Intrigues: From Being to the Other

Introduction

Introduction The unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbor in narration. The relationship with him is indescribable in the literal sense of the term, unconvertible into a history, irreducible to the simultaneousness of writing, the eternal present of a writing that records or presents results. —Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being Passive: the un-story (non-récit), that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster Thinking otherwise than he thinks, he thinks in such a way that the Other might come to thought, as approach and response. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster The encounter: what comes without advent, what approaches face-on, and nonetheless always by surprise, what requires waiting and what waiting awaits but does not attain. Even at the innermost heart of interiority, it is always irruption of the outside, exteriority shaking everything. The encounter pierces the world, pierces the self; and this piercing, everything that happens, without happening (coming about with the status of what has not arrived), is the reverse side that cannot be lived of what on the right side cannot be written: a double impossibility that by a supplementary act—a fraud, a kind of falsehood, also a madness—must be transformed in order to adapt it to living and writing ‘‘reality.’’ —Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation Writing the Other Intrigues: From Being to the Other examines the possibility of writing the other. It explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected literary criticism. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are the main focus of this study. The book’s horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of the other that, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. However, Martin Heidegger is an unavoidable reference. While it is true that for the German philosopher being is an immanent production, his elucidation of a more essential understand1 2 Introduction ing of being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign, the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for both Levinas and Blanchot. For Heidegger, ethics, as a region of philosophical questioning, comes after metaphysics (knowledge and theory) and is determined by the effect of oblivion that Plato’s philosophy institutes. Heidegger’s thinking marks a departure from an intellectualist tradition for which theoretical comprehension is the starting point of thinking. According to Heidegger, being is primarily determined in noncognitive ways, by modes of existence that are more basic than the intellectual grasp of the concept. In ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ Heidegger seeks to define an ethics prior to any ethics, an ‘‘original ethics’’ understood as dwelling or sojourn, as the preserving of the open in its opening and mystery.1 This is what the structure of care or concern (Sorge) means in Being and Time, in which the proximity of being to Dasein (being-there) is already in view. The world is for Heidegger part of a structure proper to existence (eksistence : since the prefix ek- marks the exposition at play in being-in-theworld , throwness and facticity, a form of being that goes beyond the classical opposition inside/outside) called being-in-the-world (In-derWelt -Sein). Dasein is a being for whom its being is a matter of concern and in which being-in-the-world reveals itself as a unifying structure. It is the structure of care that determines how entities come into presence, but inasmuch as the structure of care presupposes a unique relation to being, it is being that conditions the structure of our making-present. Later on Heidegger will say that being ‘‘gives or sends,’’ but soon after he abandons the schema of the history of being to think what gives being—the Event of Appropriation or Enowning (Ereignis). In an existential sense the ‘‘in’’ of being-in-the-world means a ‘‘beingalongside ’’ (bei), dwelling, a relation of familiarity or proximity that is irreducible to spatial contiguity (BT 80/54).2 But in a more essential way, dwelling names the responsibility that certain forms of existence (the thinker’s, the poet’s, the founder of a people) contract with being’s unconcealing—its preservation. In...