Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas, 1983-1994: 1983-1994

1. From the Epiphany of the Face to the Idea of Holiness

41 1 From the Epiphany of the Face to the Idea of Holiness WHAT CAN BE DONE TO OPPOSE HUMAN FOLLY? Answers to this question have not come from the most famous philosophers but from men and women often unknown in their lifetime but whose work was revealed in all its importance once they had departed this earthly life. It may be that Emmanuel Levinas belongs to this family of thinkers, alongside people such as Simone Weil and Franz Rosenzweig, whose fame was greater still after his death. First of all, by recalling that Levinas belongs to the great Western philosophical tradition from Plato to Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, one can measure the incommensurable breach effected in his work, and above all during the last 20 years, by the fundamental notion of holiness. 42 Conversations with Emmanuel Levinas In his Talmudic Readings he had already noted the primacy of the holy over the sacred.1 In a certain sense, it is with the intrusion of the holy and holiness into his discourse that the considerable originality of his thought and work is brought in a way to completion. Not content with having reintroduced God into philosophical discourse—but a God a thousand miles from Descartes’ or Pascal’s—Levinas comes and posits humanity’s holiness as the only way to answer our initial question: what can be done to oppose “the world’s tragic folly,” which occupied so much of Michel Foucault’s thought? One further word before we get into our subject , on this God who in Levinas comes to mind. In my opinion he bears some relation to the Way, the Dao in Chinese thought—that of Laozi and Confucius (Master Kong)—according to which the idea of God merges with heaven (tian) and which in Confucius’s Analects becomes the permanent referent for the ethics presiding over the relations between beings. So let us walk along the Way Levinas’s thought opens up for us, follow this philosopher whose language bears the inflections of Péguy. It is around what is concrete in the epiphany of the face as that which gives meaning to all human life that I will ask the question of the meaning of Being in Levinas’s philosophy. 1. [Levinas published four volumes of talmudic readings in his lifetime; a fifth was published posthumously. In English, they are published under the following titles: Nine Talmudic Readings, Beyond the Verse, In the Time of the Nations, and New Talmudic Readings. Difficult Freedom also contains a number of talmudic readings on the subject of messianism.—Trans.] From Epiphany of the Face to Idea of Holiness 43 A few years ago a French weekly devoted its front page to Sartre with the headline: “Sartre, the passion of error.”2 For Levinas, it would be more apt to say: Levinas or the passion of the other, in the two senses of the word “passion.” So let us ask the question of Being, which is the founding principle of all possibility of an otherwise than being, which Levinas never had coincide with a “being otherwise ,” as if otherwise could not be satisfied with its place as an adverb affixed to being in a secondary position as regards the fact of being, but rather that it determined in its precellence its very precedence over the verb to be at its foundation. Let us go back to the first lines of Levinas’s major work Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence: “If transcendence has meaning, it can only signify the fact that the event of being, the esse, the essence, passes over to what is other than being....Transcendence is passing over to being’s other, otherwise than being. Not to be otherwise, but otherwise than being. And not to not-be; passing over is not here equivalent to dying” (OB 3). These first lines by way of expounding on the problematic give us three fundamental words: transcendence, meaning, and the event of being. We should ask ourselves at this point whether we should not read this opening in parallel or together with the deeply moving exordium that opens the book, transmitting its secret core, so unspeakable that Levinas prefers to resort to the Hebrew for his second epigraph naming his murdered parents. Here then are the very first lines: “To the memory of those who 2. [Saint Cheron is referring to Le Point...