Levinas and Medieval Literature: The "Difficult Reading" of English and Rabbinic Texts

4. “In his eyes stood a light, not beautiful”: Levinas, Hospitality, Beowulf

57 • • 4 • • “In his eyes stood a light, not beautiful” Levinas, Hospitality, Beowulf Eileen A. Joy To approach the Other is to put into question my freedom, my spontaneity as a living being, my emprise over the things, this freedom of a “moving force,” this impetuosity of the current to which everything is permitted, even murder. —Emmanuel Levinas An Infinite and Unconditional Hospitality I begin with an ending.1 In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida argues that Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, especially in Totality and Infinity, has bequeathed to us an “immense treatise of hospitality.” According to Derrida, although “the word ‘hospitality’ occurs relatively seldom in Totality and Infinity, the word ‘welcome’ is unarguably one of the most frequent and determinative words in that text.”2 At the very outset of Totality and Infinity, Levinas writes about the Other as the “Stranger [l’Etranger]...who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi].”3 In the wake of this disturbance , the ethical subject “is incapable of approaching the Other with empty hands,” and by way of “conversation” she “welcomes” the Other’s “expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it.”4 The welcoming [accueillance] of the expression of the stranger-Other is a welcoming of a teaching 58 Eileen A. Joy [enseignement] that “comes from the exterior” and in which “the very epiphany of the face is produced” (TI 51). This is a “face” that is not a material face, per se—the specific physical visage of a specific person—but is, rather, an “exteriority that is not reducible...to the interiority of memory,” an expression of being that “overflows images” and “breaks through the envelopings” and facades of material form. This face exceeds any possible preconceptions, and calls into question the subject’s “joyous possession of the world” (51, 76, 297). At the same time, because “the body does not happen as an accident to the soul,” the physical face is the important “mode in which a being, neither spatial nor foreign to geometrical or physical extension, exists separately.” It is the “somewhere of a dwelling” of a being—of its solitary and separated being-with-itself.5 While Levinas describes the home, or dwelling, as a site of inwardness [intimité], from which the subject ventures outside herself (and therefore , the real home is always a rootless, wandering mode of being), he also points out that this inwardness “opens up in a home which is situated in that outside—for the home, as a building, belongs to a world of objects” (TI 152). The “home” possesses two facades, and thereby, two positions, for it “has a ‘street front,’ but also its secrecy....Circulating between visibility and invisibility, one is always bound for the interior of which one’s home, one’s corner, one’s tent, one’s cave is the vestibule” (156). The home, then, is both the architectural site filled with material furnishings [Bien-meubles, or “movable goods”] that, by its very nature, is “hospitable to the proprietor,” as well as the site of interiority in which the subject withdraws from the elements and can “recollect” herself (157, cf. 153–54). Recollection [recueillance], for Levinas, is a kind of “coming to oneself, a retreat home with oneself as in a land of refuge, which answers to a hospitality, an expectancy, a human welcome.” This is a self-possession made possible by the subject possessing a home in which she is able to be welcomed to herself, which welcoming constitutes the condition by which a certain affection for herself is “produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things” and makes the welcome of the stranger-Other possible (155). As a result, the ethical self is also a “sub-jectum; it is under the weight Levinas, Hospitality, Beowulf 59 of the universe, responsible for everything. The unity of the universe is not what my gaze embraces in its unity of apperception, but what is incumbent on me from all sides...accuses me, is my affair” (OB 116). The “I” is ultimately the “non-interchangeable par excellence” and also “the state of being a hostage,” and it is only “through the condition of being hostage that there can be in this world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity.”6 In Derrida’s view, Levinas’s ideas regarding the welcoming of the enigmatic face of the...