Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference in Blanchot and Levinas (review)

Alain Toumayan remarks in his introduction that his intent in this book is not to provide an overview of the work of Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas, but rather to focus on a few exemplary intersective moments in their work, moments that testify to their mutual influence. What he finds most intriguing is the manner in which both thinkers address the problem of difference and the question of the other, in ways that make apparent the richness of their intellectual conversation. The key term in Toumayan's analysis is that of the "encounter," which points toward a variety of concerns here: the encounter of Blanchot and Levinas, certainly and most obviously, but also the encounter of philosophy and literature, and, more generally still, that of the subject and the other.

In his first chapter, Toumayan meditates on the dialectic of identity and difference, and upon the manner in which the subject in Blanchot and Levinas is constituted differentially. Reading Blanchot and Levinas's texts as "case studies of difference" (43), and staging his discussion through a rehearsal of Saussure, Heidegger, and Derrida's thought, he argues that Levinas's construct of the il y a serves both of them as a useful tool in their reflections on the question of difference, even if the results of those reflections diverge. Levinas's ethical subjectivity insists upon identity as deriving from the responsibility to the other, while Blanchot constantly returns to the oppositional quality of the encounter, the way the other disrupts the subject in productive fashion. Turning to the problem of death in his second chapter, Toumayan suggests that for both thinkers, death is the privileged figure of alterity, an inevitable and irreducible problem in any interrogation of difference. In Levinas's Le Temps et l'autre, he sees an articulation of death as an absolute other, and a characteristic passivity of the subject when faced with death. In Blanchot's L'Instant de ma mort, he draws our attention to the way Blanchot suspends the instant of death, refuting any possibility of truth therein.

In chapter three, Toumayan invokes two mythological narratives of encounter, involving Orpheus and Ulysses respectively, and thinks about the ways Blanchot and Levinas meet them. Blanchot's principal concern as he read the Orpheus myth is the question of artistic inspiration. Pointing toward Orpheus's forgetfulness and his lack of care, he argues that inspiration results from failure. Like death, inspiration "is ultimately a relation with otherness," Toumayan suggests (99)—the crucial difference being that we survive the encounter. Both Blanchot and Levinas read Ulysses's encounter with the Sirens against the traditional grain, according to Toumayan, seeing failure instead of victory—but a failure that is ultimately productive of meaning. Like the artwork itself, meaning is something that continually and ineluctably escapes from the artist. The fourth chapter deals with the way that Blanchot and Levinas conceive the image. For the latter, Toumayan believes, the image's power "derives from a being's noncoincidence with itself; a simple, autonomous conception of identity is not sufficient to contain being" (117). The image is located in time, but represents time, for Levinas, as an entretemps, an intertime that oscillates precariously between time and timelessness, and causes us to question our status as temporal beings. For his part (and drawing liberally upon Levinas's analyses), Blanchot sees in the image both the (incomplete) disappearance of the world and a resemblance, or a doubling of the object. Here, Toumayan traces Blanchot's reflections with particular resourcefulness and attention to detail, demonstrating convincingly how they "characteristically evolve toward ambiguity" (139).

The final chapter of this book is entitled "Encountering the Other Night," and it deals largely with the "obscurity or nocturnality" (145) of the il y a. Toumayan suggests that both Blanchot and Levinas meet and grapple with the il y a at moments of darkness, in sites that are largely apart from the...