Creative Ontologies and the Infinite Task of Language in Levinas’s and Rosenzweig’s Notions of Poetic Expression

On the final page of Reality and its Shadow, Emmanuel Levinas states that the task of philosophical interpretation is to become conscious of the creative event, an event that eludes cognition during the very act of creation itself. While it sounds like Levinas demands an impossible task from the philosopher, I will show how this knowledge is possible by understanding the expressive aspect of language and speech that is different from the meanings they aim to convey. Through revealing the ethical possibilities of expressive language, the paper will develop Levinas’s interpretation of Shai Agnon’s poetry, whose work illustrates an ethical rupturing in being’s creative unfolding. Levinas writes in Proper Names that Agnon is an ethical poet who is not bewitched by passive illusions, but rather whose use of language and poetic tropes express a world of shared, cultural, and religious memories to develop the “creature” that is being. Agnon’s poetry will be used as an example to illuminate how echoes of Rosenzweig’s concept of creation is developed in Levinas’s own work on poetic language.