The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas

4. The Two Aspects of Language: The Saying and the Said

4 zyx The Two Aspects of Language: The Sayingand the Said I. LANGUAGE As THE zyxwvu SAID LEr us BEGIN OUR analysis of the saying and the said by analyzing a linguistic event, an event central to the possibility of dialogue, and attempting to sort out, on a Levinasian reading, the modes of meaning operative init. zyxwvu I say something to an other. We propose that what Levinas refers to as “the saying” will come to the fore when we analyze the conditions of possibility for the “ I zyxw say something to an other” aspect of the event, and “the said” in the aspect highlighted by the conditionsof possibility for the“I say someth.ing to another,” even as it is stressed that we are speakingall along of one and thesame linguistic event. So if “the said” has to do with the fact that in speaking to an other I am thereby-whether implicitly or explicitly-making reference to “something” (to a being [an entity], or the essence of a beinginsofar as it canbenominalized, or to an interrelated cluster of entities [up to, and perhaps always at leastimplicitly including, “being” as a whole], or an event, an action of-or a relationship between-beings, he that the generality of “eventfulness ” [up to and including the “beingof beings” or “essence”]) that can be identifiedby an otheras the “subject matter”of my/ our speaking, how are we to account for this possibility? What makes this shared reference to common “somethings” (and thus speech as the saying of something to someone) possible? A preparatoq answertothis question has already been provided in the foregoing chapter where we focused upon Levinas’s analyses, in Totality and Infinity, of the relationship of discourse to argue that it is this ethical relationship that is the condition of THE zyxwvuts TWO ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE zyxwvu 179 possibility for dialogue, an analysis that Levinas (we are arguing) does not abandon but deepens in his zyxwvu Otherwise Than Being (and deepens precisely [orsuch is our claim] by providing us [although this is perhaps not the primary focus or even intention of the work] withan accountof the conditionsof possibility, and the conditions of impossibility, of discourse itself). In those analyses the common entity, and thus the possibility of a subject matter for dialogue, was shown to derive its shared (ontological) sense insofar as it was detached from, torn out of, the element as my “economy” of jouissance, or my jouissance exercised economically, by the interruption of the face of the other-by the face that represents , or, better, thatis, the need andvulnerability of the other that demands of me the giving of my goods,andwheresuch goods become thereby objects of shared reference, around which and in terms of which is constituted an ancillaly rational order, the logos of diu-logos. But this analysis could be, prima facie,misleading-albeit only if Levinas’sphilosophical method (at least on our reading) is misunderstood , if the results of the “(radicalized-) phenomenological method”’he employs-the searchforanddescription of conditions of possibility for zyxwvu . . . , the search for the “originary” (or, as we shall see, for the “peoriginary,” if origins are already the stuff of an ontology derived from “deeper” structures)-are taken as genetic descriptions, that is, as an account of “origins.” For I no more re-make language (as a system of interdependent signs, as a “positive”language)* each time that I encounter a new interlocutor than I actually “once upon a time” lived in a pure state of jozrissan,ce,interrupted only later by the face. Rather, I am always already social, en-cultur-ated (my jouissance always already interrupted by the face) ,3 and tosay somethingto an other is always already to make an appeal or reference to-indeed, to make an appeal or reference in terms of-the ontological meanings borne by, or that together constitute, a linguisticsystem. I say something to an other in English, or French, or Dutch, and to the extent that the said something is successfully communicative, to the extent that some meaning content is communicated, the appeal to a common positive language is presupposed. That is, in order for the saying of something to an other, the something said, to be meaningful, I need make appeal to meanings that transcend the 180 zyxwvuts THE POSSIBLE IMPOSSIBI1,ITY particular speech situation inwhich I say something now to a particular other.’ Ontological meanings, meanings that delineatebeings and...