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The Face in Levinas

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The Face in Levinas

a
Bettina Bergo
a
Dpartement de philosophie, Universit de Montral, C.P. 6128
Succursale Centre-ville, Montral, QC H3C 3J7, Canada
Published online: 03 May 2011.

To cite this article: Bettina Bergo (2011) The Face in Levinas, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities, 16:1, 17-39

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 ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 1 march 2011

I the ambiguous face: language or

immediacy, history or perception?
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Shouldnt 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.
(Lyotard, The Differend 6061)1 bettina bergo
La pensee de lorigine cest la tradition . . . La
verite sur lorigine la relation avec lorigine
accueil dun enseignement. Verite nest pas ici
adaequatio rei ac intellectus mais tradition.
THE FACE IN LEVINAS
Verite simultaneite. Se debarrasser de la toward a phenomenology
verite devoilement. (Levinas, Carnets de
captivite, 1959 (frag. 76))2 of substitution
he face is arguably the most important
T concept and moment for Levinass
thought. It is both of these both concept and
for David Teasley
pre-linguistic moment and in that respect it
engenders a tension throughout his work between
an original mode of time, the interruption,3 and in Levinass thought. Not that it disappears; yet
a set of discursive strategies that dramatize the tension between a philosophy that thematizes
situations, from living in the world, creating a the present as though the fragile time of its
dwelling, to facing the other. Between Totality writing did not exist, and a logic that insists
and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being, upon the priority of a lived time of speaking
or: Beyond Essence (1974),4 the presentation of and acting over every conceptual a priori, is
situations unfolds between the mise-en-scene certainly present in Levinass work, as in recent
of pre-eminently sensuous concepts and their existentialism and phenomenology. Yet Levinas
deconstruction. At the heart of the 1961 work deploys a vast effort to dismantle the tension and
was the face, as expression and voice teaching. to develop a first philosophy in and as pre-
The 1974 essay presents a less phenomenalist, philosophical experience both of being as an
less illuminated encounter, called substitution. indeterminate field and of the Other as a face that
The germinal tension in philosophy between addresses me.
description as experience purified or appropri- The encounter with a face is inevitably
ately bracketed and description as a conceptual or personal; with a seminal pathos whose sources
linguistic exercise finds an unparalleled response lie beyond criteria of verification perhaps even

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/010017^23 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564362

17
 the face in levinas
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,
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satirization or local pragmatic abstentions?
The question Can we hope . . . motivates
Levinass work. It depends on the dubious now
whose enactment sets it (the now) between use
and mention in his 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, Levinass
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 adequa-
tion) 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 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 interpretative 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 multi-valence allows Levinas to draw
out of psychological experience a philosophical
enseignement about simultaneity: first philoso-
phy may be pure logic or metaphysics, under the
principles of identity and causality; but first
philosophy is also paradoxically and necessa-
rily 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 simul-
taneity of perception and performance pulls
Levinass thought between philosophies of
naming and predication, and phenomenologies
of perception. The tension between logical first-
ness and experiential primordiality may be
undecidable, but it impels Levinas who finds
himself, as phenomenology also has done
recently venturing a wager about an intersubjec-
tive, but pre-linguistic, 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 inter-
subjective quality that counts, however, such that
in or through these passions the Other matters
more, occupies me more integrally, than do my
interests. The argument that this intersubjective
openness beyond visual perception and extend-
ing to the insideoutside structure of the epider-
mis itself is neither mechanically caused nor
an affair of faculties, deepens the ambiguity of
Levinass wager.
It is in abiding with his dual ambiguity, not
without philosophical absurdity, that Levinass
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 under-
determination of discursive events to come.
18

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 phenom-
enology draws sense from what is often relegated
to psychology: Levinas traces the pre-conscious
dynamics of embodied sensibility, sensation look to a metaphoric depth dimension, which the
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(pains, pleasures) as sensibility broadly under-
stood as entwined with and flowing into
emotions like anguish, remorse and joy. Before
these are conscious objects for us, before they directional indication. Thus, language and con-
are understood, they are active. This subtle
genealogy of vulnerability, as the continuous
blending of sensibility-affectivity, describes con-
ditions 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 pathos of itself, precisely, as self-affection.8
them. Call this it me without all the social and Related to what we call drives as well as
intellectual prostheses of an I identifying desires affect-sensations, affect-memories and
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 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 is the human face persists,
19
bergo
as if indeterminate objects like expressions
somehow motivate affects that we recognize
only as they recur and notably, as what we
never master.
It is temping to see in this depth archaeology
a departure from Levinass phenomenology of
world, dwelling and exteriority, as developed
during the 1950s. The 1974 exploration of
proximity, the caress, and the flesh shifts his
1960s had prepared. Otherwise than Being7
works through the other pole of the philosophical
ambiguity, making it an amphibology, a two-
ceptuality 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 naivety of their posits and their
logics of development, psychologies repeat a
difficult counter-lesson; namely, that contempor-
ary 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 conscious-
ness and intentions lives from forces and
processes that it endures as itself, as the
passional associations have no single identifiable
origin (outside of psychoanalytic reconstruc-
tions), 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 colour experiences like a tonal
wash this, even when the transparency of an
experience ought to be uncomplicated. Affective
memories cast into question the 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 construc-
tive (creating and re-creating its world of
 the face in levinas

intentional objects), certain affects, certain mem-
ories, above all, certain of their interfaces, resist
being integrated into the steady flow of time-
as-consciousness 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-the-same, where the same means me, is the salut Levinas was thinking through in
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fait meme de letre et la voie du salut. Le mal
de la solitude nest pas le fait dun etre se
trouvant mal dans le monde; mais le mal du
fait meme de letre auquel on ne peut pas
remedier par un etre plus complet, mais par le
salut. Salut nest pas etre. (Levinas, Carnets de
captivite, septembre 1937 (Carnet 1))10
The face is the only thing that metaphorically
breaks through existence. In this sense the face

me alive in a world. With the concept of the
other in the same,9 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 emotion-
ally 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, some-
thing of his/her nearness affects. Is this imma-
nence; 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, discrete
times, and temporally indeterminate clouds of
affectivity, like Freuds 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 7072). 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
lIn-der-Welt-Sein Heidegger sinterdit de voir
dans la solitude une insuffisance le neant du
1937, against Heideggers 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 inter-war
syndicalism laid claim to Marx applied now to
the Nation, the Volk, rather than the proletariat-
victim of economic injustice. Salut nest pas
etre, because Being is either Heraclitian fire,
change, or a voiceless summons to confrontation
with oneself, as nothingness.
Levinass early writings, from Reflections
on the Philosophy of Hitlerism (1933) to On
Escape (1936), are polemically important.11 They
recognize acutely how the vitalist, existentialist,
and Nietzsche-inspired philosophies (the so-called
philosophies that nourished Hitlerism)
seduced readers, saturated with neo-Kantian
formalism in the inter-war period, with the
promise of reintegrating soul and body in an
original living situation of culture and heri-
tage. On Escape extended the intuition of
Reflections, challenging the eigent-lichkeit
or propriety of a mortal being, resolutely out-
ahead-of-itself-toward-its-most-proper-possibility,
its truth: mortality. The modest essay responded
to Heideggers existential analytic with a rheto-
rical question: would an immortal being seek to
escape its condition? Ecstatic, or forward-casting
temporal consciousness, the consciousness of
the project, would not be more authentic
to human existence than the lessons learned
from anxieties of engulfment, suffocation, with
the resulting urge to wrest free of existence itself.
The popular escapist literature of the time
pointed to a sense in which being as

20

what-is, all-that-is suffocates us in its waves of
repetition (Baudelaires exhausting days passing
into agonizing nights)12 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 phenom-
enologies of sensibility and passions, proposing
a host of phenomenological dramatizations13
that defied distinctions between what is proper
to us vs. what is improper or deceived about our
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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 transcen-
dence. 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 sleep14 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 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, punctu-
ated by attempted evasions from self and
existence, which we pursue now with resolute-
ness, 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
21
bergo
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 recipro-
cally, 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 con-
nectedness; this simply means that the spontane-
ity 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 Levinass
seminal concept of responsibility. This non-
sexuate otherness is embodied by the face.
Responsibility is non-innate, non-inborn spon-
taneity. It is the heart of Totality and Infinity.
Simultaneously an act and an affect, in Levinass
sense the I neither produces 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 responsi-
bility is the core of a Levinasian ethics (cf. OB 94
n. 35 at 193). This may be right, if ethics refers to
an ethos or the character and values of an acting
subject.15 Yet responsibility immediately unra-
vels doctrines of virtues and deontologies, as it
corresponds to an ideal or Idea of practical reason
only in so far 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 Others. Almost a correlation
(though not one of H. Cohens three correla-
tions),16 it proceeds from the phenomenological
suspension of object-construction and subjective-
self-identification, which are recursive or after
 the face in levinas

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, before he speaks of ethics;17
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While the call Levinas presents as exceeding
the capacities of our sensibility-affectivity
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 Heideggers Pauline investi-
gation,20 the name rejoins the Other as non-
appearing appearance, as expression, within a
Maimonidean negative theology. Understood

underscoring the interrelation and employing a
contested etymology (religio). But the 1961 considered, simply, as the face.
work, Totality and Infinity, was still concerned
with working out what it is that, in our experience,
provokes the search for transcendence, a beyond parsed into a me affected-by X, and an other
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, aletheia, from world and site to the other
person. In so doing, it argues for the intersubjec-
tive primacy both of human speech and the
conception of the good. Similarly to Heideggers
deformalization of logical time, integrated into
interpretative phenomenology thanks to the
latters reading of Pauls expectant awaiting
(kairos) and Kierkegaards anxiety prior to free-
dom 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 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.18 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.19
practically, the summoning voice should be
To the degree, then, that intersubjective
connectedness, as spontaneous response, can be
that affects, we can say that the face arises at the
intersection of Levinass 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, restitu-
tion, or doing better than equalling ones part).
Imre Kertesz captures 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 dog-eyes 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 doesnt
tally, and a yelling and commotion and a kick,
then I feel myself being snatched up and
dumped in front of the next wagon, and its a
long, long while since I saw either Teacher
or my ration thats 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 Teachers
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

22

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 astonish-
ment must be written all over my face because
he, although already scurrying back if they
dont 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 didnt
imagine for one moment? So much for the
story . . . although theres no getting round the
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fact that Teacher, for example, did what
he did in order that I should stay alive, to look
at it purely from my viewpoint . . .21
III what, then, is a face?
En partant de lHolocauste, je pense a la
mort de lautre homme, je pense a lautre
homme . . . Je me suis demande, vous le savez
peut-etre, ce que signifie le visage de lautre
homme. (Levinas, La Philosophie et la
mort)22
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 gen-
eral value of blindedness [aveuglement], or
even entombment, it is also because meta-
phorizing these values accompanied . . . every
discourse produced by the works 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 . . . (Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le
visage. Autour dune sculpture dAlberto
Giacometti)23
In 1933, the year in which Levinas wrote his
Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism
Alberto Giacomettis public and private worlds
collapsed simultaneously. Long obsessed with
capturing faces in their concrete and disturb-
ing 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
bergo
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 a cube, nor a surrealistic object,
nor a constructivist exercise. Irregular, bombe,
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 beck-
oned, 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 artists 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.
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 Heideggers
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.24 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-cogni-
tive meaning continues to elicit the scepticism
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.
23
 the face in levinas
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Fig. 1. Alberto Giacometti, The Cube (1933^34); image reproduced with kind permission of the Giacometti Estate,
represented by SODRAC (Societe du droit de reproduction des auteurs, compositeurs et editeurs au Canada).
Levinas does not directly address the problem
of logical vs. 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
colour 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.25
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 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 Sartres rustling
behind me, which informs me of the defeat of my
momentary contemplative sovereignty, arises in
Levinass 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.26 Of course, these events
are imaginative reconstructions, and in that
sense there is, always, an indirect aesthetic, or
24

dramatization, in Levinass work indeed, we
should really speak of an aesthetic of enseigne-
ment or welcome.27 But can a teaching, identified
with reception-of-teaching, and with tradition, be
reconciled with the claim to experiential plausi-
bility 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
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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 Husserls phenomenol-
ogy of time (and) consciousness. In effect, if time
flows in a regular fashion, independently of a
fixed ground, and if pre-objective time is
consciousness, deploying an orderly flow and
carrying along with its dense, moving present,
elements retained and anticipated, each with a
self-modifying yet definite temporal marker
(e.g., just-past, past for five minutes, one week
past), then the force of times 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 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 conscious-
ness: formal time-consciousness.28 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 some-
thing, for (my) intentional, or cognitive con-
sciousness. His figure of the other-in-the-same
25
bergo
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 ongoing time consciousness into an
identifiable sensation and thus into full con-
sciousness. If it is fair to speak of full conscious-
ness 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 Levinass later work. This is important,
because substitution, or the one-for-the-other,
can be reconstructed as having 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 condi-
tions of enacted, embodied signification.29 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,
for-the-other; not interested in identifying the
 the face in levinas
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 over-
whelms. 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
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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 phenomenol-
ogy of immediate pre-intentional sensibility?
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 The sensible is the being, insofar as it
resistance; especially if one attaches ones existen-
tial 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 Levinass thought, but
they rarely have the constructive power of his
descriptions. Paradoxically, the phenomenologi-
cal how proves constructive over a psychologi-
cal 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, com-
posite portraiture (Galton) evincing ethnic
natures or souls.
Perceptual acts of classification rely on a
dualism in sensibility, whereby expression is
fixed as if it were a sign. Whether as aestheticiza-
tion or as reduction, the perceptual double
concerned Levinas as the contrary of living
expression, rather than a process of projection:
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.30
A certain freezing of expression proceeds to the
creation of an object that can be intended and
26

made perceptually adequate in much the way
that truth is defined as adaequatio 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 pictur-
esque is always to some extent a caricature . . .
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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; emphasis in original)
In his characterization of beings whose way of
being is that of resemblance, Levinas traces a
boundary between phenomena that give them-
selves in a relative transparency, those that give
themselves as they simultaneously withdraw, and
lastly, those whose self-presentation 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.31
The beings that give themselves in the original,
even as they withdraw, refer to the quality of the
face and the polemic with Heideggers Ereignis
is intended as a genealogical recapitulation.
Finally, being, whose self-presentation is predo-
minantly resemblant, belongs to the logic of this
as that. While this suggests substitution, here it
is 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
27
bergo
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; emphasis added)
Following this tripartite logic of presentation, we
find transposed to art the outlines of Levinass
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 ones entire body, toward-X.32 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 . . .33 The
political character of some portraits Daumiers
cartoons not to mention the insidious quality of
racist caricatures, accounts 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 nineteenth centurys
sciences of faces, heads, and flesh, but posing a
legitimate danger to discursive critique event
today (cf. the missile-turban). The same politi-
cized character forges social imaginations, aggran-
dizing, 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 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).34
In his play on before and beyond,
Levinas means that the freezing, rearrangement,
and exaggeration of selected qualities or beings
 the face in levinas
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. 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 argued, a collective personage
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or subject. Only, in satire (as opposed to a Jewish
joke), the author is not always a part of the
collectivity. But 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 anothers 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 only abstractively correct, so far as visual
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 illustrate one aspect of this, when Frantz Fanon
why the art of mourning does well to seek other
avenues, like Giacomettis Cube, than mimetic with Maman regarde, le Negre, jai peur!37 and
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 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,35 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 percep-
tion 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 intui-
tion depends on a signification irreducible to the
intuition.36 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 subliminal to immediate
awareness, is ordered by combinatorial grammars
that abstract, condense, and associate. What we
call a social imaginary Castoriadiss 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
perception, understood as practical conscious
awareness and positive seeing (together with its
constructivist elan), is taken as if it were
separable from a vaster sensibility, which is
lived as vulnerability and world-openness. To
recounts the story of a little French girl erupting
coins the expression of a racial body schema, he is
demonstrating the interweaving of perception,
conceptualization, and aspects of a social imagin-
ary. 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 wish
28

to annihilate as respond to. But not all affectivity
moves through this rather simple social imagin-
ary. 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, still himself he sees. This is because something
types or caricatures. It seems to me as plausible
to argue that I perceive race, ethnicity, sex nance them, but it also invariably feels looked at
perhaps size, or deformity thanks to the
saturated accumulation of my perceptual and
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cultural history, as it is to maintain that I also
undergo expression and address as if at a and seen; so visual perception continues to
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 psycho-
analysis.38 When the former argued, in Le Visible
et linvisible, that the psychology of percep- perceives them, as pathe. This does not mean
tion must be rethought in order to better show that the body is eo ipso passive. It argues that the
that the crises of psychology result from reasons
of principle and not from some delay of the
research in this or that particular domain,39 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-Ponty 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.40
29
bergo
Having extended classical phenomenological
bracketing to an inter-space of feeling and
touching, Merleau-Ponty hesitated over
Husserls concept of a subject-pole, such that
while the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is
remains free to look at things, even discounte-
by things.41 Despite its expansion, perception
(still understood pre-eminently as vision) lives
out reciprocal geometries or vectors between seer
operate at a (metaphoric) level close to objectify-
ing consciousness. As a different perception,
sensibility can, but need not, share visions
cognitive-objectifying quality. If visual dimen-
sions 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
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 pathe:
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, notebook VI 26, p. 42b)
Every aspect of embodied existence, so far as
it reaches consciousness, moves within an
indeterminate interstice between being-affected
(Merleau-Pontys 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?
 the face in levinas
Both Merleau-Ponty and Levinas will argue
that c a veille; something that is not a full-blown
subject keeps watch, is aware, however faintly,
even as we drift off to sleep.42 And this para-
subject is irreducibly responsive, that is,
passive. Such was the legacy of classical phenom-
enology: 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,
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it instinctively attracts . . . and the Ego reacts
kinaesthetically, as an immediate reaction
(Husserl, MS B III, notebook 3, p. 5a; emphasis
added).43
Following the extensive criticism of his early
Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time
(190405, then 1910) as paradoxical and formal-
ist, Husserl proceeded to investigate modalities
of passivity, including bodily experiences of
values, abstracted from the conscious will to cognition.45 By implication, it is possible to be
which his teacher Brentano had assigned them.
In this twenty-year 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 life-philosophies
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;
emphasis added). Yet, despite this work of
prioritization, Husserl refrained from psycho-
biological speculation on meaning as the produc-
tion 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 inten-
tionality, 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 hatred44 in short, toward the genesis of
evaluations.
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 sponta-
neous flight, during which we identify and
recognize our feeling of fear. Yet strangely,
Husserls claim for the sensuous-affective neu-
trality of intentionality, as the sheer aiming of
consciousness (modelled on vision and logically
prerequisite to the appearance of an object),
comes into question the moment we acknowledge
the interpenetration of sensation, emotion and
affected pre-intentionally to feel mal dans
sa peau, anxious (OB 10709) while in
proximity to another (OB 8889), whether we
thereupon see him/her, or not. Seeing race, sex,
or some trait is not requisite to the suscep-
tiveness46 to others, which Levinas argues is the
root of our intersubjective responsibility for
another. If this is the case, then Levinass
concepts of being-for-the-other and substi-
tution flow out of Husserls own conundrum
about the dual birth of time consciousness as a
primal embodied impression, structured almost
spontaneously by the ongoing flow of intention-
ality. 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.47
The primal impression corresponds to the life
of consciousness-as-body. Arguably, it is the
matter thanks to which we experience percep-
tual life as moving, changing, and thus as
30

a temporalizing flow. Why, then, should these
immanent, sense- or drive-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
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content of sensation. The moment of the
original temporal position is naturally noth-
ing 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 events time-points from
the actually present now continuously
expands . . . (PCIT x31, 7071; emphasis
added)
The upwelling now moments of sensibility,
as pathe, 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 mean-
ingful 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 misconcep-
tions. In any case, self-modifying bodily sensa-
tions, entering and distending in the flow of
consciousness, constitute a sort of pre-conscious-
ness in process. This corresponds to Levinass
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.
31
bergo
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,
Levinass distinction (which applies also to the
face) between eventing pre-conscious sensa-
tions, which occur adverbially, 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 inflected, in so far as it passes through
sensibility? This is likely, but it is not Levinass
concern. For him, the impact of the other is a
unique sort of adverbial, an iterative modaliza-
tion 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 illus-
trations in something like Levinasian
moments. One such moment occurred, with
great drama, in the life of the French actress and
member of the resistance Charlotte Delbo. Delbo
wrote about it twenty years later in her book
Auschwitz and After.48
One of the situations she describes is a typical
line-up at Raisko, the womens camp in
Auschwitz. It is winter, 1943 or again, as
Delbo writes, it is a cafe in Paris, in which she
relives the moment with the uncanny intensity
and through the mnemonic filter that makes
possible (yet how?) 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,
 the face in levinas
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
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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 dogs fangs in my own
throat.49
The devastating moment illustrates the sense
of substitution, with its sensuous saturation and
its now as remembrance or as a recollected human-like murder and recognition; recall the
now that inverts the usual 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 dogs fangs the SS? Or was it their interweave? Whatever it
in my throat. The challenge of thematizing this
scene, whose intensity 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 sensuous force, an efficacy related neither to sex
self-resuscitates. Yet something still distin-
guishes the then from the now. Is it the norms (history). Morally or practically terrifying,
concentration of the temporal lag of becoming-
conscious? Is it the conceptual overlay?
Important here is the raw, virtual state of
nature, engineered by the camps not as
the heuristical dramatique des phenomenes of
political philosophies but as the impossibility of
hope. This scene, though different from Kerteszs
food ration, comes to pass in a situation in which
the usual protections of culture, norms, habits
our historic inheritance have been as degraded
as possible. Can culture and habit be neutralized?
Not enduringly so yet again, we may wonder
what allows culture and norms to unfold anew.
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, ineradic-
able, and through which we perceive something
like the astonishing range of human ways.
For Delbo, Levinass 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 her own flesh-
unto-death. In the viscous substance of the
winters 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 fulfils or exacerbates
prisoners friend Bobbie, a dog, and the last
Kantian in Nazi Germany.50 I believe that
something, neither verbal nor simply gestural,
set the SSs dog into motion. Was it the womans
gaze, or something the dog sensed in the body of
was, the face, there, was simply some protrud-
ing shoulder blades, whose trace survived for
decades in Delbos memory. And what was
seen was not, really; yet it carried a
or race (perceptual objects), nor to culture and
there came to pass, there, a sort of perceiving or
sensing that undermined object-interpretations.
Hence the oneiric character the thick, passive
now, out of time 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 percep-
tion. Levinas and Merleau-Ponty understood this,
each in their respective ways. The one privileged
32
 bergo

the weaving of body-flesh and world-flesh. The
other focused on the intersubjective blend called
the one-for-the-other, whose external cognate
was expression, in faces, shoulders, even 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 the other who interrupts me
affectively, from that of another whom I identify
by a quality, much less by a name. It is their
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Consequently, it points toward a history both
personal and forgotten. Husserl ventured strik-
ingly that, in studying association, he was
elaborating a phenomenology of the uncon-
scious.53 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 impos-
sible.54 In slightly more than a decade, Husserl
changed his position. He was no longer even

reciprocal tension, and the movement between certain that time-consciousness continued to flow
them, that are phenomenologically interesting. indefinitely, past a certain point in our distant
It might be that Delbo among others did past. Perhaps time, too, sank abysmally, dissol-
experience other such scenes, and either fled ving in a night beyond compare.55
those, forgot or refused them. How much do we It should be clear that the conjunction of
recall of instants wherein our field of vision is a personal history and the configurations of
momentarily overwhelmed by something, a back, sensuous traces require us to think, together, the
a coat or a face, which inverts our outward-aiming senses of a face as interruption and as a thing
intentionality? To answer this would require that we cognize as raced or sexed object-others.
we work with other concepts, notably psycho- These belong to different levels and times
analytic repression, screen memories, association, of consciousness, an acceptable solution when we
and the imagination. But these draw us toward a recall how much of what comes readily to mind
realm, alongside phenomenological description, is, seconds before, apparently just latent.
that proceeds on distinctions like the normal and The two-fold solution that Levinas proposes to
the pathological. the question about a conceptual vs. a sensuous
In 1925, Husserl presented the outlines of a a priori is substitution. The term denotes
phenomenology of spontaneous association. the experiential embodied fluidity of perception
He broke down the comparative movement as other-in-the-same and, as if through
of associated images, as if mentally superimposed the implications of our embodiment, actual
on each other, showing how it is we speak of predication: this-sign-in-the-place-of-that-X. The
metaphoric lines of resemblance and dissem- common root would be passive embodiment
blance. He noted that the limit lay in advancing a and the affective impact on us of the other, of
causal explanation of association; why it is, say, the face. As Freud had argued about dreams,56
that one stream of lights perceived now from a symbolic production like a fantasy or a dream
a bridge should spontaneously evoke a different though they appear to be like confused thoughts
vision of a trail of lights with no clear time and thus of a higher order than reflexes or
markings but without clouding the ongoing drives is a functional way of protecting sleep.
perception.51 The how of association lent Some activity of consciousness would thus be
itself to phenomenological description; less so, serving a vaster intelligence called a healthy
the why. This was because the supposed nervous system, etc. Producing and offering
irrationality of association lies in the way in words, engaging in the activity of language,
which non-retentional memory memory no might therefore be similarly rooted in our
longer tied to a lived now endures as embodiment, and in the affective motivations
affective or metonymical trace,52 some part of of intersubjective connections.57 A genealogical
which can activate a group of perceptions reading of Levinas would set affective substitu-
otherwise lost to consciousness. Association tion as temporally prior to the substitution of one
turns on a profoundly passive sedimentation of signifier for another. Language, as discourse,
memories, a waking stimulus, and something would arise from spontaneous address, speaking-
like affective imagination, bound up with these. to another, and what Levinas called sensation

33
 the face in levinas
and affect getting-out-of-phase [dephasage]
with themselves.58 Again, that is the dynamic
difference between feeling and felt: our ongoing
feeling becoming conscious thanks to tiny shifts
in what is felt. Those differences motivate
perceptual identifications (regarde maman, un
Negre . . .) as readily as they account for the
interweave of flowing structured consciousness
bearing and preserving intense now
moments.59 This is an important reading because
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it grasps the distinctiveness of the modalities of
consciousness.
A more horizontal reading would emphasize
the amphibology Levinass term for casting being incarnate, in the face.
in either of two possible directions60 between
affective pre-consciousness and intentional cogni-
tive activity. This reading might diminish our
scepticism about perceiving expression before
identifying a face as this race, that class, or that
X, which is a doubt born, above all, of the passion
to keep our critical focus on the non-conscious
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
Levinass spontaneous, enacted good. Before
the vastness of cynical calculation and the
dear self that Kant feared was always
behind an apparently ethical act, dissolving
an idea like the humane good might be a
realistic choice. Certainly, palaeo-linguistics
cannot prove that the origin of language is
dialogical; and phenomenology is a lonesome
archaeologist.
Yet the debate about a prioris and first
conditions of possibility depends on the regres-
sive forgetfulness of embodied intersubjectivity.
We need 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 the good. As Levinas argued, against
Hegel and rationalism broadly conceived: 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, unre-
presentable, and en-fleshed (OB 122).61
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
through sensibility-affectivity. It preserves the
otherness or surprising upsurge of sensibility
within. However, the reading loses the Other
without. It loses, in a word,
Levinass point of departure, and
his sense of an imageless image
of the possible62 both of these
notes
1 Jean-Franc ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases
in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988; French
original 1983).
2 Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de captivite, suivi de
ecrits sur la captivite et notes philosophiques diverses,
vol. I, eds. Jean-Luc Marion, Rudolph Calin
and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Grasset, 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 adaequatio 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 simultane-
ity as the time, or temporality, for the interrup-
tion by the other: an I would thus be
simultaneously conscious and affectively
wrenched out of the complacency of its intentional
consciousness. See Carnets de captivite 409ff.
4 The two great works of Levinas, respectively:
Totality and Infinity: Essay on Exteriority, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999;
French original 1961); Otherwise than Being, or:
Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998; French original
1974). HereafterTI and OB in the text.
5 To resolve the tension that asks: which really is
first? ^ linguistic meaning, sentences, or narrativ-
ity, explaining and grounding our concepts? ^ or
a broadly understood perceptual experience
apt to root human language in human bodies
34

and intersubjectivity? Levinas steers a course
between phenomenology and phrases, phenom-
enology and history; and finally, phenomenology
and writing itself.
6 Respectively, in TI, and then in OB. See n. 4
above.
7 See OB, chapter II: Intentionality and Sensing,
21^59; also chapter III: Sensibility and Proximity,
esp. 75^97.
8 The term comes from Michel Henry; see,
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among others, his Genealogy of Psychoanalysis,
trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford UP,1993);
French original: Genealogie de la psychanalyse:
Le Commencement perdu (Paris: PUF,1985).
9 OB 69 n. 3
10
In transforming solitude into a form of Being
in the world, Heidegger does not allow
himself to see in solitude 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.
11 Levinas, On Escape/De lEvasion, trans. B. Bergo
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 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.
12 Charles Baudelaire,Lettre a' Narcisse Ancelle,
Paris, 30 June 1845.
13 Didier Franck proposes variations on this
expression, citing Levinass own Preface toTotality
and Infinity (TI 28) in Francks collection of essays,
Dramatique des phenome'nes (Paris: PUF, 2001) 93,
100,118. In his Preface, Levinas writes:
we come upon events that cannot be
described as noeses aiming at noemata,
nor as active interventions realizing pro-
jects . . . 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. (TI 28 n. 2)
35
bergo
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.
14 Compare this, from the 1930s, with Levinass
remarks about intoxication and escape in OB
87 n. 21 (in the English version, the note is at 192):
It is perhaps by reference to this irremissibil-
ity [of responsibility] that the strange place
of illusion, intoxication, artificial paradises
can be understood. The relaxation in intoxi-
cation is a semblance of distance and irre-
sponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity,
or a murder of the brother [fantasized].
The possibility of going off measures the
distance between dream and wakefulness.
Dream and illusion are the play of a con-
sciousness come out of obsession, touching
the other without being assigned to him.
15 See, for example,TI197 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 resis-
tance 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 circumvent-
ing 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 pro-
motes my freedom, by arousing my
goodness.
16 Levinass appraisals of the concept of correla-
tion vary. InTI he ventures, at one point:
Irreversibility [in the relationship between
the other and me] does not only mean that
 the face in levinas
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 36)
17 TI 40. Levinas writes: We propose to call
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religion the bond that is established between
the same and the other without constituting
a totality.
18 Epistemologically, both Heidegger and Levinas
provide informal phenomenological genealogies
of what have been interpreted, by their authors,
as religious experiences: 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, inde-
finitely endured and repeated, of existence as
anticipation and stretching-forward, and of inter-
ruption by something I cannot grasp, which calls
me in a way nothing else can summon.
19 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. That
is one possible meaning of Levinass emphasis on
tradition in his Carnets (La Pensee de lorigine ^
cest la tradition).
20 See Marle'ne Zarader, The Unthought
Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage, trans.
B. Bergo (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006) Part II,
chapter 2:
Levinass constant reduction of Heideggers
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 Heideggers Being with its
other. (142)
21 Imre Kertesz, Kaddish for an Unborn Child
(New York: Vintage, 2004); Hungarian original
published1990, 41^ 42. Kertesz subsequently quali-
fies Teachers 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. (46)
Clearly, Kertesz wants to connect human
freedom, and beautifully so, to the exceptional
act, which continues to see it from Kerteszs
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
Teachers was a natural and decent human gesture
(47; emphasis added), to which he adds these
words upset me . . . all my emotions suddenly com-
pacting, becoming almost uncomfortably imma-
nent and confused. Neither answer, per se, is the
right one. The difficulty is attempting to grasp
the exceptional gesture; finding a level of experi-
ence to which to attribute it.
22 In Levinas, Alterite et transcendance, Preface
Pierre Hayat (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1995)
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.
23 Georges Didi-Huberman, Le Cube et le visage.
Autour dune sculpture dAlberto Giacometti (Paris:
Macula,1993) 13; my trans.; emphasis in original.
24 ThusTI:
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 . . . (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,
36

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. (81)
25 TI 66 ^ 67.
26 Ibid. 67.
27 Ibid. 295.
28 See Levinas,Intentionalite et sensation [1965]
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in En decouvrant lexistence avec Husserl et Heidegger,
3rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1982) 143^ 62, 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 letre],
absorbed in the Being [dans letre] that it ima-
gines it grasps, assures us a culture that func-
tions in a satisfying fashion. Yet, ignoring
its [own] ignorances [ignorances] this aiming
is unconscious and irresponsible. Open to
all interpretations and without defences,
it can be cheated [flouee]. 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 it 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
[lenchevetrement] . . . An original and neutral
terrain is necessary, which is found, for Husserl,
in the depths of intersubjectivity, where all
meanings ^ those of interiority, exteriority,
corporeity, spirituality, etc. ^ shine with
their first light of sense . . . (My trans. and
emphasis)
English abridged edition, Discovering Existence with
Husserl, trans. Michael B. Smith and Richard A.
Cohen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1998).
Hereafter EDEHH.
29 However, Didier Franck has done this beauti-
fully in his LUn pour lautre: Levinas et la signification
37
bergo
(Paris: PUF, 2007), to whom I am indebted for his
analyses. See, for example, chapters 7 and 8:
Contact et proximite and Le Retard de la
conscience 77^95.
30 Emmanuel Levinas, Reality and its Shadow
[1948] in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1993) 8;
emphasis added. Hereafter RIS.
31 Ibid. 6.
32 OB 48, 49.
33 My emphasis here.Could it be that, for Levinas,
to be pulled into the future, as we are, while
observing a horrible accumulation of human disas-
ters, induces aestheticized 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-con-
scious perception, is a tool of choice for ideology
or for critique.
34 My emphasis here. The ambivalence of these
created universes perhaps evoked the mimesis of
the golem, theTower, or a self-proclaimed messiah.
35 RIS 5.
36 Ibid.
37 Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs (Paris:
Seuil, 1952) 90. In English, Black Skin,White Masks
(1967). As Achille Mbembe writes: Il nexiste plus
que par son arraisonnement et son assignation
dans un echeveau de significations qui le depassent
[he no longer exists other than by his being
inspected and assigned to a tangle of significations
that surpass him] in De la sce'ne coloniale chez
Frantz Fanon, Corpus 58.4 (2007) 43^ 44.
38 Among other things, Merleau-Pontys lectures
on passivity, delivered at the Colle'ge de France in
1955 after lectures on the phenomenological sense
of Stiftung, or institution, must have been known
to Levinas, as Merleau-Ponty was slated to serve
on Levinass doctorat detat jury, just before his
death in 1961. See his LInstitution dans lhistoire
personnel et publique; le proble'me de la passivite,
le sommeil, linconscient, la memoire: notes de
cours au Colle'ge de France, 1954^195, eds.
Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort et al.
(Paris: Belin, 2003).
39 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the
Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans.
 the face in levinas
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
UP, 1968; original first published in 1964) 23.
Hereafter VI.
40 Ibid.138; emphasis added.
41 Ibid.139; emphasis added.
42 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, LInstitution/La Passivite:
Notes de cours 195^97; Levinas will say, as early as
1946:
The distinction between attention, which
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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 vigilance of insomnia
which keeps our eyes open has no subject.
(See Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,
2001) 61^ 62)
43 I owe these Husserl sources to James R.
Mensch, whose research in the Husserl Archives
resulted in Embodiment: From the Body to the Body
Politic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2009).
44 See Jocelyn Benoist: LIntentionalite et les
valeurs in Les Limites de lintentionalite: Recherches
phenomenologiques et analytiques (Paris: Vrin, 2005)
155^56. Referring to Husserls complex two-step
approach to an object, possessed of a (judgement
of) value, in the early work Phenomenological
Investigations (1900 ^ 01), Benoist points out that
non-objectifying acts, such as love and
hatred for example, certainly have an
object . . . The question is then one of know-
ing whence my hatred draws its object.
Is hatred ^ and affective attitudes in
general ^ capable of giving itself an object
by itself? Brentanos thesis, as also that of
Husserl, is No: . . . another sort of act must
give to hatred the hated object. (My trans.)
45 See Didier Franck,Au-dela' de la phenomeno-
logie in Dramatique des phenome'nes 105^23, esp.
121ff. See also, Renaud Barbaras, Introduction a'
une phenomenologie de la vie (Paris: Vrin, 2008),
Introduction 8 ^15 and Existence et
Incarnation esp. 68 ^77.
46 Levinas, OB122.
47 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the
Consciousness of Internal Time (1893^1917), trans.
John Barnett Brough (The Hague: Kluwer, 1991)
x31: Primal Impression and the Objective
Individual Time-Point 66 ^71 (70). Hereafter PCIT.
48 Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans.
Rosette C. Lamont (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995;
originally published separately as Aucun de nous
ne reviendra (Paris: Minuit, 1970)), English version
28 ^29.
49 Ibid.
50 Levinas, The Name of a Dog, or Natural
Rights in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism,
trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1990; French original 1963) see 153.
51 Edmund Husserl, Troisie'me section:
LAssociation in De la synthe'se passive: Logique
transcendantale et constitutions originaires, trans.
Bruce Begout et Jean Kessler (Grenoble:
Millon, 1998) 191^251; see here Chapt. 2: Le
Phenome'ne de laffection esp. 221. Hereafter
SP. English version: Analyses Concerning Passive
and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 2001).
52 Ibid. 223.
53 Ibid. 221.
Thus, the following question . . .: do not affec-
tion 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 that
are 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 trans.)
38
 bergo

54 PCIT, Appendix 9,122^23.

55 SP 236.
56 And Merleau-Ponty brings this out in his lec-
ture on dreaming and delirium as extreme modes
of passivity; see Institution/La Passivite 206 ^57.
57 Merleau-Ponty writes, in Institution/La
Passivite 210:

No actual words in dreams, nor actual calcu-

lation, which suppose subsumption and not
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coexistence. The word used as word-plays,

the utilization of a ready-made symbolic,
the echoes in language (violet and to violate),
[all] appear very artificial to the interpreter
who is awake; it is rather that we need
to place ourselves back into the ebb and
flow [maree] of oneiric consciousness in
which words are things . . . Signification, an other
intentionality. (My trans. and emphasis)

This is precisely Levinass argument about signifi-

cation and affectivity; words and things.
58 OB 29ff.
59 As Levinas wrote in 1965:

. . . intentionality implying thematiza-

tion . . . 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 [secartait] from its coinci-
dence with itself, it would be neither temporal,
nor conscious through a simple temporality.
(EDEHH 223; my trans. and emphasis)

60 OB 42.
61 The words humanite and inhumanite are in
italics in the French original.
62 The expression refers to Adornos only possi-
ble bridge, today (in the 1960s), between a pri-
vate ethics and an ethical politics. See his Problems
Bettina Bergo
of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Departement de philosophie
Thomas Schroder (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000; Universite de Montreal
originally published 1963). These were lectures C.P. 6128 Succursale Centre-ville
given on Kantian ethics, and beyond; at times, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7
they come quite close to Levinass descriptions Canada
of responsibility. E-mail: bettina.bergo@umontreal.ca

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