But to avoid mimetic myths perception may have to be separated from corporeal sensibility immersed in the natural and political worlds (RIS, 5), something Levinas actually does in 1974. I return to that shortly. Because perception moves in and through the symbolic domain, we must allow that all perception is conditioned by these ways of abstracting and fixing images, and condensing concepts. Social constructionism has understood this; there is no seeing that stands “untainted” by the en-mattering power of discursive practices. Levinas was similarly aware that “[e]very intuition depends on a signification irreducible to the intuition” (RIS, 5). No matter how complex the modes of temporalizing intentionality, consciousness is indeed structured as a language—better, it is structured much the way language also is, which simply means that the bulk of conscious life, though latent in or sub-liminal to immediate awareness, is ordered by combinatorial grammars that abstract, condense, and associate. What we call a “social imaginary”—Castoriadis’s linguistic “miasmas”—entails articulations of images and concepts sometimes quite distant from pragmatic or everyday awareness. But awareness and these “imaginaries” are not separable. The argument that we cannot see a face immediately, as sheer expression, appears beyond debate. Yet it is still only abstractively correct, so far as visual perception, understood as practical conscious awareness and positive seeing (together with its constructivist élan), is taken as if it were separable from a vaster sensibility, which is lived as vulnerability and world-openness. To illustrate one aspect of this, when Frantz Fanon recounts the story of a little French girl erupting with “Maman regarde, le Nègre, j’ai peur!”29 and coins the expression of a racial body schema, he is demonstrating the interweaving of perception, conceptualization, and aspects of a social imaginary. Although he does not tell us whether he thereupon faced the little girl, it is fair to wonder about the affective context in which she exclaimed. The racist outburst could be an eruption of surprise, fear, or disgust, which is why the face is that which I can as readily 29 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris : Le Seuil, 1952), p. 90. In English, Black Skin, White Masks (1967). As Achille Mbembe writes, “Il n’existe plus que par son arraisonnement et son assignation dans un écheveau de significations qui le dépassent” (“he no longer exists other than by his being inspected and assigned to a tangle of significations that surpass him”) in “De la scène coloniale chez Frantz Fanon, ” Corpus, Vol. 58, no. 4, 2007. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 23 wish to annihilate as respond to. But not all affectivity moves through this rather simple social imaginary. What is crucial is that the sensibility, or pathos, that experiences fragility or anxiety is not reducible to the perception that highlights aspects perceived, forging them into myths or “icons,” types or caricatures. It seems to me as plausible to argue that I “perceive” race, ethnicity, sex—perhaps deformity, truncation—thanks to the saturated accumulation of my perceptual and cultural history, as it is to maintain that I also “undergo” expression and address as if at a deeper corporeal level, somehow differently anchored in my flesh. That, I believe, is what Levinas was aiming to show in 1961, and which he refined into a rich hermeneutics of passive sensibility-affectivity in 1974. How to illustrate and justify this? Despite their divergences, Merleau-Ponty provided Levinas a very significant approach to sensibility, because he effectively drew out the phenomenological implications of Gestalt psychology and psychoanalysis.30 When the former argued, in Le visible et l’invisible, that the “psychology of perception” must be rethought “in order to better show that the crises of psychology result from reasons of principle and not from some delay of the research in this or that particular domain,” 31 he was embarking on a new thinking of perception that grasped it as the interweave of flesh and world. In brief, something like the “sensible in itself” (VI, 138) that Levinas would disclose as the site, and the “how,” of substitution. Thus Merleau inquired, Where in the body are we to put the seer, since evidently there is in the body only “shadows stuffed with organs,” that is, more of the visible? The world seen is not “in” my body, and my body is not “in” the visible world…as flesh applied to flesh, the world neither surrounds it, nor is surrounded by it. As participation in and kinship with the visible, vision neither envelops it nor is enveloped by it definitively. The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence contains my vision….There is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other (VI, 138). 30 Among other things, Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on passivity, delivered at the Collège de France in 1955 after lectures on the phenomenological sense of Stiftung, or “institution,” must have been known to Levinas, as Merleau was slated to serve on Levinas’s doctorat d’état jury, just before his death in 1961. See his L’institution dans l’histoire personnel et publique ; le problème de la passivité, le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire : notes de cours au Collège de France, 1954-195, eds. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort et al. (Paris : Éditions Belin, 2003). 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968; original first published in 1964), p. 23. Hereafter VI. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 24 Having extended classical phenomenological bracketing to an inter-space of feeling and touching, Merleau hesitated over Husserl’s concept of a subject-pole, such that while the “seer is caught up in what he sees,” it is “still himself he sees.” This is because something remains free to look at things, even discountenance them, but it also invariably feels “looked at by things” (VI, 139). Despite its expansion, perception (still understood preeminently as vision) lives out reciprocal geometries or vectors between seer and seen; so visual perception continues to operate at a (metaphoric) level close to objectifying consciousness. As a different “perception,” sensibility can, but need not, share vision’s cognitive-objectifying quality. If visual dimensions of perception readily combine the activity of regarding with the passivity of feeling oneself seen, sensibility forms a kind of “thick” corporeal layer that is distinctly if diversely passive. Even the tumultuous events of striving or tending-to, understood as “instincts” active in the body, happen to a self that only progressively perceives them, as pathê. That does not mean that the body is eo ipso passive. It argues that the incipience of consciousness-of-sensation is an emergence in and as passivity. For Husserl, phenomenology can approach even the drives although, as meaningful for us, they are not active but distributed across a spectrum of pathê: Life is striving in manifold forms and contents of intention and fulfillment; in the broadest sense, [it is] pleasure and fulfillment; in the lack of fulfillment, [life is] a tending towards pleasure as a pure striving that desires, or as a striving that slackens off in the realization that fulfills it and accomplishes its purposes in the process of the realization of the life-form of pleasure, with its release of tension. (Husserl, MS A, VI 26, p. 42b) Every aspect of embodied existence, so far as it reaches consciousness, moves within an indeterminate interstice between being-affected (Merleau’s “perception”) and reacting or responding; that is, between pre-conscious sensibility and intentional, i.e., structured, flowing, consciousness. Where is the I or the subject in this corporeal-temporal interstice? Both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas will argue that ça veille; something that is not a full-blown subject keeps watch, is aware, however faintly, even as we drift off to sleep.32 And this para-subject is irreducibly responsive, that is, passive. Such was the 32 M. Merleau-Ponty, L’institution/ la passivité: Notes de cours, Op. cit., pp. 195-197; Levinas will say, as early as 1946: “The distinction between attention, which is turned to objects [intentional], whether they be internal or external, and vigilance, absorbed in the rustling of unavoidable being [or existence], goes much farther. The ego is swept away [passively] by the fatality of being. Vigilance is quite devoid of objects… The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 25 legacy of classical phenomenology: “The Ego [das Ich], Husserl ventured, is awakened by affection [durch Affektion] from the non-egological, because the non-egological [nicht-ichlichem] is ‘of interest’, it instinctively attracts…and the Ego reacts kinæsthetically, as an immediate reaction” (Husserl, MS B III, 3, p. 5a).33 Following the extensive criticism of his early Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time (1904-1905, then 1910) as paradoxical and formalist, Husserl proceeded to investigate modalities of passivity, including bodily experiences of “values,” abstracted from the conscious will to which his teacher Brentano had assigned them. In this twenty year long investigation of passivity, it was Husserl who exerted the greater influence on Levinas—even beyond the existential analytic of Heidegger. It was Husserl, after all, who worked out a phenomenology of deep passivity at a time, the 1930s, when lifephilosophies were celebrating the will. Thus, in his notes on instincts, Husserl spoke explicitly about dynamic “levels of instincts [Stufen von Instinkten], of original drives, [and] needs which do not initially know their goals….” (MS B III, 9, p. 4a). Yet, despite this work of prioritization, Husserl refrained from psycho-biological speculation on meaning as the production of an unconscious. Sense is conscious because sense, or meaning, comes to pass, as undergone. Under the phenomenological gaze, sense is even available as taking-shape; it is a becoming-conscious or a vital event of sense in the passive experience of self-modification. If the privileged realm of phenomenology was intentionality, an adequate account of it had to include all aspects of corporeity. Sensibility had to be traced past conative and cognitive acts of object construction, toward non-objectifying events, including degrees of pleasure and pain, love and hatred34 —in short, toward the genesis of evaluations. the vigilance of insomnia which keeps our eyes open has no subject.” See Levinas, Existence and Existents, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), pp. 61-62. 33 I owe these Husserl sources to James Mensch. 34 See Jocelyn Benoist, « L’intentionalité et les valeurs, » in Les limites de l’intentionalité : Recherches phénoménologiques et analytiques (Paris : Vrin, 2005), p. 155-56. Referring to the complex two-step approach of Husserl to an object, possessed of a (judgement of) value, in the early work Phenomenological Investigations (1900-1901), Benoist points out that “non-objectifying acts, such as love and hatred for example, certainly have an object…The question is then one of knowing whence my hatred draws its object. Is hatred—and affective attitudes in general—capable of giving itself an object by itself? Brentano’s thesis, as also that of Husserl, is No:…another sort of acts must give to hatred the hated object” (I translate). Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 26 Value would thus be locked in to passions, and the pathic-sensuous “atmosphere” in which all our intentional acts unfold—including the identification of faces—weaves through cognition like so many tonalities or attunements. It would be mistaken to argue for the priority of the one over the other, as a host of bodily responses seem to occur before we take cognizance of “what” we are feeling or undergoing. This was clearly understood by an American reader of Husserl, William James, who illustrated it with spontaneous flight, during which we identify and recognize our feeling of fear. Yet strangely, Husserl’s claim for the sensuous-affective neutrality of intentionality, as the sheer aiming of consciousness (modeled on vision and logically prerequisite to the appearance of an object), comes into question the moment we acknowledge the interpenetration of sensation, emotion and cognition.35 By implication, it is possible to be affected “pre-intentionally”—to feel mal dans sa peau, anxious (OB, 107-109)—while in “proximity” to another (OB, 88-89), whether we thereupon see him/her, or not. Seeing race, sex, or some trait is not requisite to the “susceptiveness”36 to others, which Levinas argues is the root of our intersubjective “responsibility” for another. If this is the case, then Levinas’s concepts of “being-for-the-other” and “substitution” flow out of Husserl’s own conundrum about the dual birth of time consciousness as a primal embodied impression, structured almost spontaneously by the ongoing flow of intentionality. But what really is a “primal impression” (cf. OB, 33ff)? The primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being. Primal impression has as its content that which the word “now” signifies….Each new now is the content of a new primal impression. Ever new primal impressions continuously flash forth with ever new matter, now the same, now changing.37 The primal impression corresponds to the life of consciousness-as-body. Arguably, it is the “matter” thanks to which we experience perceptual life as “moving,” “changing,” and thus as a “temporalizing” flow. Why, then, should these immanent, sense- or drive35 See Didier Franck, “Au-delà de la phénoménologie” in Dramatique des phénomènes, Op. cit., pp. 105123, esp. 121ff. Also see Renaud Barbaras, Introduction à une phénoménologie de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2008), “Introduction,” pp. 8-15 and “Existence et Incarnation,” esp. pp. 68-77. 36 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or : Beyond Essence, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 122. 37 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), tr. John Barnett Brough (The Hague: Kluwer Publishers, 1991), §31 “Primal Impression and the Objective Individual Time-Point,” pp. 66-71, here p. 70. Hereafter PCIT. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 27 based impressions require a “form”? Is Husserl still indebted to an Aristotelian model of the psyche? What distinguishes [one] primal impression from [another] primal impression is the individualizing moment of the impression within the original temporal position, which is something fundamentally different from the quality and other material moments of the content of sensation. The moment of the original temporal position is naturally nothing by itself….[As] the living source-point of being [our being and that we call “world”], in the now, ever-new primal being wells up simultaneously, in relation to which the distance of the event’s timepoints from the actually present now continuously expands…(PCIT § 31, 70-71) The upwelling “now moments” of sensibility, as pathê, require a minimal “space” of transition to become conscious. They have to self-modify to be remarked, which is why the “moment of the original temporal position is…nothing.” In this dynamic stretching along, they become meaningful to cognition even as they acquire a determinate position in consciousness as a now-becoming-a-just-past. Stabilized by their “now” yet flowing off, some sensibility can be returned to and examined—but not all, because the geometric metaphors add their own misconceptions. In any case, self-modifying bodily sensations, entering and distending in the flow of consciousness, constitute a sort of preconsciousness in process. This corresponds to Levinas’s proximity, for perception, and to his “obsession,” for the self-affection that happens through memory. To take a step further and attend to the ontological implications of the modalizing “now,” it is no accident that Husserl speaks of “being,” here. His phenomenology approached subjects and objects together, in their unfolding as experience (objects that present themselves and attention that aims at them and fills them out), and called this “being,” logically enough, since experience is what-is. That is also why being, or existence, is processual—denoted best by a verb. If signifiers correspond to anything— say, to clusters of entities and to events—then we can say that experiences, of what-is but likewise that something is, come to pass, like verbs, before we parse out their subjects or objects. Hence, Levinas’s distinction (which applies also to the face) between “eventing” pre-conscious sensations, which occur “ad-verbially,” and the related, strict verbality of being, itself. Even before entering consciousness, the upwelling sensibility modalizes experience; it inflects it affectively, pathically. Can we say that the world too is modally Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 28 inflected, insofar as it passes through sensibility? This is likely, but it is not Levinas’s concern. For him, the impact of the other is a unique sort of adverbial, an iterative modalization of affect—whether in direct proximity or as the upsurge of memory. V. The Insistence of Emotional Memory: Camp Raisko These dense philosophical expositions find illustrations in something like “Levinasian moments.” One such moment occurred, with great drama, to the French actress-resistant, Charlotte Delbo, who wrote it out twenty years later in her book, Auschwitz and After. The situation she describes is a typical line-up at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, Raisko. It is winter, 1943—or again, as Delbo writes, it is a café in Paris, in which she relives the moment with the uncanny intensity and through the mnemonic filter that make possible (?) its reiteration. A woman in the throes of starvation and fever has been struggling to stand up; the assembled captives sense that she may die in the ditch from which they have just been called to line-up: Suddenly a shudder runs through this heap of a yellow coat lying in muddy snow. The woman attempts to rise. For every act falls apart in unbearable slow-motion sequences. She kneels, looks at us. Not one of us will make a move….She manages to stand up. She reels, tries to regain her balance….She is so bent down you wonder how she manages not to fall again. No. she is walking, staggers, yet keeps on. And the bones of her face convey a frightful kind of willfulness. We watch her make her way across the empty void before our ranks. Where is she heading now?...The woman SS in the black cape has left. Now an SS officer, wearing a green uniform, is standing at the gate. The woman moves forward. She seems to be obeying an order. She stops in front of the SS. Shudders run down her curved back, with shoulder blades protruding from under the yellow coat. The SS has his dog on a leash. Did he give an order, make a sign? The dog pounces on the woman—without growling, panting, barking. All is silent as in a dream. The dog leaps on the woman, sinks its fangs into her neck….The woman lets out a cry….We do not know if the scream has been uttered by her or by us, whether it issued from her punctured throat or from ours. I feel the dog’s fangs in my own throat.38 The devastating “moment” illustrates the sense of substitution, with its sensuous saturation and its “now” as remembrance—or as a recollected now that inverts the usual 38 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, tr. Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; originally published separately as Aucun de nous ne reviendra, Editions de Minuit, 1970), pp. 28-29. The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 29 priority of those actual presents in which we recall the past, realizing it is a simple past. The sensuous saturation also blurs cognitive distinctions between subjects and objects, reality and dreams: then and now “all is silent as if in a dream”; “I feel the dog’s fangs in my throat.” The challenge of thematizing this scene, whose intensity utterly concentrates the typically “regular” flow of time-consciousness, will be met by the production of a stripped down prose that does not “interfere” with the “event” as it “self-resuscitates.” Important here is the raw, virtual “state of nature,” deliberately engineered by the camps. This scene, though very different from Kertesz’s food ration, comes to pass in a situation in which the usual protections of culture, norms, habits—our historic inheritance —have been as diminished as possible. But is such neutralization possible? And even if not enduringly so, we might wonder what allows culture and norms to unfold again. To the degree that norms and traditions can be stripped from a group of people, it should be possible to glimpse the sorts of events that become, as Levinas would say, obsessions with us; those events, too, whose trace abides, ineradicable, and through which we perceive something like the astonishing range of “human ways.” For Delbo, Levinas’s “face” is a yellow coat, eyes like “dirty hollows,” with a jaw that leads a skeleton as her ultimate lifeline. It is the SS officer whom the coat confronts. Their face-to-face encounter invites speculation. While he apparently does nothing, the dog leaps to defend the SS. “Did he give an order, make a sign?” asks Delbo. But it hardly seems necessary that he act. The haggard intruder dispossessed him with the near obscene fragility of its own flesh “unto-death.” In the “viscous substance” of the winter’s line up, “as in a dream,” the impact on the SS officer is debatable, but not that on his guard dog. And it is something paradoxical that, in the camps at least, a dog fulfills or exacerbates human-like murder and recognition; recall the prisoners’ friend “Bobbie,” a dog, and “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany.”39 I believe that something, neither verbal nor simply gestural, set the SS’s dog into motion. Was it the woman’s gaze, or something the dog sensed in the body of the SS? Or was it their interweave? Whatever “it” was, the “face” was there some protruding shoulder blades whose trace survived for decades in Delbo’s memory. And what was “seen” was not, really; yet “it” carried a sensuous force, an efficacy related neither to sex or race (perceptual objects), nor to culture and norms 39 Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, tr. Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; French original 1963), see p. 153. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 30 (history). Morally or practically terrifying, there came to pass, there, a sort of perceiving or sensing that undermined object-interpretations. Hence the oneiric—the thick, passive now, out of time—character of the episode. VI. The Phenomenology of the “Un-conscious,” from the Insistence of Memory to “Substitution” – A Conclusion of Sorts There is, in phenomenology, no “pure” perception. Levinas and Merleau-Ponty understood this, each in their respective ways; the one, privileging the weaving of bodyflesh and world-flesh; the other, focusing on the intersubjective blend called “the one-forthe-other,” whose external cognate was the expression, in faces, shoulders, carriage. If there is no pure seeing, then no “visible” can stand divorced for long from language and signification. Therefore we cannot separate perception of another who interrupts me affectively, and another whom we identify by a quality, much less a name. It is their reciprocal interlock, and the movement between them, that is phenomenologically interesting. It might be that Delbo—among others—did experience other such scenes, and either fled those, forgot or repressed them. How much do we recall of instants where our field of vision is momentarily overwhelmed by something, a back, a coat or a face, which inverts our outward-aiming intentionality? To answer this would require that we work with other concepts, notably psychoanalytic repression, screen memories, association, and the imagination. But these draw us toward a realm, outside phenomenological description, that presupposes distinctions like the normal and the pathological. In 1925, Husserl presented the outlines of a phenomenology of spontaneous association. He broke down the comparative “movement” of two images superposed on each other, showing how it is we speak of metaphoric lines of resemblance and dissemblance. He noted that the limit lay in advancing a causal explanation of association; why it is, say, that one stream of lights perceived “now” from a bridge should spontaneously evoke a different vision of a trail of lights without clear time markings and without clouding the ongoing perception.40 The “how” of association lent itself to phenomenological description; less 40 Edmund Husserl, « Troisième section : L’association » in De la synthèse passive : Logique transcendantale et constitutions originaires, tr. Bruce Bégout et Jean Kessler (Grenoble : Éditions Jérôme The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 31 so, the “why.” This was because the supposed irrationality of association lies in the way in which non-retentional memory—memory no longer tied in to a lived “now”—endures as affective or metonymical trace (SP, 223); some part of which can activate an assemblage otherwise lost to consciousness. Association turns on a profoundly passive sedimentation of memories, a waking stimulus, and something like affective imagination, bound up with these. Consequently, it points toward a history both personal and forgotten. Husserl ventured strikingly that with association, he was elaborating a “phenomenology of the unconscious” (SP, 221).41 This, despite his earlier insistence that consciousness is “necessarily being conscious in each of its [temporal] phases,” and that “retention of an unconscious content is impossible” (PCIT, Appendix 9, 122-123). In about one decade, Husserl changed his position. He was no longer even certain that timeconsciousness continued to flow, past a certain place or point in our distant past. Perhaps time too sank down, dissolving into “a night beyond compare” (SP, 236). It should be clear that the conjunction of a personal history and the configurations of sensuous traces require us to think, together, the senses of a face as interruption and as a thing we cognize as raced or sexed object-others. These belong to different “levels” and “times” of consciousness, a solution acceptable when we recall how much of what comes readily to mind is, seconds before, entirely latent. The two-fold solution Levinas proposes to the question about a conceptual versus a sensuous a priori is substitution. The term denotes the experiential, embodied fluidity of perception as “other-in-the-same” and as if by extension of our embodiment, actual predication: this-sign-in-the-place-of-that. The common root would be passive embodiment and the affective impact on us of the other, of the face. As Freud already understood of dreams,42 a symbolic production like a dream—though it appears to be like Millon, 1998), pp. 191-251; see here “Chapt. 2 : Le phénomène de l’affection,” esp. p. 221. Hereafter SP. In English, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, tr. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). 41 “Thus, the following question…: do not affection and association—dependent according to laws on the essential conditions of the formation of unity, but also co-determined by a new genre of laws of essence— make possible firstly the constitution of objects existing for themselves? [But] do there not exist contrary forces that, in a normative manner, retard and weaken the affect and…make the upsurge of unities existing for themselves impossible, those unities that could therefore not take place in general without affect? These are questions difficult to sort out; particularly when we want, as will be necessary later on, to pass from the sphere of the living present to that of forgetting, thereby making intelligible reproductive awakening. It goes without saying that we could give to the entirety of these considerations….a famous title, that of the ‘unconscious’,” SP 221 (my translation). 42 And Merleau-Ponty brings this out in his lectures dreaming and delirium as extreme modes of passivity. Bergo, Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 32 a confused thought and thus of a “higher” order than reflexes or drives—is a functional way of protecting sleep; some activity of “consciousness” would thus be serving a vaster “intelligence” called a healthy nervous system, etc. Producing and offering words, engaging in the activity of language, might therefore be similarly rooted—in our embodiment, and in the affective motivations of intersubjective connections. A genealogical reading of Levinas would set affective substitution as temporally prior to the substitution of one signifier for another. Language, as discourse, would thus arise from spontaneous address, speaking-to another; and what Levinas called sensation and affect “getting-out-of-phase [déphasage]” with themselves (OB, 29ff), which is the dynamic difference between feeling and felt: our ongoing feeling and the tiny shifts in what is felt. This difference would motivate perceptual identifications (“regarde maman, un Nègre”), as readily as it had accounted for the interweave of flowing structured consciousness with intense “now” moments.43 This is an important reading because it grasps the distinctiveness of the modes of consciousness. A more horizontal reading would emphasize the “amphi-bology”—Levinas’s term for casting in either of two possible directions (OB, 42)—between affective preconsciousness and intentional, cognitive activity. This reading might diminish our skepticism about perceiving expression before identifying a face as this race, that class, that X, which is above all a doubt born of the passion to keep a critical focus on the unconscious operations of prejudice. Levinas would welcome it as bearing affective elements of “for-the-other” sensibility in it. Accurate or not, if it means that we tend to “go either way,” the horizontal amphibology dissolves the fragile primacy of Levinas’s spontaneous, enacted “good.” Before the vastness of cynical calculation and “the dear self” Kant feared was always behind an apparently ethical act, dissolving an idea like the humane “good” might be realistic. Certainly, linguistics cannot prove that the origin of language is dialogical; and phenomenology is often a lonesome archeologist. 43 As Levinas wrote in 1965, “…intentionality implying thematization…defines the very notion of activity and initiative. Contrariwise, consciousness as a passive work of time, as passivity more passive than any passivity [that was] simply antithetical to activity…cannot be described by the categories of consciousness aiming at an object. Finally, if the present did not separate itself [s’écartait] from its coincidence with itself, it would be neither temporal, nor conscious through a simple temporality” (En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [Paris: Vrin, 1967], p. 223 (my trans. and italics); English abridgement, Discovering Existence with Husserl (1998). The Face in Levinas: Toward a Phenomenology of Substitution 33 Yet the debate about a prioris and first conditions of possibility depends on the regressive forgetfulness of embodied intersubjectivity. We should not regress anew to isolated, conative, autonomous “building blocks”. It is the fact of other persons, other faces, not we as agents, that brings about this good. As Levinas argued, against Hegel and rationalism broadly: “The distinction between the free and the un-free would not be the ultimate distinction between humanity and inhumanity, nor the ultimate reference point for sense and non-sense; to understand intelligibility does not consist in going back to the beginning. There was a time irreducible to presence, an absolute past, unrepresentable,” and en-fleshed (AE, 194-95). Privileging the amphibology respects the two principal strands of consciousness, the one that thematizes and wills in all awareness and the other that is passivity of and in sensibility-affectivity. It preserves the “otherness” or surprising upsurge of sensibility within. However, it loses the Other without. It loses, in a word, Levinas’s point of departure, and his sense of an “imageless image of the possible”44—both of these being incarnate, in the face. 44 The expression refers to Adorno’s bridge, “today” (in the 1960s), between a private ethics and an ethical politics. See his Problems of Moral Philosophy, tr. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Thomas Schroder (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000; originally published 1963). These were lectures given on Kant’s ethics; at times, they come quite close to Levinas’s descriptions of responsibility.