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  • What Is Levinas Doing?Phenomenology and the Rhetoric of an Ethical Un-Conscious
  • Bettina Bergo

If an an-archeology is possible.

—Levinas, Otherwise than Being

I. Introductory Remarks on the Place of Levinas within Phenomenology

The history of philosophy accommodates figures that position themselves outside of philosophy, even working against "philosophy" itself. Indeed, the framework around this history may well be nourished by such figures. In various ways, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche position themselves as most clearly against philosophy itself. Now the marginal stance invariably has to do with the relationship between what is called "true" and "good." Levinas stands in this margin. At first, not clearly so: in the 1940s, his work is that of a Husserlian phenomenologist, inspired by Heidegger's ontology and Bergson's vitalism. However, Levinas's project of creating a phenomenology of the subject—examined as a site of sheer vulnerability without higher intentional activities—gradually leads him to a rhetoric of radical singularity, whose focus is exclusively on the complex of affective responses to an other that he calls "substitution."

This evolution moves Levinas in a strange direction. I would argue that in his late work Emmanuel Levinas finds himself writing a psyche-analysis. It is hardly a Freudian analysis. It is an interpretation of his affectivity as a kind of "other" event or force within him.1 Levinas's immanent alterity isolates what he calls his "self"; it is comparable to a phenomenologically reduced ego that responds affectively before reflection begins. This isolation via affectivity resembles Heidegger's Stimmung of anxiety, which similarly isolates a Dasein and places it before itself. This Heideggerian then Levinasian interpretation of affective "modes" of grasping what is unthematizable is intended to push Husserlian phenomenology past its limit in the passive synthesis of time as a spontaneous flux. Levinas's [End Page 122] strategic phenomenological debt is to Heidegger for the latter's modification of the phenomenological reduction: it was Heidegger who took the reduction out of Husserl's abstract, eidetic bracketing and set it into the common, lived "experience" of self-loss and world-loss. However, Levinas's debt is, paradoxically, to that thinking that: 1) emphasized the dynamic and symptomatic quality of affectivity from enjoymentto Angst; and 2) developed a conception of the split subjectivity whose actuality resembles a comet's tail, shining clearly at one end and shading off into semiconsciousness then unconsciousness at the other. That thinking was psychoanalysis. Given this, and given Heidegger's and Levinas's expansion of the phenomenological reduction to affective tones, or unreflected moods, we are encouraged to examine two questions: What precisely is the phenomenological reduction? And, is there a reduction operative in psychoanalysis; if so, in what form? We will turn to these questions in parts VI and VII of this essay.

II. Phenomenology of "Presynthetic Experience" and its Vicissitudes

The "introspective" analysis Levinas unfolds as ontological, rather than psychological, structures Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1998 [1974]); it works toward a presynthetic phenomenology. Levinas tells us he is describing a prerepresentational occurrence, which we cannot call "experience," if "experience" involves just intentional consciousness. Instead, Levinas pursues a prereflective immediacy that is affective and excessive, and whose expression is paradoxical. This protoexperience, "substitution," takes the form of suffering and contains a certain call—of conscience, as it had done in Heidegger, yet somehow more concrete because the "other" is another person.

Now, the paradox of this "pre-experience" is this: in order to communicate it, we must reconstruct this pre-experience and set it into concepts. In so doing, however, we betray its force and, Levinas adds, its "meaning." This meaning, he explains, is a "surplus of meaning"; i.e., it is affectively greater than one can contain without ex-pression, although expressed meaning, here, is not just discursive, since its expression involves action. Highlighting the paradox, Levinas writes of this "meaning" that "consciousness all by itself would be incapable" of it (Levinas 1998, 152). And he cautions us that in the interpretation of this meaning, "there is a [End Page 123] possibility both of ideology [as a religious or 'political' hypostatization] and of sacred delirium, [and] delirium must be reduced by philosophy, [it must] be reduced...

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