Disastrous Responsibility: Blanchot’s Criticism of Levinas’s Concept of Subjectivity in The Writing of the Disaster

In the Anglophone reception of the works of Blanchot and Levinas, it is generally accepted that the main differences between the two authors can be explained from the distinction between an aesthetic and an ethical point of view. Is not a reflection on the essence of literature and the ontological status of the artwork the central theme of Blanchot’s writings? And is the philosophy of Levinas, on the contrary, not dedicated to defending the priority of ethics with regard to the question of being and thus also to redefining responsibility for the other as a modality of subjectivity in terms of an otherwise than being? Yet at the same time it is also accepted that this distinction does not really divide the two friends who articulate a similar or perhaps even the same structure of difference within the condition of existence. This assumption is generally taken for granted, and forms the starting point for inquiries into the relation between Blanchot and Levinas as different as are those of Joseph Libertson,¹ Leslie Hill,² and Simon Critchley.³ It still is the basis for the comprehensive approach given by Alain Toumayan, although he is aware of the fact that “the encounter” constitutes “a common theme” in Blanchot and Levinas and that the scope of this theme goes far beyond the possibility of the aesthetics/ethics distinction, “disrupt[ing] the subject’s foundation of selfhood, the subject’s fundamental spatial and temporal coordinates, and generally, the subject’s conceptual resources.”⁴

It is indeed astonishing that the evidence of the aesthetics/ ethics distinction is never seriously put in question with regard to the relation between Blanchot and Levinas. Certainly, Levinas is making this distinction because he wants to go beyond the primacy of the ontological and he sees in the aesthetic mode the mere continuation of being. But Levinas is not alone in his opposition to Heidegger’s renewal of a fundamental ontology: Blanchot, too, is searching for a language beyond ontology. How then—outside of the primacy of being—are we to consider as evident a distinction that can be given clear conceptual delimitation only within the realm of beings? Moreover, it is not right to argue that the aesthetics/ethics distinction can account for every difference between the two approaches of Blanchot and Levinas. On the contrary, it may even seem that the themes which they share and upon which they communicate with each other in trying to investigate the insufficiency of a strict ontological determination—such as, for instance, the il y a, death, the other, the trace, transcendence—are first of all indifferent with regard to the question of priority for either ethics or aesthetics. All the same, when analyzing these themes with proper care, it is not difficult to make manifest an insurmountable gap between the two friends.⁵ When reducing this gap to a matter of different emphases on the aesthetical and the ethical, one is led to overlook the farther reaching tenets of their debate that concerns, as Toumayan formulates it so well, the “subject’s foundational selfhood” and “the subject’s conceptual resources,” and as such concerns the very possibility (and manner) of distinguishing aesthetics and ethics.

I hope to show this specifically by focusing on the notion of responsibility. It is well known that this notion is central to Levinas’s philosophy, with its decades-long defense of the priority of the ethical and thus contributing a renewed sense among European philosophers of the importance of an ethics of responsibility. But long before Levinas’s works reached prominence even in France, Blanchot had addressed himself explicitly to the Levinasian sense of responsibility in some fragments of his The Writing of the Disaster (1980)—and indeed undermined it in several instances, especially in creating the strange, disorientating formulation: “responsibility is itself disastrous” (WD 27).

My aim is to give a philosophical reformulation of Blanchot’s criticism of Levinas’s notion of responsibility in The Writing of the Disaster. The stakes of this criticism go far beyond...