Face to Face with Levinas

2. Bad Conscience and the Inexorable

EMMANUEL LEVINAS 2. Bad Conscience and the Inexorable The ego responsiblejar the Other, ego without ego, isjragility itself, to the point oj being put into question through and through as I, without identity, responsiblejor the one to whom he cannot give a response, respondent who is not a question, question which relates to the Other without any longer waiting jar a response jrom him. The other does not respond. Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster 1. Starting with intentionality, consciousness is understood as a modality of the voluntary. The word intention suggests this, and thus the label acts conferred on the unities of intentional consciousness is justified. On the other hand, the intentional structure of consciousness is characterized by representation. Representation would be at the basis of all consciousness, whether theoretical or nontheoretical. Brentano's thesis remains true for Husserl, despite all the exactitude he brought to it and the care with which he surrounded it with the notion of objectivizing acts. Consciousness implies presence, position-before-itself, that is, mundaneness, the fact of being-given, and exposure to the grasp, hold, comprehension, appropriation. Is not intentional consciousness, then, the detour through which perseverance-in-being is concretely exercised, the active appropriation on the scene where the being of beings unfolds, is reassembled, and is manifested? Consciousness would be the very scenario of the incessant effort of esse with a view to this esse itself, a quasi-tautological exercise of the conatus, to which the formal signification of that privileged verb one names, without due consideration, "auxiliary;' is reduced. But a consciousness directed onto the world and its objects, structured as intentionality, is also in addition indirectly consciousness of 35 36 EMMANUEL LEVINAS itself: consciousness of the active-ego that represents the world and objects, as well as consciousne,s of its very acts of representation, consciousness of mental activity. However indirect, this consciousness is immediate but without intentional aim, an implicit and pure accompaniment. It is nonintentional, to be distinguished from the interior perception to which it is apt to be converted. The latter reflective consciousness takes Jor o~jects the ego, its states, and mental acts. This is a reflective consciousness, where consciousness directed onto the world seeks help against the inevitable naivete of its intentional rectitude, which is forgetful of the indirectly lived and the nonintentional and its horizon:;, forgetful of what accompanies it. In philosophy one is then borne - perhaps too quickly - to consider 6is lived element as a still nonexplicit knowledge or a still confused representation that reflection will bring to full light. It would be the obscure context of the thematized world that reflection, intentional consciousness, will convert into clear and distinct data, like those presenting the perceived world itself. Nevertheless, it is not forbidden to wonder if, under the gaze of reflective consciousness taken for self-consciousness, the nonintentional , lived in counterpoint to the intentional, conserves and delivers its veritable meaning. The critique traditionally applied to introspection has always suspected a modification that the consciousness called "spontaneous" would undergo under the scrutinizing, thematizing, objectivizing, and indiscreet eye of reflection, as a violation and misappreciation of some secret. This critique is always refuted, but it is always reborn. What happens, then, in this nonreflective consciousness that one takes solely as prereflecti ve and that, implicit, accompanies intentional consciousness, aiming intentionally in reflection at the selfsame, as if the thinking ego appeared in the world and belonged there? What can this alleged confusion, this implication, in any manner positively signifY:) Ar'~ there not grounds to distinguish between the envelopment of the particular within a concept, the implied of the presupposed in a notior, the potentiality of the possible in a horizon on the one side, and the intimacy of the nonintentional in prereflective consciousness? 2. Is the "knowledge" of the prereflective self-consciousness, properly speaking, knowing? The confused and implicit consciousness preceding every intention - or returning from every intention - is not an act, but pure passivity. It is not only pure passivity Bad Conscience and the Inexorable 37 because of its being-without-having-chosen-to-be or because of its fall into an entanglement of possibles already realized before dny assumption, as in Heideggerian Gewoifenheit. It is a "consciousness" that rather than signifying a knowledge of self, is an effacement, or discretion, of presence. It is bad conscience: without intentions, without aims, without the protective mask of the character beholding himself in...