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

1. The Impasse of Dialogue

The Impasse of Dialogue zy DIALOGUE, as the transmission of meaningful thought contents between interlocutors, is, etymologically, zyxwv dia-logos, a transmission mediated dia (“through”) the logos (“word,” or “reason”). As such, the very notion of dialogue presupposes an a priori commonality of access toa sharedlogosfor all prospective participants in the desired dialogue. The logos, if it is to effectively perform its mediatory function, must be shared, must be the same logos accessible to each. If dialogue, after its etymological sense, is to be possible, I must be able to speak a word (alogos) whose meaningformecorrespondstothemeaningthatthatsameword evokes in the other, thatis to say, that I andmy interlocutor must sharebothalexicon of same-signifjmgsigns, andthefaculty, namelyreason (logos), fortheprocessing of suchsignsinto thought contents and back, the faculty whereby such signs are linked to thoughts, and thoughts one to another. That in Greek, the language philosophy speaks,’ the same word, logos, signifies at once “the word by which the inward thought is expressed,” and “the inward thoughtor reason itself,”2 need be given some attention , for it is in the alibi of this ambiguity that, traditionally, language has been made subordinate to thought.3 Nor can we ignore the presence of this word at the rootof the word ‘dialogue’,itself the progeny of Greek language/thought. Logos inhabits the very word, and our notion, of dialogue, founds its possibility, is the lifeblood of dia-logos. A shared language, mutual recourse to a series of signs that signify identically across the range of potential interlocutors by providing the external medium for linking up shared, inward thoughts, and the common means of processing such signs, are the conditions of possibility for dialogue as diaBut does dialogue not also require a difference between the interlocutors,inthatdialogue,the very necessity of dialogue, makes sense only whereone of the interlocutors lacks that which logos. 4 THE zyxwvuts IDEA OF DISCOURSE the other is capable of providing, necessitating the transmission that dialogue names? Identical terms would have nothing to offer to each other.If we were all the same,if our inward thoughts were identical,dialoguewouldberenderedsuperfluous. Is this not what Husserl saw when he denied that the experience of internal dialogue was anything more than a semblance? In the intimacy of the self-samephilosophicalsubject, in “solitary mental life,” thought is, according to Husserl, immediately self-present to itself , and nosigns-signs, for Husserl, being thatby which inward thought is externalized-are therefore required.q The same need not communicate with thesame.Consequently,wouldnotdialogue , insofar as it were real communication-a transmission of meanings between interlocutors-and not the semblance of language that, according to Husserl, is soliloquy, require, at once,zyx both identity in the logos, and adifferenceamongthetermsin dialogue, that is to say, an identity in difference, or a difference in identity? What might such a locution mean? What might this at least seemingly oxymoronic exigency reflect?5 AccordingtoEmmanuel Levinas, theWesternphilosophical tradition has predominantly and overwhelmingly emphasized the identity aspect of this dual exigency for dialogue, emphasizing the common logos explicit in diu-logos at the expense of the implicit (but no less necessary)difference.‘j For the tradition, the difference requisite for dialogueis taken be a function of-either as a fall away from or as a step in the movement toward-a more primordial or originary’ identity, resulting in a view of dialogue that Levinas, as we shall shortly see, refers to as the “dialogue of immanence,” that is, a view whereby dialogue is part and parcel of the process of reducing all difference to identity, of reducing all transcendence to immanence, orof reducing the otherto the same. This process,Levinas claims, endemic to philosophyas ontology , the overwhelmingly predominant mode in which Western philosophy has been transacted, is accomplished precisely by recourse to a term independent of the terms in relation but common to each, such as, for instance, the mediatory logos of zyx dinlogos , that, we have been so farsuggesting, is thecondition of possibility for dialogue. As such, we shall argue, the conception of dialogueas dia-logos (by whichwe shall mean dialogueas predicated upon the a priori commonality of the logos for all potential THE zyxwvutsr IMPASSE OF DIALOGUE zyxwvu 5 interlocutors, as the condition of possibility for dialogue) is but one manifestation of the Western philosophical/ontological project. It is the purpose of this opening chapter to trace Levinas’s account of dialogue after this philosophically predominant concep tion,and to indicatetheimpasseintowhichthismodelleads regarding the...