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

5. The Two Directions in Language: The Reductive and the Re-Constructive

5 zyx The Two Directions in Language: The Reductiveand the Re-constructive I. FROM THE SAYING TO THE zyxwvu SAID: REDUCTION zyxwv I. zyxwvutsr 1. TheReduction LET us NOW EXAMINE rather more closely the claim we are developing that for Levinas there is no sense in which the conditions of possibility for . . . zyxwv exist in the sense that they zyxw present themselves to us, that they arepresent to experience or as experienced. There is adoublesensein whichthis is true of “the saying,” which we are in the course of arguing here-albeit circuitously -is the conditionof possibility for discourse (whichis itself a condition of possibility of dialogue, and so here we are dealing with the complex matter of a condition of possibility for a condition of possibility for . . .). On the one hand, we are faced with the simple problem that the conditionsof possibility for experience cannot be part of that experience itselflest the experience of these conditions would require, qua experienced, yet further conditions of possibility for the experienceof them, which, if experienced, would require yet further conditions of possibility for their appearance, ad infinitum , ad nauseam (if contact with aground is the curefor nausea). The Husserlian project of eidetic reduction (the representation of the conditions of possibility for representation, and for intentions other than those of representation) is perhaps an infinite task (opening upon ever new horizons) for precisely this reason. But if Husserl’sreductivethoughtsaresometimes dizzying, he saves us from nausea in stilling the vertiginous descent with the anodyne of the assurance of “presence,” that self-groundingmo- THE TWO DIRECTIONS IN zyxwvut I,ANGlT.4C.E 225 ment of intuition (the presence of the present) wherein, at the end of the day, the conditions of possibility for experience are experienced as conditioning themselves, conditions and conditioned ,subjectandobject,past,present,andfuture,hereand there, being and the experience of being, all “present” (or at least presentable) at once. And here, for Levinas, Husserl represents the whole of the Western philosophical tradition in its proclivity to idealism: wherein being and the disclosureof being are of a piece. Being subsumes (or has already provided) itsown conditions of possibility as constituting a part of itself, as it does the showing of itself to itself: presence, and thus truth. Western philosophy is the performance of overcoming the problemby which the conditions of possibility for experience cannot show themselves in experience. Western philosophy as ontology is the showing of being to itself, the coincidence of condition and conditioned in a synchronic present. Given theimpotence of this“formal”problemagainstthe weight of the tradition that produced it (and that persists in enclosing even the conditions of possibility for beingwithin the circleofthecomprehension of being), Levinashas recourseto another, and more substantial (if less substanc-ial), prohibition to subsuming the conditions of possibility for experience into experience itself: the unrepresentable (because ethically rather than ontologically qualified) “otherwise than being.” In zyxw OtherruisP Than, Being as we have been attempting to show, this “mode”’ of “othenvise than being” is the subject as saying, the subject that in its responsibility for the other is exposed to the other,is for-the-other before beingfor-itself, whose sayingto the other, “before”‘ being the saying ofsomething, is a saying of itself as saying, a signifying, not of a content, but of signification itself, an expression of its signifyingness, the expression of its expression: subjectivity.But this (active or quasi-active) signification of (the passivity of) signification (of my having always already been signified), that which makes the saying of contentsandthuscommunication as the transfer of information possible, does notitself become a content oraninformationcommunicated, is not a “being”(bethat as noun, oras verb), is not some-thing, identifiable in a said. We cannot therefore hope to “experience” this condition of possibility in any straightforward way, reading it off from out of zyx , ” - ” ” ” - “ 226 THE POSSIBLE 1MPOSSIBII.ITY experience as one experience among experiences,as a privileged experience, even if there may be certain privileged experiences that allow zyxwvut us to catch a glimpse of the trace that it leaves in the said thatitconditions.But, as there is no “hinter-world”into which we might retreat in order to experience this condition directly , it must therefore be possible to arrive at a description of it (if it can be at all described) from out of the experience of life as lived.Levinasrefers to this “process,” this “procedure,” this “method,“ whichtakesplacezyxwvu zuith.iyz philosophy, as “the reduction ,” in...