Man and Worm 29:1-17, 1996. (~) 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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How best to keep a secret? On love and respect in Levinas" "Phenomenology o f Eros ,,1
JEFFREY D. BLOECHL
Edelzangerslaan 56/44, 3010 Kessel-Lo, Belgium
What then was he to do when Diotima at one moment embraced him, and at another irritably declared that, living with him, a person with a soul had no f r e e d o m ? . . . All of a sudden he was expected to discriminate clearly between that Eros in whom the spirit o f love floats free, unhampered by base desires, and downright sexuality.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. II.
Ethics and egoism "To love," says Levinas, "is to fear for the other, to come to the aid of his weakness" (233). And yet it also "pleases itself, is both pleasure and egoism." (244) This is surely troubling: is my love in fact no more than an especially complex form of self-interest or - and only Levinas could make us ask this question - is even self-interest a disparate form of concern for the one that I love? It is, of course, possible to reject both of these alternatives at once, pointing out that they share a common and fatal pretense to doing away with the very distinction that lends meaning to the two terms in question. To conflate egoism and love would thus be to render both terms meaningless. Love, one could then insist, demands a sacrifice which egoism refuses to make. And, contrarily, without the possibility of that sacrifice, love itself is unthinkable. As convincing as this move seems, it still does nothing to dispel the impression that the love I bear another person first requires a modification of my own self-interests. The question is therefore not so much whether love can be distinguished from egoism as whether and when I can rightly do so: how much o f what I myself ascribe to love is not in fact motivated by one or another selfish desire? Might this not hold even for what seem to me my most
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selfless acts? Sartre, for one, was willing to pursue this line to the very end: in love, the lover wants to be 'the whole world' for the beloved. This means that he puts himself on the side of the world; it is he who assumes and symbolizes the world; he is a this which includes all other thises. He is and consents to being an object. But on the other hand, he wants to be the object in which the other's freedom consents to lose itself....2 Love, according to Sartre, is thus one of two possible attitudes I can adopt when the freedom out of which I have been giving meaning to m y life runs up against that of someone else. Confronted by an other person, I try either to submit him to m y intentions - ultimately, a sadistic venture - or to make myself accommodate his. And the latter, masochism, remains nonetheless governed by my own drives and inner constitution. In Being and Nothingness, selfless love is considered a myth. Moreover, human relations emerge there as irreducibly violent, a matter of ceaseless contestation. Totality andlnfinity challenges precisely this sort of argument. The manner in which it tries to do so proceeds not by way of blunt rejection, but instead through a deepening of earlier phenomenological analyses ofintersubjectivity until uncovering a radical alterity which they are then said to have excluded or suppressed in a commitment to identity and reflexivity. Beyond Husserl's descriptions o f the ego and alter ego relation in which, says Levinas, the other person is merely another subject with whom I can identify and then communicate, there is the asymmetry of the 'T' approached by an other from beyond all comprehension. And anterior to Sartre's conflict between mutually irreducible freedoms, there is the other whose face expresses an otherness transcending every effort contributing to my drive for an autonomy to be achieved by mastering everything I meet. The face o f the other, in short, arrives from outside all meaning. It is the self-expression of an othemess unassimilable to my situation and concems. As such, it places everything I have been doing from and for myself in question. These, Levinas thus argues, comprise a circuit which closes itself to true alterity-closed, then, to the other person precisely as other. My speech, for instance, departs from an intention and takes up certain words available to me in our common language, but without ever touching or accounting for the other. The face, awakening me to a relation wider than any o f this, is therefore the first word of ethics. It is a call to a responsibility that is ultimate and, as Levinas will argue, constant. Like Being and Nothingness, Totality and Infinity develops an analysis of human life which considers it to begin from the experience of freedom and self-concem. But unlike that earlier book, Totality and Infinity undermines this experience first by arguing that the Sartrean conviction that one can base
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an ordered view of the world on an absolutely free subject leads only to the contradiction o f providing oneself with one's own grounds, and secondly by charging that in any case Sartre has not sufficiently appreciated what it is that makes the other person truly other) These two claims are of a single piece: according to Levinas, the arbitrariness of basing oneself on one's own freedom is corrected only by the self-expression of the other person whose othemess exceeds my capacity to grasp or even give meaning to it. True freedom, as opposed to mere resistance to any claim from outside, begins in salvation from what would then become endless flight. It is, says Levinas, "invested" in what announces itself to me in the face of the other. In that face, I am confronted both with the fact that the self-centered life I have been living is false - that the very act of beginning from myself, seemingly unavoidable, already closes me to the othemess of the other - and, thus at the same time, with an otherness which, prior to any such move from myself, is therefore absolutely fundamental. Even the error of my ways presupposes an unspeakable truth. And only on the basis of insight into that truth can argumentation and analysis pretend to lasting coherence. Henceforth, Levinas' philosophy pits the originality of that asymmetric relation and its consequences against all forms of thinking leading away from there. The othemess of the other person is radical. It is beyond all question of understanding or anticipating. Everything that 1 think or say or do falls short and even suppresses it. My every act and even my appearance presuppose the otherness of the other, which in that sense is closer to me than I am to myself. I am, in short, that which responds to this other who faces me. And unless I wish to subvert what the face thus teaches me is my true character, I must now live in such a way as to embrace that responsibility. To do otherwise would be not only irresponsible - though this, too, since it would involve disregard of the othemess o f the o t h e r - b u t also simply inhuman. From this perspective, philosophies leading in such another direction would be guilty of promoting violence.
The feminine equivocation As is well known, all of this is accomplished on the basis ofa phenomenology o f the ethical appeal. According to Levinas, such an appeal is made when the face of the other breaks into an egocentrism which suppresses but also presupposes his or her othemess. A moment ago, I was the unquestioned locus o f everything that I encountered; now, suddenly, I am faced from beyond that entire sphere. The event o f being faced is, to borrow a frequent expression of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, a "trauma." Not only am I not alone and not the sole beneficiary of the fruits of the earth, but this was never the
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case. Here, in contrast, is my truth: that the othemess of the other is beyond comprehension withdraws him or her from any sort of use or subordination. This calls for respect. The other is that which I can neither use nor consume without flatly denying what is most distinctive about him or her. The otherness o f the other is presupposed in everything I do. His or her face, expressing that othemess to me as my first principle, deprives me of any further excuse for what I now know was self-concern and even self-indulgence. For Levinas, the face is thus more than simply enlightening. Approaching me from outside of everything I can know and use or even recognize, the other person, a s other, is defined by a lack o f any such thing. The strangeness of this person is also a poverty. Henceforth, I am not merely to know that there before and while I live and eat and work the other person has already inhabited the world I thus took as my own. More than this, I must also know that that life presupposes someone else's dire need. The face of the other is a lesson about myself, but it is also an appeal for help. This explains why Levinas says that the appeal is also a command: if I am first and always in relation with the other person, and if that person's otherness appears to me as destitute, then my relating to him or her must take the form of serving his or her many needs before attending to my own. And, since that otherness is beyond comprehension, the need that it entails is infinite. According to Levinas, I am defined by a command to responsibility which is unlimited and endless. Responsibility, the very definition of individual identity, is not only a phenomenological limit-concept; it is also an imperative. This event occurs at the initiative of the other. The concept of the "face" refers both to a form and an event. It is both static and dynamic, both this fleshy surface with eyes and nose and mouth, and the act in which it turns toward me. Surprisingly enough, both such dimensions belong to the essence of Levinas' overall argument: the encounter with radical othemess which defies even anticipation - that is, any form of initiative beginning from the ego depends on a prior withdrawal of that otherness from its own manifestation. There must, of course, be an entry into my experience. But that entry cannot exhaust alterity. Experience cannot grasp the other as other. In the event o f being faced, the corporeal face is what confronts me, what I recognize, what makes the experience intelligible. And what I recognize there is the self-expression o f an othemess already beyond my reach in a sense that things or words are not. The face, as expression, is excessive. It is expression overflowing the limits o f what can be said or heard and hence understood, rendered in my own terms. It is this incarnation, this coming to light, testing the very limits of incamation and light, which also allows the other person, as other, to withdraw from anything I could make of him or her. In this sense, the flesh alone is merely that which is left behind as the otherness of
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the other withdraws from contact and appropriation. It is the surface of an approach which is already a retreat. Meeting the other in the flesh is like jaws snapping together where one had expected to find bread. It is shocking, wholly unexpected. It is also the arrival of the appeal, the event of being commanded. And, since only thus does someone enter my awareness as an other person, it is the necessary condition for sexual desire and love. A certain negative evaluation of these latter terms and experiences is thus in view from the outset. From the perspective of radical responsibility, my taking hold of the other such as he or she makes it possible for me to do so, compromises his or her absolute othemess. Yet this is unavoidable for both of us, and it occurs instantaneously. To be precise, my relation with, for example, m y wife, begins as she manifests herself from beyond manifestation and as I appropriate what thus appears. The face, her appearance in an image already submitted to my possession and interest, is therefore not only self-expression but also falsification or betrayal. Let us mark this strange lack of decision in Levinas, first in anticipation of the fact that he will soon argue that it is precisely this that makes possible the erotic, and secondly because he will soon install it at the root of his analysis. From there, one also recognizes the strategic importance of that analysis for an entire book given over largely to a study o f the human face: in the face, writes Levinas, "the essentially hidden throws itself toward the light without becoming signification" 234). But what nonetheless reaches the light is already in my grasp, the captive of my gaze. The face, according to his famous formulation, is a "trace. ''4 It is both the other and not the other, and it is both mine and not mine. Hence does the ethical imperative arrive, but from wholly beyond my reach. Hence, too, is there an erotic dimension in a relationship where I am always moving toward and taking possession of what can neither be grasped nor exhausted. Levinas' "Phenomenology o f Eros" develops the exposure entailed in other's withdrawal from me in terms of his or her vulnerability, fragility and even frailty. And on that basis he speaks of the "feminine face." The other person who expresses herself such that I am able to understand - the other person who has a face - does indeed command me, but only by entering m y world and in that sense submitting to my intentions. She is someone to whom I have already responded, and thus someone who gives herself to me. Facing me, she is both forceful and accommodating. But - let us pose this question immediately - what can this latter claim represent if not a desire to have someone there for me alone and without any concerns of his or her own and this according to a logic exempting either of us from responsibility? How is this not pure fantasy, the insistence of a desire which masquerades as an articulation of the true order of things? Such questions are, if anything, fortified by a look back at an earlier passage in Totality and Infinity where
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"Woman" (la Femme) is explicitly aligned with hospitality and the general function o f making my sojourn in the world a comfortable one. 5 Who is this Woman without a care of her own not derived from mine? To be sure, Levinas attributes the feminine face and this strange notion of womanhood to men as well as women. Perhaps, then, it is less a matter of sexual difference than of the status and organization of individual desire. 6 Quite simply, one wonders about Levinas' assurance that even a single dimension of the other's manner of relating to me is entirely devoid of any form of self-interest. And one cannot help noticing that this comes to the aid of his argument against the fundamental legitimacy o f any self-interest on my part. In any event, he aligns the feminine with the equivocation of what is at once pressing and hospitable: "The simultaneity or the equivocation of this fragility and this weight of n o n s i g n i f y i n g n e s s . . , we will call femininity" (234). As feminine, the face is both the other person at my mercy and the other person beyond my reach. In those eyes I read both helplessness and the impossibility of touching it. Moreover, this helplessness and this impossibility appear to me only after the fact of the self-expression of the other person in a face already submitted to my initiative. The feminine equivocation of the face consists in the irreducible ambiguity of a possession at once impossible and unavoidable, beyond my desire and yet already its object. In the extreme distance o f the other, there is nonetheless an intimacy; and in the other's retreat, there is a hint of seduction. My desire is already underway. Knowing my responsibility and sensing the opportunity for certain pleasures, I have already made the face my own. And yet there is infinitely more. Such is the allure of the other: beyond that flesh and those eyes, there is always something which I can never see or touch, yet whose very hiddenness and inaccessibility frustrates me in my egoism, thus causing it to awaken to myself and requiring me to take possession of what I am. This is the impossibility of desire for an other person. It knows itself for what it is and it knows that its object is no object at all, and yet it carries on. The other whom I can not know or have is the other whom I love. At such points as this, where one might well expect to find the word "desire," Levinas often speaks of "love" (aimer, l'amour). This is not by chance or mistake. The "Phenomenology of Eros" need not concern itself with the possible differences between blind instinct, desire, and love because it has no place for thinking a self-interest because what first matters is simply that each of these serves the self before the other. Any such differences are immaterial to the fundamental, ethical question. It will be necessary to return to this, but for now let us merely note that for Levinas life itself tends toward closure from the otherness of the other person. However, far from viewing this as a problem, he considers this the original structure of the ethical relation.
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The otherness of the other remains absolute because I am therefore such that I can never touch it. As we have seen, it is only at the initiative of the other that I can become aware of this relation, and the event in which this occurs is for me traumatic. This move has certainly improved Levinas' capacity to address the ethical difficulties embodied in Being and Nothingness, but not without the risk o f gravely underestimating the complexity of egoic life. Other than a prior commitment to the absolute otherness of the other person, what justifies his assumption that the life of the ego is egocentric? This question, to which there will be occasion to return, must be posed not merely to the eleven pages on eros, but to the entire argument o f Totality and lnfinity, which from the beginning builds on and defends as its central axiom that radical separation of a self-enclosed ego and absolute alterity or, to use Levinas' synonym, "exteriority." It is this affirmation that determines that every act and intention which begins from me cannot be otherwise than egocentric and that the ultimate, ethical meaning o f that egocentrism is to be discerned only upon the arrival of what is revealed in the face of the other. In terms of the "Phenomenology o f Eros," this means that it will have been determined in advance that drive, desire, and even love will have always presupposed a radical responsibility which, upon reaching their limit, they can only confirm. It is clear, however, that this single analysis represents somewhat more than an especially clear example among the many facets of human life. Addressing those experiences in which human life is at its most passionately self-interested, the "Phenomenology of Eros" contains Levinas' attempt to find the proof of his own convictions precisely where they seem most sorely tested. Beyond mere concern with comprehensiveness, what is really at stake here is the salience of Levinas' entire argument. Let us then suspend all questions surrounding his troubling lack of attention to differences that seem to us essential, and instead follow the argument which it licenses until those questions become unavoidable. 7 To summarize that argument thus far: the otherness of the other whom I love is beyond ever grasping - it is a secret which I will never know - because it precedes and conditions all knowing, all sensing and even all desiring. Erotic love is individual desire born from and aiming toward the face of the other. It is irremissible egoism testing its own limits.
P r o f a n a t i o n a n d the c a r e s s
Facing me, the other person is exposed to me as other. In a single event, the other both becomes available to me and withdraws from me. That gesture, ethically brutal, still is not without something in it for me. The distance of
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the other is also a presence which intrigues me. How am I to interpret this, the fact that I am already involved? Levinas calls this sense in which the dispossession o f my egocentrism is first a possession of something more, "profanation." At the moment in which I catch sight of my lover's face, the beloved (l'Aim~e - Levinas no doubt intends the past participle as well as the substantive), has already offered herself to me. As entrance into my experience from beyond its reach, as offering to me in my solitude, the face has a tenderness which is inviting, perhaps even promising. My solitude is invaded by discontent. I am no longer satisfied with food, clothing, and shelter, but now want precisely what I cannot have. Thus interrupting what had been indiscriminate hunger only to stimulate me to new heights, the face o f the other person institutes erotic desire. I now become daring, seeking what lies beyond m y reach. I "indulge myself in compassion, am absorbed in the self-indulgence [la complaisance] of the caress" (235). Aroused, I am at the service of a desire which, in pursuit of what it can never have, is only intensified by whatever purchase it may gain on the body of my lover. There is always more. Mine is a hunger driven forward into oblivion, beyond all reason and defying the limits of the here and now. "The caress consists in seizing on n o t h i n g . . . " (235). Hence is the beloved always virginal. Always already withdrawn from what I make of the trace left behind for me, the otherness of the other whom I love both stimulates that love and eternally eludes it. Acting out of love, I never get beyond the carnal - but neither do I ever cease aiming past it. Caressing m y beloved, I reach for everything but touch only what little is exposed to me. I know that there is a secret, but never that secret itself. This much is afforded me by the other. And it alone presents my drive for satisfaction with an object which it did not invent itself. Without the self-expression of the otherness o f the other, the pursuit of my wishes could never escape arbitrariness. Instead of love, there would only be the shifting sands of blind impulse - and when I tire, only a horror in which I could neither escape from that desiring nor immerse myself in it. Thanks to my beloved, my desire has a fixed point. Life is stable, even if inflamed. I am at home in the world. Hence, too, does m y love feed on itself without simply filling up. To possess the otherness o f the beloved is a mad ambition. It is immune to every attempt to limit it. Love is insatiable, and yet it pursues a single object - or rather, it aims through its object, the beloved, toward what is wholly beyond all objects. 8 This beyond that I seek, the otherness of the other, would thus be infinite and timeless - not one among the many possible futures I might one day see or accomplish, but futurity itself. Erotic desire seeks eternity. It lusts after the absolute. 9 The caress, then, moves toward a secret which is not susceptible to the distinction possible-impossible. In this sense, Levinas
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even goes so far as to deny that the caress is an act. It searches, but never grasps. Caressing my lover, I lose my very identity. I seek what is closer to me than the very self which I take to be my own. No longer thought or use or consumption, my "'intention' no longer moves toward the light, toward meaning. Wholly passion, it shares in the passivity, the suffering, the evanescence of the tender" (237). Caressing my lover, I draw ever closer until we are virtually one. I suffer with her suffering, I am pleased with her pleasure, and I desire her desire. Seeking what I also presuppose, inspired by what I now want to make my own, my movement is thus also a "being moved" (attendrissement).
The intersubjectivity of the drives The desire which meets with and recognizes the face of the other and nonetheless continues to submit that other to i t s e l f - the desire, then, which enjoys the other as other 1~- consists in sensuality, or what Levinas calls "the voluptuous." Love is a self-indulgence, we are led to consider, because it consists in asserting one's own needs even in the face of a command to responsibility, to ethical respect. One knows better, and yet acts for oneself. Here we might pause over what will otherwise have seemed a discordant remark: "Being moved," we read, "is a pity [piti~] . . ." (237). This latter term, of course, has a rich philosophical heritage, especially since Rousseau (inspired by Mandeville), for whom it designates a feeling close to what we now call "compassion." From there it influenced the empiricism of Hume and Smith, both of whom, however, write of a "sympathy" which has less to do with benevolence or altruism than simply with an experience of shared humanity between oneself and this other person here and now. Still later, Nietzsche's G e n e a l o g y o f M o r a l s targets such p i t y - b o t h as a moral sentiment and as an anthropological precept - for having participated in the artificial confinement o f true, uninhibited passion. In addition to this, it is worth noting the clear affinities between the French term piti~ and what we now reserve for the term "piety" - devoutness, fidelity to one's innate obligations. It is a compelling feature of Levinas' study of eros that it enables us to think all o f these definitions at once. The loving caress, at once movement and being moved, aims at what it presupposes from the first. Love, persistence of my neediness when faced by the other, is thus desire inflamed by a hint of what it cannot have. It is an openness beyond every object which nonetheless, as mine, starting from me and therefore finite, closes on one. The beloved becomes the object of my love - becomes my beloved - in opposition to the essential tendency o f love's movement but in agreement with the limited nature of its origin. It is I who desire the other as other, and in so doing I
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cannot help but render othemess as an object satisfying my need. I submit my beloved to an "irresponsible animality,.... the stage of infancy" (241). 11 For me, I and m y beloved are as o n e - and all o f this according to an uninhibited passion which, Levinas tells us, is still not the last word on loving. Love is devotion to the absolutely other under the form of innate fidelity to oneself. Such a position severely curtails any claim for love as an original phenomenon. In view o f his conviction that it is the ethical appeal which causes love to arise where before there had only been brute passion, Levinas reserves little sympathy for the popular vision o f 'love at first sight.' Emotional ties to an other person, no less so than identification, representation, and recollection, only come after the ethical appeal arriving in the face. The appeal which reaches me from wholly beyond reach by any form of anticipation or predisposition offers me only the othemess of the other a s o t h e r - or the secret a s secret. Love, as opposed to animal hunger, expresses the impossibility of ignoring that otherness. Presupposing the call to radical responsibility, love is the ego's incapacity to fulfil it. Love, as it were, accumulates where the absolute relation comes to light without freeing the ego to satisfy its ethical conditions. It is not that I make a place in my life for the beloved, but that the beloved breaks into it with a force and a message I resolve only in - and a s loving her. But this resolution and the allowances which I thus make for the other person cannot be attributed to a decision or effort on my part. As opposed to what Freud or Lacan might have to say on the matter, Levinas' analysis of love separates it from the drive for self-satisfaction not by bounding the latter from within, not by a reorganization of one's own desires in order to account for those o f the other, but according to the arrival of a face which presents one with an absolutely external and therefore infinite demand overriding those private desires. Rather than a working out of my desires in such a way as to accept the other person as someone whose love I wish to have, Levinas thus restricts love to what results from the interruption of base desire by confrontation with what it can never have. In other words, whereas psychoanalysts have tended to interpret love as the expedient of individual drives confronted by something irreducible to their aim but seeming to possess the means for providing gratification, Levinas traces that so-called adjustment strictly to the initiative o f the other person - to the event of being faced. It is not that I bind myself to this one person who can offer me what I so desire, but that the impossibility o f commanding the otherness of that other person stirs me in a way which I can neither control nor satisfy. It is the withdrawal of the other as absolutely other, and not the sense I make o f that otherness which determines my relation to him or her.
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This difference could not be more important for the whole of Levinas' thinking, operating as it does on the premise that the othemess of the other person can reach me from beyond the terms dictated by anything belonging to me or my situation. What sustains this fundamental premise is, of course, the equally indispensable notion that I maintain myself and my situation in a tight circuit o f identifications constituting what Levinas has called "the same." Without an egoism o f extraordinary density - without egocentrism - there can be no doctrine of separation such as guides and reassures every turn in the development of the ethics of radical responsibility culminating in the study of eros. 12 The reduction of egoism to sameness is also a reduction of the life o f desire to a uniformity such as perhaps Levinas alone is willing to defend. Desire, passion, animal hunger, the Freudian drives - all are, according to him, defined by a simple thrust toward satisfying the needs of a self whose discrete identity can therefore be specified, if not indeed localized: I, as myself and not those other selves, am that which presumes itself and its urges to be the center o f the universe. What is accomplished on my initiative thus begins in me and from me and always with the aim of returning to me. The life of the ego is nothing more than an intending which is also a comprehending and thus a consuming. Only as such - blind to the possibility of frustration but therefore running headlong toward it - is the ego traumatizable, or - if we cede this word to L e v i n a s - appealable. Nowhere, then, does he entertain the possibility that "the same," individual life, is itself crossed by an antagonism o f forces, some driving toward full and immediate satisfaction and others trying to impose limits on pursuing that satisfaction, striving instead to avoid the pain of failure or refusal. One immediately foresees the difficulties which that would have entailed: if individual identity is fluid or even intemally conflictual, then it becomes thinkable for me to relate to the other person according to a predisposition which neither my own intervention nor the appeal of the other can change for the simple reason that it involves forces beyond the range of my ego, the principle of my identity. The appeal might well disrupt the life of the ego, but only to reinvigorate the conflict over which it had perhaps managed an uneasy truce. What manifests itself then would not be radical responsibility but the basic structure of my desire. Such would yield an ethics not of original separation and trauma, but instead of an attachment beyond m y mastering for which, however, the appearance of the other person calls me to account. The other person would be someone whom I cannot help viewing in a certain way and yet whom, by exceeding that definition, makes me recognize that helplessness. Only by sparing himself these complications could Levinas give us Totality and Infinity. The tension that all of this brings with it is unmistakable in Levinas' understanding of the climax of love in voluptuosit3; "impatience itself" (237),
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where the lover trembles helplessly at the unbreachable limit of satisfying a desire which, aiming beyond any and all objects, is literally insatiable. "Love," writes Levinas, "does not simply lead, whether by detour or directly, toward the You. It leads in another direction than that in which one encounters the You" (242). And yet love never gets beyond such a You, never grasps the ungraspable, is never sated. Because you are wholly other than me and because I am one with my desires-because we are separated- love will have always taken root in the complicity o f profanation. You will have offered yourself and I will have accepted. You will have expressed yourself to me as other, and this will have aroused me. We meet: "the hidden is tom from its modesty" (242), unfolded before my eyes, bent to my purposes. Stirred by your tenderness, the promise of companionship, I make the time-honored declaration: 'You are the only one for me.' Love, my attachment to you not merely in spite of your othemess but first because of it, thus takes us not only away from radical responsibility but also out of society. "It excludes the third person, remains intimacy, dual solitude . . . the non-public par excellence" (242). A s lover, I am both alone and in unique company. Love is an interiority torn open by a hunger for what remains beyond reach no matter how fervently I pursue i t - an interiority which is therefore not at all my own. Inclining toward fusion, toward immolation and consumption at once - ever hotter until seized by spasms both long in coming and too soon in arriving this love betrays itself at its greatest intensity, bringing to light the otherness of the other not by illumination but, finally, by burning out, by relinquishing the night sky to what has watched over its trajectory from start to finish. This impossibility o f merging, this refusal which is not mine but exercises me, is the ethical testament of love - a love which, according to Levinas, is inward and intimate and yet also, from the first, "structured intersubjectively" (243).
Death and sensuality In the "Phenomenology of Eros," Levinas thus claims to have distinguished love from both ethical respect and pure consumption. If it is the fact that I am a carnal being which makes this first distinction, it is no less the fact of having been faced which makes this second. Love, erotic desire - and, again, Levinas uses these two interchangeably - is the passion of my self interest turned toward the other person. It is the recalcitrance of a hunger which will not accept that it has met with what it can not have. It is a frenzy of vain denial. And there where it p e a k s - in the wanton enjoyment of simply being enjoyed, in the gratification of being gratifying, thus in loving this other person not as other but as my lover, a s t h a t w h i c h l o v e s m e - the rush of my desire finally
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reaches a place, if only for an instant, where her personhood matters not at all, where she is present solely as my object and I spend myself in solitude. Love matures without ever laying hold of the other whose otherness I so desire. Sensuality is meteoric. In the end, nothing which I have seen or done puts me in touch with the otherness of the other person which excited me in the first place. Indeed, my passion has never ceased appealing to that otherness on which it is, in fact, predicated. "In voluptuosity, the other is both me and separated from me. The separation of the o t h e r . . , constitutes [its] acuity" (243). Without the secret, there can be no desire; but were that desire to know the secret, its own necessary condition, it would itself also expire. Thus, without constituting an ethical response, erotic desire ends by confronting me with my self such as I had suppressed it. Sensuality is not respect, yet it does eventually return me from the heights of self-interest. Aroused, I meet with limits set out in advance. My passion ebbs; I recoil into myself. But what, then, is this encounter with my deeper truth which, however, is not the appeal? And what is the character of its meaning, if not strictly ethical? What place does Levinas give to these within the infinite horizon o f responsibility? Erotic desire climaxes in the splendid paralysis of being possessed by one's own energies, by what rises from within me as the final expression of my inwardness. Voluptuosity is a paroxysm of self-disclosure. My powers and the urges which drive them reach the end of their forgotten tether, bringing to light their own impossibility - an impossibility which, it can be agreed, was nested there from the beginning, but which, Levinas adds, is due ultimately to an otherness in the other person which makes possible the entire drama. And this impossibility, we are to understand, signifies our deeper finitude, the proper form of our subjectivity. Or so contends the "Phenomenology of Eros" and, with it, the entirety of Levinas' argument: only by beginning from an account o f the otherness of the other with whom I am in relation even before becoming aware of it is it possible to render a salient description of the life o f m y desires. A secret older than any wish to know it gives rise to desire and its language, but also accompanies its every move as the entire process ripens. This secret - the otherness of the other person - is inspiration and it is animation but, bounding the life of my desire, it is also death. This encounter with death at the end of my capacities cannot be equated with Levinas' own description of the death which confronts them from wholly outside, in the approach of an other person. Totality and Infinity interprets this latter event in opposition to claims for the primacy of the economic: the true meaning o f the menace I feel when an other comes into my vicinity is not anticipation of conflict over available goods but the nearness of what is wholly beyond any anticipation. I cannot guess who this is or what he or
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she might do. M y very life might be threatened. According to Levinas, the other person is first a stranger in this sense, and only subsequently intelligible. As stranger, the other has nothing to do with what I am or might recognize. Ultimately, we have nothing in common, which is another way of saying that the true character of our encounter consists in an approach from beyond any horizon centered on me. To reverse that movement, to define the other in one's own terms, would thus be to eradicate precisely what is distinctive about the other as apart from oneself. The face therefore represents a radical limit, a prohibition against further advancement: "thou shall not kill." Beyond any question of my efforts or achievements, the face of the other presents me with my finitude - a finitude which, on Levinas' account, is comprised as an original and absolute debt913 In immediate contrast with this, the "Phenomenology of Eros" describes a process in which I myself come to the impossibility of my own desire, though, of course, this occurs only because that desire has met with something which it can never have. Because there is this other person, my desire will embark but then also founder. Moreover, once my excitement is discharged, I no longer wish to do so. Is this not where my lover at last becomes fully a person to me? Indeed, this is a personhood that Levinas seems never to discuss neither sexual partner, nor threatening stranger, nor hungry outcast nor even friend. 14 One's lover, we all know, might well be any of t h e s e - but none by necessity. Spent, but still in his or her presence, I am attached without sexual desire or servitude. I am simply happy to be there - there and nowhere else. M y thoughts are with my lover, even while wandering in another direction. M y entire way of being carries on in the ambiance of this person whom I cannot do without. What is this disharmony with myself, this strange lack of self-mastery such that I am neither pure desire driven toward enjoyment of the other nor capable of living on as if that other was no longer there? How shall I live with the other with whom I am on these intimate terms? What of this person neither faces me nor joins me in carnal passion? And what of me is neither radical responsibility nor sexual desire? To be sure, it is tempting to consider this denouement as nothing more than a return to the egocentrism which for Levinas is then again on its way to ethical trauma. This, however, would indicate either that the other was in fact never present, not even in what appeared to be his or her vulnerability - in which case it was not vulnerability at all but either a ruse or a f a n t a s y - or that I have immediately integrated the lesson of my desire and thus made it my own. At times, the "Phenomenology of Eros" comes out clearly in support of the former interpretation. Levinas writes: "In its feminine epiphany, the face 9 dissimulates allusions, innuendos. It laughs under the cloak of its own expression without leading to any particular meaning, hinting at emptiness
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and signalling less than nothing" (242). But, then, what would this be if not a sudden confession o f the hitherto unacceptable idea that loving this person was solely my own invention? What need have I of an actual lover for that? If there is any erotic adventure in such a pathetic spectacle, it would have to lie with that other, in the perverse gesture of someone whose acknowledgement o f my humanity is on record from the moment he or she appeals to me and who nonetheless encourages the folly of a desire never to be satisfied. This possibility is only a single, albeit especially disturbing expression of a general problem for any ethics: unless eros is to be understood wholly according to egocentrism - manifestly not Levinas' intention - it will be necessary to develop one or another positive account of the erotic character of the appeal. And, at the same time, without a place for the independent desire of my lover, love itself must again be included among the forms of pure self-interest from which Levinas sought to extricate it. But where in Levinas' opposition of sameness and the other could one locate the desire of the other? The seemingly obvious objection that taking account of my lover's desire only reduces it to a function of m y o w n - thus returning me to egocentrism, after a l l - m i s s e s the simple fact this 'accounting' can never pretend to equate the other as object of m y desire with the other as an other person. Behind the appearance o f this other whom I wish to have, there is a freedom and desire all its own which I will have to honor if I hope to succeed at all with my wishes. Recognizing this fact would mark the beginning of what can become love, as opposed to the sexual passion which it certainly can include. Levinas' own analysis o f the rise and fall of erotic desire teaches nothing if not this: at the end o f m y desire, and thus also throughout it, this other person remains other. This is the sign of my finitude, my death: I can neither help but want her nor have her for m y own. It is at that moment, when she is the one whom I have been desiring and may well desire again, that Levinas' own thinking makes possible the thought of a love which he himself cannot admit. For thenceforth, whether I reach out to her or turn away, everything I do belongs to the structure o f a relationship which I from my side tries to build in the attempt to manage the fact that my desires arise from beyond the sphere of my control and seek what is beyond my capacity to give them. I in my finitude need the aid o f an other. Love, then, is not merely demand and not only a thrust toward satisfaction, but also an invitation and a gift. To offer myself to this person aims not at mastery, but simply a return of that love from her, an offer of help with what in me I myself cannot master or even simply appease. And in t u r n - if we are truly to become l o v e r s - she appeals to me from needs all her own. She thus appeals not so much for mercy or respect as for help help which, however, is never without those other things. She asks not that I apologize for this, my finitude, my place in the sun, but that drawing on it and
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w h a t s t r e n g t h it a f f o r d s m e , I l o o k k i n d l y o n h e r in hers. 15 L i v i n g , d e s i r i n g , s e e k i n g p e a c e w i t h w h a t a s s a i l s t h a t life a n d t h a t d e s i r e , she s a y s n o t " t h o u shall not kill" but "help me with my death."
Notes 1. E. Levinas, Totalit~ et Infini. Martinus Nijhoff, La Haye 1961, pp. 233--244. All references made in the body of my essay are to this text. Throughout, all translations are my own. In no case have I added or subtracted emphasis, and I use "other" where Levinas variously employs autre and autrui, capitalizing both on occasion. I also wish to thank Herman De Dijn, Paul Moyaert and Rudi Visker for helpful questions and objections to earlier versions of this paper. 2. J.-P. Same, L'Etre et le N~ant. Gallimard, Paris 1943, p. 435. 3. This charge is clarified in "La signification et le sens" (1964), where Levinas praises Sartre for having been able to see that "the other is a pure hole in the world," but censures him for having confined this insight to an articulation of the structure ofintersubjectivity- that is, for Levinas, to reciprocity and therefore identity (in E. Levinas, Humanisme de l'autre homme. Fata Morgana, Montpellier 1972, p. 58). 4. This term does not enter explicit use until "La trace de l'autre," published two years after Totalit~ et Infini (in E. Levinas, En decouvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Vrin, Paris 41988, pp. 187 - 216). As I will show on another occasion, that definition, to a significant extent already in operation throughout Totalitb et Infini, distinguishes Levinas' work there and thenceforth from certain parallel passages in his earlier books, De l 'existence ~ l 'existant and Le temps et l 'autre. For the moment, I can only sketch this difference: in those texts from the late 1940s, not yet fully sensitive to the challenge of Sartre's analyses of perverse desire, much of Levinas' argument still lends itself to the notion that my relation to the other must be determined by the pain of an existence taken up in the struggle simply to be - a pain for which the approach of other is, he writes, a "remedy," "pardon," and "salvation." As I have shown here, the essential gesture of Totalitd et Infini consists in a radical ethicization of precisely this notion. If there is a turn in Levinas' thinking, it lies in this move, and not, as some interpreters have claimed, between Totalit~ et Infini and Autrement qu'Otre ou au-delfi de l'essence, which only intensifies his commitment to this position. 5. Cf. TotalitO et Infini, II.B.2. 6. It is for this reason that the problem of sexual difference must be pursued with regard not to Levinas' examples but the architecture framing them. As early as De l'existence a l'existant (1948), Levinas speaks of the "virile subjectivity" presupposed in the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. But there, as in the pages under consideration here, a primary concern is in fact to put that very presupposition on trial. The existing subject, Levinas argues in both places, is virile - that is, active and assertive, living according to its own desires. This is unavoidable, but it is also tragic and futile: no amount of insistence will put me in possession of my own grounds. Hence the necessity and definition of its counterpart, the feminine - t h a t is to say, the passive and self-effacing. This essay attempts to question this set of identifications from within. My own examples are therefore taken from Levinas but, eventually, also turned against him. 7. This, of course, holds not least for the many questions surrounding the issue of sexual difference. Cf. supra, note 6. 8. To the considerable extent that Levinas privileges the otherness of the other person over the personal identity and appearance of that particular person who, moreover, need only appear, his entire analysis flirts constantly with what Freud has called "scopophilia," love of seeing. For Levinas, in short, the other person is an object of desire only insofar as
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10. 1 I.
12.
13. 14.
15.
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he or she appears - and the specifics of that appearance seem not to matter at all. That appearance is thus, in a manner of speaking, extraneous to the desire itself. Such has been Levinas' stated conviction since 1935, when in "De l'Evasion" he declared that "temporal existence has an unspeakable savor for the absolute" (in E. Levinas, De l'Evasion, introduced and annotated by J. Rolland. Fata Morgana, Paris 21982, p. 70). Totalit~ et Infini continues in this same line, now trying to distinguish between pure, "metaphysical Desire" and what might be caIled its 'corruption' in sensuality. Only a life in full conformity with what is voiced in the ethical appeal could truly enact such pure Desire. Nonetheless - and this is the contention of the "Phenomenology of Eros" - even that corruption, sexuality, is directed to the absolute. This reductive tendency becomes acute in the later works, notably in Autrement qu 'dtre ou au-delgt de l'essence, which is less concerned with eros than with a better account of the "plot [intrigue] of desire" by which all relations are joined anterior to history and manifestation. This startling formulation appears in "the Ambiguity of Love," a brief section introducing the "Phenomenology of Eros." There, perhaps, I feel the pity to which we commonly make that term refer: I feel sorry for her. But what is this, if not compensation for my disappointment at the thought that my lover is not simply what I desire but has desires of her own, is not wholly there for m e is other than I had thought and hoped? Perhaps such pity is more deeply a response to the shame of realizing the more selfish root of that hope, and, on the heels of that, an attempt at regaining mastery of the situation. It was Derrida who first drew attention to the critical function of this definition. Cf. J. Derrida, "Violence et m6taphysique" (1963), in his L'Ocriture et la difference. Seuil, Paris 1967, pp. 139-140. Cf. Totalitd etInfini, III.C.3. As opposed to love, friendship is for Levinas direct and unconditional. Bound up with carnal desire and aiming toward voluptuosity, love is thus more than merely a specific instance of friendship. This of course alludes to a passage from Pascal's Penskes under whose emblem Levinas later wrote Autrement qu'Otre ou au-delh de l'essenee. I repeat his citation in full: " . . . 'This is my place under the sun.' Such is the beginning and the image of the usurpation of the world."
