Aesthetics As First Ethics Levinas and the Alterity of Literary

Discourse
Henry McDonald
diacritics, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 15-41 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
For additional information about this article
Access Provided by University of Washington @ Seattle at 05/11/11 6:06PM GMT
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v038/38.4.mcdonald.html
diacritics / winter 2008 15
AESTHETICS AS FIRST ETHICS
LEVINAS AND THE ALTERITY OF
LITERARY DISCOURSE
HENRY McDONALD
1
Notwithstanding the considerable amount of scholarly attention paid since the 1980s to
Emmanuel Levinass ethical philosophy of the other, critics and theorists have gener-
ally approached the relation between ethics and aesthetics in his work warily. Although
readings of poetry and fction inspired by Levinas`s philosophy continue to grow at a
rapid rate, arguments applying that philosophy to literary and aesthetic theory have been
few and tentatively advanced. Some critics have contended that Levinas was something
of a Platonic moralist who disparaged and denounced art and literature as failing to
conform to his idea of what was ethical.
1
If there is a critical consensus on the issue, it
would seem to be that Levinas believed that art and ethics are incompatible.
2

Based on the aesthetic writings that Levinas produced over a four-decade period,
as well as on the role literature played in the genesis and development of his ethical
philosophy, such assessments seem puzzling. A Lithuanian Jew who studied with Hus-
serl and Heidegger in 192930, Levinas (190695) came to philosophy initially through
literature, especially Russian literature and Shakespeare: the whole of philosophy, he
said, is only a meditation of Shakespeare.
3
In the frst work of his philosophical ma-
turity, Existence and Existents (1947), discussions of aesthetics and literature introduce
and develop the notion of being as il y a (there is), an account which, in giving emphasis
I am indebted to Alain Toumayan and Tina Chanter for their helpful comments on a prior draft of
this paper.
1. See section 5 for my discussion of what I believe to be Levinass clearly anti-Platonic posi-
tion. On Levinass so-called Platonism, see Robbins 17. Edith Wyschogrod, in her early work on
Levinas, completed prior to the publication of Otherwise than Being in 1974 (although I cite here
from a later edition), speaks of Levinass Platonic bias in art [Emmanuel Levinas 78]. In a later
essay, however, Wyschogrods perspective is much more helpful [The Art in Ethics].
2. A crucial work representative of and inuential in furthering these views is that of Jill Rob-
bins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature [xxi, 3940, 48, 50, 5253, 75, 85]. The present essay
is in no sense intended as a response to Robbinss book, which would require a very different kind
of argument than the one I have undertaken. Other studies asserting that Levinas was dismissive
of literature due to its lack of ethical value or meaning include Steve McCaffery, Prior to Meaning
215; and Chris Thompson, The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Leo Bronstein, and the Inter-
human Intrigue' 316. Many of these studies confne themselves to Levinas's frst aesthetic essay,
La ralit et son ombre' (Reality and Its Shadow'). I have benefted from Alain P. Toumayan's
commentary on this essay in Encountering the Other [58, 7172, 12023, 12628, 149, 15253].
Most commentators, unlike Toumayan, simply assume that Reality and Its Shadow denounces
ethics. See, for example, the otherwise very interesting and challenging perspective provided by
Kevin Hart in Ethics of the Image 120.
3. TO 72. For a general discussion of the literary background of Levinass philosophical inter-
ests, see Levinas and Robbins, Interview with Francois Poirie (1986).
diacritics 38.4: 1541
16
to beings horror (horreur), simultaneously critiques ontology and places ethics on a
tragic basis.
4
The il y a, along with its temporal counterpart, the entretemps (between
times), introduced just one year later in Reality and Its Shadow (1948), are of particu-
lar importance to his writings on aesthetics, produced during a period from the 1940s
through the 70s.
5
The latter provide abundant evidence of the potential for ethical mean-
ing, indeed transcendence, he attributed to the artwork, as in The Poets Vision (1956),
in which he asserts: Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the
horizons of the world . . . the authenticity of art must herald an order of justice [The
Poets Vision 134, 137]. Although Levinas never completed anything approximating a
system of aesthetics, it is nonetheless true that in pieces ranging from developed essays
on literary theory and aesthetics to brief commentaries on dozens of literary fgures and
works, he gave substantive indications of the ways in which his radically nonconceptual,
nonontological account of ethics might alter our understanding of the status of the liter-
ary artwork.
Most crucial among those indications is the close connection he posited between the
alterity, or otherness, of the artwork and its tragic nature, which he defned in terms of his
antiontological accounts of being and especially time (entretemps, between times).
As early as Reality and Its Shadow, Levinas proposed the thesis, extended in his later
essays, that the alterity of art and literature was located not in any ontological or concep-
tual beyondin a spiritual dimension which sets itself up as knowledge of the abso-
lute [1]but in the interstices of language [3], in the between times (entretemps)
of its modes of temporality: which can be accessed only by way of the tragic in art.
Time in Levinas`s aesthetics is signifed diachronically, from within a region of diaspora.
What Levinas terms alterity, or otherness, points not toward a privileged, interpersonal
dimension freed from the problematics of modernity, but strives to expose the complicity
between the West`s concept of rationality and its history of barbarism exemplifed by the
Holocaust, its history, as Levinas put it, of National Socialism, Stalinism, the camps, the
gas chambers, nuclear weapons, terrorism and unemployment.
6
Art and literature dem-
onstrate a utopian, emancipatory potential in revealing the fssures and hidden pathways
that run through the hegemonic structures and totalizing frameworks of modernity.
A central aspect of such an aesthetics is its privileging of music and musicality, which
Levinas shares with a more recent thinker and critic, Paul Gilroy.
7
Like Gilroy, Levinas
deploys 'musicality, which he characterizes as 'writing in its signifcance without signi-
fers [157] not just to 'refute, as Gilroy puts it [Black Atlantic 73], the Hegelian thesis
of the death of art via philosophy, but to challenge critical theorys claim of an all-encom-
4. The twelve-page chapter Existence sans existent [93105] of De lexistence a lexistant
(1947), in which the notion of the il y a is introduced, employs the term horreur or its cognates
about twenty times, by my count. The work has been translated by Alphonso Lingis as Existence
and Existents.
5. Discussions of the il y a play a prominent role at both the beginning and the end of Other-
wise than Being. With the exception of La ralit et son ombre (Reality and Its Shadow), most
of Levinass writings on aesthetics important to this essay can be found in Noms propres and Sur
Maurice Blanchot, both of which are translated by Michael Smith in Proper Names / On Maurice
Blanchot.
6. Foreword, PN 3. In common with Theodor Adorno, for whom writing poetry, after the
Shoah, is barbaric [Prisms 34], poetry has for Levinas what Berel Lang calls a retroactive
status in understanding that complicity [Evil inside and outside History 11]. See also the works
of Zygmunt Bauman, including Modernity and the Holocaust.
7. See Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic; Postcolonial Melancholia; Small Acts; and his Fore-
word: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe.' In a more specifcally philosophic sense, I
am indebted to the works of Tina Chanter for alerting me to the centrality of time in Levinass effort
to establish ethics as frst philosophy.' See her Time, Death, and the Feminine.
diacritics / winter 2008 17
passing textuality: to open up, within the structures of rationality, a tragic, subversively
ethical function for art. What is coming to a close, Levinas posits, may be a rationality
tied exclusively to the being that is sustained by words. . . . Poetry signifes poetically the
resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing [Foreword,
PN 4; Poetry and Resurrection 12]. It is the diachronic, temporal nature of literary lan-
guage, what Levinas calls its sovereign forgetfulness (oubli souverain) which is also a
kind of homelessness, a diaspora of identitythe view from the Stranger, the state-
less person, the dispossessedthat is the vehicle of transcendence [Servant and Her
Master 143, Foreword, PN 6]. Such an aesthetics intersects closely with the Diaspora
concept of culture developed in recent decades
8
and is alert as well to what Gilroy calls
the advantages of marginality as a hermeneutic standpoint [Black Atlantic 213].
The comparison of Levinass view of aesthetics to Theodor Adornos assertion that
To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is apt in that Levinass view of literature,
which cannot be separated from his view of philosophy, refects a postmodern loss of
faith in the effcacy of culture and mind. Unfortunately, the comparison has been made
not for this reason but to point up Levinass negative attitude toward art. But that is to
distort not just Levinass perspective but Adornos as well. To quote Adorno more fully:
Cultural criticism fnds itself faced with the fnal stage of the dialectic of culture
and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes
even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Abso-
lute reifcation, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements,
is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. [34]
Adorno uses the word impossible here in a way similar to that of Levinas: as
conceptual, ontological impossibility, not as ethical impossibility. To assign to art the
function of representing the horror of human existence, the function of presenting its bar-
barism, is to assign it, after the Shoah, the task of representing the unrepresentable, a task
both impossible and necessary. Art performs the ethical risk that it represents. That risk is
a 'fne one, as Levinas put it [OB 120], for the alterity of the artwork is double-edged:
the barbarism from which it cannot be disassociated is the ground of its transcendent
status.
In this essay, I argue that aesthetics plays a crucial role in the central project of Levi-
nass philosophy: his effort to make ethics, as he says in pointed allusion to metaphys-
ics, 'frst philosophy. Far from being an anomalous departure from his philosophy as a
whole, as has been suggested, Levinass writings on literature and art are at the heart of
that philosophy, providing the point of reference for the tragic yet affrmative content of
his ethics. It is no accident, in this respect, that much of Levinass ethical terminology,
clustered around the notion of passivity, has its origin, directly or indirectly, in his aes-
thetics. The question of aesthetics in Levinass philosophy is arguably the question of that
philosophy, since it is precisely with reference to the aesthetically and phenomenologi-
cally defned notions of the il y a and the entretemps that Levinas developed his ethical
account of alterity in the frst place. If, in relation to the metaphysical tradition, Levinas
would grant ethics the status of 'frst philosophy, then aesthetics, in relation to his own
work, might be regarded as 'frst ethics [see 'Ethics as First Philosophy]. By this I
mean not that aesthetics for Levinas is a kind of ethics, but rather that it is a frst 'frst
philosophy whose alterity to, and at the same time complicity in, theoretical discourse
functions to delineate the bounds of the ethical, the ways we do and do not conceptualize
ethical categories.
8. See, for example, Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora; and Braziel and Mannur.
18
2
Throughout much of the history of Western philosophy, however, aesthetics has been far
from a frst 'frst philosophy. Rather, it has been, as the 'other of ethics, something
much closer to an other other philosophy.
9
It is therefore crucial, and will be the effort
of this brief section, prior to discussing his aesthetic writings themselves, to describe the
post-Kantian philosophical orientation within which Levinass views of aesthetics took
shape. That orientation has two prominent features. First, in common with many post-
Kantian philosophers, Levinas challenges the concept of rationality underlying Kants
tripartite division of the spheres of philosophy, but he does so less by offering an alter-
native account of rationality, as Hegel, Heidegger, and poststructuralism do in different
ways, than by imposing limits on what is counted as rational, pointing up the boundaries
between the conceptual and the nonconceptual and refusing to assimilate the two to a
common frame of reference.
10
Such a method tends to be antiepistemological in recog-
nizing the value of untruth, of falsehood (as Nietzsche also stressed); and antiontologi-
cal, desubstantializing and de-nucleating [Poetry and Resurrection 10] the noumenal
sphere in order to trace the pathways of the nonconceptual in the conceptual. The bounds
of sense, in Levinasian terms, lie not at the border of some ontological otherworld but
within the interstices of language: within, that is, the gaps in time that language fails
to representwhich are present in language as unrepresentable. Levinas laid the basis
for such critique early on through the notions of the il y a and the entretemps, his counter-
Heideggerian accounts of Being and Time, respectively (and the title of Heideggers
most important work). At the heart of Levinass critique of Heideggerian ontology is a
critique of the unity and autonomy of the temporal instant or momentwhat is also at
issue in Nietzsches eternal return of the same
11
which serves as the foundation of the
metaphysical view of time as an infnite succession of moments continually passing away
and arriving; and which Heidegger, according to Levinas, did not challenge radically
enough. Here, again, it is a question not of providing an overarching theory or explana-
tion of the way time works but of pointing up, within the instant or moment, that which
is other or beyond conceivability, immemorial and unpredictable. It is aesthetics, as
a mode of expression of the tragic grounded in the entretemps of the artwork, that gives
access to such a temporally transcendent dimension by virtue of its ability to infltrate,
between the lines, its culture and society.
9. By this I refer simply to the inuence during classical and medieval times, largely up to the
eighteenth century, of Horaces dictum in Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) aut prodesse aut delectare
(to teach or to delight), usually applied more in the form to teach [ethically, morally] by delight-
ing and often having reference to another maxim of Horace, ut pictura poesis (a poem is like a
picture). Later critics and philosophers inuenced by a nonmimetic, musical' model of the arts
saw such maxims as reecting the assumption that poetry gives a kind of moral knowledge that is in
turn grounded in a more theoretical knowledge: what is described by Nietzsche in his early period
in The Birth of Tragedy [8993, sec. 14]. According to this conventionalized view of the role of
aesthetics in ancient and medieval times, whose distortions cannot be considered here, the arts are
secondary to morals which are in turn secondary to the theoretical sciences. For remarks on the
philosophical signifcance of aesthetics in modern times see Henry McDonald, The Ontological
Turn; American Literary Theory and Philosophical Exceptionalism; and Language and Be-
ing.
1O. On Levinass critique of philosophy, with reference not just to Hegel and Heidegger, but
Derrida as well, see Ideology and Idealism 238. See also God and Philosophy 167.
11. See section fve of this essay for a comparison of Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence
and Levinass entretemps. My work was completed too early to take into account a remarkable,
exceedingly valuable collection of essays, Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain
God [ed. Stauffer and Bergo]. Especially pertinent to my arguments are the articles by Stauffer,
Longneaux, Bergo, and Diprose, although none reects the focus on aesthetics provided here. See
notes 14 and 20.
diacritics / winter 2008 19
But that ability is at the same time an ethical one. The second general feature of Levi-
nass post-Kantian philosophical orientation is that it posits a common basis for ethics
and aesthetics in the nonconceptual and in so doing reconfgures the nature of both. On
the one hand, ethics is no longer subordinated to and largely equated with morality, which
in Kants system had been viewed as an adjunct of theoretical reason that he called prac-
tical reason. Instead, ethics becomes what Aristotle called 'frst philosophy, displacing
both classical metaphysics and modern ontology. On the other hand, aesthetics is not just
given a nonconceptual basis; such had been the central thrust of the modern tradition of
aesthetics after Baumgarten in the eighteenth century, and was common, indeed, to Ger-
man romanticism, French antiexpressivism, and the European-wide art for arts sake
movement, all of which had taken music as the central symbol of the nonconceptuality
of aesthetics.
12
What is new, rather, is that aesthetics should be rooted in the nonconcep-
tual and linked to a nonmoral, non- (but not anti-) rationalistic account of ethics as 'frst
philosophy. The link between ethics and aesthetics, in the work of Levinas, is expressed
in the concept of the tragic, which is not just a literary but an ethical concept refecting
arts philosophic transcendence. Literature, instead of being interpreted by the critic on
the basis of theoretical, ultimately philosophical principles, becomes the vehicle of an
ethical critique of traditional philosophy, of philosophy as modernist rationality. What
enables such critique, what serves as its tragic locus, is the musicality of the artwork, and
the characteristic mode of time, the entretemps, to which it is intimately related. Crucial
to the notion of the musicality of the artwork is the ethical sensibility which animates it,
which is contrasted with traditional moralityto which contrast I now turn, by way of
a brief analysis of Huckleberry Finn that will also highlight a number of themes charac-
teristic of Levinass mode of literary analysis before describing the temporal basis of his
tragic aesthetics.
3
Traditionally, morality has been characterized as the rules and conventions used to guide
a persons conduct or behavior, such rules and conventions having reference to a ra-
tionality whose crucial if not defning feature is, as in the case of Kant`s 'categorical
imperative, its universality. Ethics, by contrast, connotes the more personalized, less
universal and consequently less rigorously rationalizable aspects of our moral interaction
with others in the world. If the meanings of the two terms have often been blurred in the
history of moral philosophy, that is because they have been assumed to occupy a continu-
um in which ethics was marginalized in favor of the more essential center of morality.
In recent decades, due to the infuence of a diverse range of thinkers, including Ber-
nard Williams, the late Derrida, Rey Chow, and Levinas himself, something approaching
an ethical Copernican Revolution, reversing the axis of reference from morality to
ethics, has occurred in the work of many literary theorists, social scientists, and philoso-
phers.
13
From such a vantage point, the history of moral philosophy since Kant appears
in changed perspective: as a history in which morality gained its privileged, essential
12. For valuable accounts of the inuence of Baumgarten, Kant, Mendelssohn, and Herder
with respect to the antimimetic implications of music as a semiotic model for understanding lit-
eratures (ontological) mode of existencea mode Levinas is engaged in resistingsee Beck 283
86; Dixon 1, 3738, 4850, 8084; Gadamer 1618; Guyer, Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb;
Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom 8485, 95, 13241; Kristeller 3: 41628; Dahlstrom
ixxxx; Henrich 30; and Norton.
13. See Williams; Chow, Ethics after Idealism. Some of the pertinent Derrida references are
Acts, At This Very Moment, Faith and Knowledge, Of Hospitality, and Politics of Friendship.
For a good account of these issues with respect to Levinas, see Spargo.
20
status only by assimilating the alterity of ethical experience to the universal categories
of the selfby reducing what is other to the same. Justice, as a consequence, can no
longer be equated with reason defned in terms of universality; it requires recognition, to
put it in Levinasian terms, of the alterity, the incommensurability, the unpredictability, of
experiencewhether such experience consist of an encounter with the other person,
with death, or within the entretemps of the artwork. As Nietzsche urged, ethics begins
where morality ends; the two converge only at a semantic aporia where the moral basis
of the self is confronted with its own impossibility.
14

Such impossibility is at issue when Huck Finn, in the celebrated scene of chapter 31
of Mark Twains novel, turns against his own conscience, against everything he has
been taught to believe is true and good, which includes slavery and the Christian moral-
ity that justifes it, in order to help free his friend, Jim, from slavery. Huck, it needs to be
emphasized, is not an abolitionist; he thinks that the institution of slavery is moral and
just, and he takes on the commitment to help Jim at the cost of what he dramatically avers
is his own eternal damnation. But readers who would attribute such avowals merely to
the internalization of religious dogma and social convention have not heeded Twains
language carefully enough. In this scene and elsewhere in the novel (not to mention in a
later story, where the human conscience is personifed as monstrous and horrifc), Twain
makes clear that it is the moral nature of the self that is at issue.
15
Huckleberry Finn, as
James M. Cox says, is an attack upon the conscience. . . . And not only the social con-
science . . . but any conscience [Uncomfortable Ending 353]. The vehicle of that at-
tack, however, is a certain passivity, a receptivity and trust, which puts in check Hucks
inherited belief system, casts the reason of his moral self in a hateful light, and compels
him, as it were involuntarily, to obey impulses and recognitions that take shape, in this
scene, in the memory images of Jims talking, and singing, and laughing, of Jims
words and deeds of kindness and unselfshness, of gratitude and friendship [HF 169].
No one is good voluntarily, as Levinas says [OB 11]. Hucks commitment to help Jim,
which is initiated prior to this scene, is an ethical, not a moral, act, a putting of himself in
service to his friend that subverts his settled sense of self, incites him to a state of dis-ease
not just with himself but with most of the people he encounters, and projects him toward
a space of social and moral dislocatedness, toward a sort of diaspora of identity that is
reaffrmed, in the fnal sentences of this novel, when Huck says, in what has become a
pervasive theme of American literature, I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the
rest [HF 229]. Huck wants to get ahead of the rest in order to get away from the rest;
14. The moral impossibility referred to here is an ontological, not an ethical one. Bettina
Bergo, in The Flesh Made Word; Or, The Two Origins, makes a similar distinction [Stauffer
and Bergo 104], although without reference to the contrast between ethics and morality that
I have drawn. Bergos discussion of an ethical alterity associated with the instant of sensations
upsurge [103] is similarly conducive to the understanding of the corporeal and temporal nature of
ethics that I emphasize in this essay. Also in Stauffer and Bergos collection, see Rosalyn Diproses
Nietzsche, Levinas, and the Meaning of Responsibility. What I am terming morality is parallel
to what Diprose calls a juridical concept of self-responsibility [116], which she contrasts with
both Levinass and Nietzsches responsibility for the other . . . made possible by an idea of corpo-
real subjectivity . . . based on what I will call somatic reexivity' that is grounded in the temporal-
ity of the body, in the body open to an undetermined future [11819]. This splendid formulation
goes to the heart of the musicality of the artwork, which I locate in Levinass aesthetics beginning
with Existence and Existents (1947) and Reality and Its Shadow (1948). See sections four and
fve.
15. The story I refer to is Mark Twains The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime
in Connecticut. Other places in Huckleberry Finn where Hucks conscience is made an issue
include chapter 26, when Jim threatens to steal his children back from slavery, and chapter 33,
where Huck remarks, If I had a yaller dog that didnt know no more than a persons conscience
does, I would poison him [183].
diacritics / winter 2008 21
he sees himself as continuously engaged in an effort to break free from the frozen and
false authority of the present in order to become a citizen of somewhere else, as Haw-
thorne put it at the end of the preface to The Scarlet Letter.
To say that Hucks self-identity is diasporic is to say that it is irremediably split or
divided. Indeed, for much of the novel, it seems to be shadowed by itself. The shadow
has a corporeal form: Hucks prior, reappearing best friend, Tom Sawyer. Competing
with his loyalty to Jim is Hucks admiration for Tom Sawyer, who incarnates all the con-
ventional moral virtuesthe values of Southern romantic honor which we know Twain
despised and even made responsible for the warthat Huck seems driven, but fails, to
turn his back on.
16
That failure is nowhere so evident than in the novel`s fnal, so-called
evasion chapters where Tom, with Hucks reluctant participation, subjects Jim to a
make-believe version of his morality that is cruel and humiliating to Jim.
17
These chapters
have stirred much critical offense, and in turn defense, but what such responses often fail
to appreciate, in their understanding of Huck as either intrinsically good or pragmati-
cally self-serving, is the basic duplicity, the tension of ethical and moral imperatives, that
informs Hucks behavior throughout the novel. Hucks irresistible attraction to Tom is
emphasized at the beginning and the end of the novel, but it is Hucks more affecting rela-
tion to Jim, by virtue of the parallelism of his escape from Pap and of Jims escape from
his owner, that structures the novels plot in between. Indeed, that relation is anticipated
early in the novel when Huck is imprisoned and nearly murdered in Paps cabin while Pap
delivers several racist, if comic, harangues, all of which are nothing if not reminiscent
of the conditions some slaves were forced to endure [2629]. Hucks character has often
been proclaimed as the founding voice of modern American literature, and that voice, as
scholars have argued, has its origin partly in the voices of the Negro slaves that Twain
who viewed the narrative artist as a word-musician
18
was immersed in growing up in
the South:
16. The ideology of the South and Southern fction that Tom reects was incarnated above all,
for Twain, in the work of Sir Walter Scott: Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern
character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war [qtd. in
Twain, Life on the Mississippi 266].
17. For the better part of a century, critical discourse on Huckleberry Finn has tended to focus
on the fnal so-called evasion' chapters of the novel. This description refers to the explanation
given by Tom Sawyer in chapter 39 when he likens his and Huck's effort to free Jim to accounts he
has read in romantic novels. When a prisoner of style escapes, Tom explains, its called an eva-
sion [211]. During the middle of the twentieth century, critics such as Leo Marx charged Twain
with a similar evasion in the fnal chapters of the novel through his construction of a plot that al-
lows the seriousness of Huck's commitment to free Jim to be subverted by Tom Sawyer's game-play-
ing antics. Twains evasion, Marx argued, constituted a lapse in moral vision that crippled
the novel aesthetically [349]. Beginning in the 1960s with James M. Cox, such arguments were
persuasively countered, if not exactly refuted, by drawing attention to their own moral complacency
The reader's approval of Huck's presumably self-sacrifcing decision to free Jim is exercised, Cox
observed, at a safe distance; it is an approval of a sentiment, not of a political course of action.
Tom's performance at the end, resting as it does on the knowledge that Jim is already legally free,
is an exposure of the readers throughout the novel. In the headnote to Huckleberry Finn, Twain
warned against fnding a moral' in the novel, and some critics, including Cox, have taken that
warning in support of a view that argues Hucks ethical crisis is largely a chimera, a fabrication
of post-Reconstruction sentimentality. Just as it was easy for a reader to condemn slavery after the
war against it had been fought and won, Huck does the easiest thing, as Cox put it, in commit-
ting himself to free Jim [HF 351]. Although critics since this time have contributed immeasurably
to our understanding of this novel through their detailed historical and political contextualizations,
the basic critical opposition reected in Marx's and Cox's readings remains intact today. For only
a handful of the critical and other readings that have inuenced my view of this novel, see Jehlen;
Carton; Cox; Doyno; Fulton; and Powers.
18. Twain, Fenimore Coopers Literary Offences 302.
diacritics / winter 2008 23
In Mark Twains manuscript pages half a century later, these [slave] voices chal-
lenged the genteel paradigm that had sonorously governed the frst epoch of
indigenous American literature. They ushered in a replacement . . . the solo
riffs of the dispossessedthe advent of an American voice derived not from Eu-
ropean aesthetics, but entirely from local improvisational sources, black and
white. [Powers 8]
The point is not at all that Huck is possessed of the ability to assimilate and internalize,
through Jim, the reality of slavery, but on the contrary that precisely as other and inca-
pable of being assimilated such reality exerts its effects on Huck, unsettling and putting
in question his true self. It is the experience of Tom, not of Jim, that Huck internal-
izes. Indeed, that both Huck`s and Jim`s 'escapes turn out to be fctional hoaxes made
possible by withholding information, until the end of the novel, from the reader (Pap is
already dead; Jim has already been freed) suggests that Huckleberry Finns musical
form is closer to that of a comic opera, with a closed, narrative structure, than a blues
symphony. It is not, in any case, tragic; and nothing signifes that fact more loudly and
dissonantly than Tom Sawyer`s reemergence in the novel`s fnal chapters. Such an end-
ing, as James M. Cox, Myra Jehlen, and Evan Carton have argued, exposes the compla-
cency and bad faith of the post-Reconstruction reader who, like Tom, already knows
that Jim is free. More broadly, it refects what Twain often pointed to late in life in his role
as literary icon: the complicity of modern forms of reason and representation, including
fctional discourse, with the human cruelty and terror witnessed in slavery and racism
[see Smith and Carton]. That Huck is himself so compliant in Tom`s stratagems refects
the fractured nature of his ethical identity, encoding the racist cruelty it rebels against but
also its perpetual incompleteness, its distinctive dislocatedness pitting conscience at
odds with itself.
4
It is worth observing, whatever ones judgment of Huckleberry Finn, that Levinas, for
all his privileging of the form of tragedy, did not fail to defend the rights of literature
as pleasure and entertainment, as what Henry James, more darkly, called amusement,
connoting a right of irresponsibility and immorality.
19
For these authors, to a greater
or lesser extent, comedy clears the air from, and punctures the pretensions of, a modern,
especially expressivist aesthetics which views art as a form of knowledge or cognition
having the mind or imagination of the artist as its source. As Levinas put it, with studied
irony:
An artisteven a painter, even a musiciantells. He tells of the ineffable. An
artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common percep-
tion trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It
thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates,
a poem or a painting speaks. Thus an artwork is more real than reality and at-
tests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge
of the absolute. [RS 1]
For Twain, as I have tried to indicate, as for Levinas, such a view of art was nave and
potentially of bad faith. Levinas, however, was skeptical of the expressivist view of art
19. One cannot contest without being ridiculous . . . [arts being] reduced to a source of plea-
sure' [Levinas, RO 12]. On Nietzsche and Henry James, see my Henry James as Nietzschean.'
24
for reasons less cynical, less pessimisticand less romanticthan Twain. He believed
not just that it was a defning property of art to be nonrepresentational, to be disengaged
and disconnected but also-as he said in the introduction to his frst essay on aesthetics,
Reality and Its Shadow (1948)that the question of art is the meaning and the
value of this disengagement. Exercising that post-Kantian discrimination, as I have
described it, which traces the pathways of the nonconceptual in the conceptual, Levinas
asks rhetorically:
Is to disengage oneself from the world always to go beyond [au-del], toward
the region of Platonic ideas and toward the eternal which towers above the
world? Can one not speak of a disengagement on the hither side [en-deca]of
an interruption of time by a movement going on on the hither side of time, in its
interstices? [23]
What is encountered on that hither side, beneath representation, is a dimension
characterized by the image, which is distinguished from the concept by its temporality:
by our ability to sense objects, rather than perceive or conceive them. Images, unlike con-
cepts, are not expressed or represented, but rather impose themselves on us without
our assuming them [4] and compel our participation, impower us,
20
in a characteristic
rhythm, or externality, that Levinas calls musical [3]. Just as music demands from us
an involuntary responsiveness that encloses us in a private yet shared sense of posses-
sion, an exteriority of the inward [4], so too art compels a passivity, a participation
prior to understanding, which reverses the ordinary identity of things and exposes what is
shadowy and strange in them, effecting a deconceptualization, a disincarnation of real-
ity [5]. The artist, Levinas says, moves in a universe that precedes . . . the world of
creation [7]. The artist is not a maker, a fabricator, a creator, but rather, as Levinas puts it
in a later essay, 'a nomad . . . wandering . . . as in a desert [where] one can fnd no place
to reside [The Poets Vision 136].
What is most striking in such an account, from the post-Kantian perspective I indi-
cated previously, are the homologous roles played by art and ethics in Levinass thought:
the passivity, nomadism, and discontinuities of language and time, that function in both
cases to undermine philosophys rationalist paradigms. At the core of these homologies
is the role played by aesthetics in Levinass ethical critique of ontology. The universe
which precedes creation that Levinas denotes, in Reality and Its Shadow, as aesthetic,
was described, just one year previously in Existence and Existents (1947), as a charac-
teristic of being as il y a; and the il y a posited a tragic account of being that was the
starting point of an ethical critique of both classical metaphysics and modern ontology.
Most signifcantly, the notion of the musicality of the image advanced in 'Reality and Its
Shadow is part of a tragic account of time central to that critique. To insist on the mu-
sicality of every image, Levinas says in the latter, is to see in an image its detachment
from an objectits detachment, that is, from the category of substance [5], which was
the basis of Aristotelian metaphysics. It is also to insist that Non-truth is not an obscure
residue of being, but is its sensible character itself [7]: which does not mean, as it did for
20. Here and elsewhere in this essay, my use of the term impower, or impowerment,
contrasts with the expressive or imaginative attributes of empowerment normally attributed to the
artwork. Suggestive of the ethical potential Levinas grants to aesthetics, and drawing on the model
of music in particular, it describes a radical passivity grounded in the temporality of the body. Such
passivity might be understood, in Nietzschean terms, as a sort of somatic self-overcoming: the will
to power as pathos, which Jill Stauffer [33-47] and Jean-Michel Longneaux [48-69] argue power-
fully, although in different ways, is crucial to Nietzsches notion of eternal recurrence, relating both
(i.e., will to power and eternal recurrence) to the passivity of Levinasian ethical alterity.
diacritics / winter 2008 25
Plato, that the aesthetic world is a lesser one of becoming. It means that arts disengage-
ment is philosophically subversive, radically so. Critics who claim that Levinass view
of art is Platonic have confused his critique of the function of representation in art with
a critique of arts failure to represent. The latter, for Levinas, contrary to Plato, is not a
failure at all. Although art for Levinas is a region of darkness and obscurity, error and
falsehoodof the untruth of being, as he put itthe question it poses, from its hither
side, is ethical: what are the meaning and the value of such an untruth of being?
One of the centrally philosophic ways-grounded in the 'frst philosophy of eth-
icsthat Levinas tries to answer this question is through the notion of the entretemps,
which is a characteristically aesthetic time that, in its association with the time of dy-
ing or what Heidegger called anxiety toward death, undercuts both metaphysical notions
of time as a moving image of eternity, in Platos words [Timaeus 37d], and modern,
ontological accounts of time as fnite. Much as ethics confronts the moral self with its
own impossibility, so too tragic art opens up an externality of time, a diachronic tran-
scendence, immemorial and unpredictable, which is subversive of the idols of eternal and
historical meaning guarded by philosophy. But beyond arts function of subverting the
rationalist paradigms of philosophyof calling [philosophy] back to error, as Levinas
puts it ['The Poet`s Vision 135]-there is art`s tragic affrmation in face of the horror of
being: in face of the Nazi terror and Jewish Holocaust with which Heideggerian philoso-
phy was actively complicit, and to which Levinas was a close witness. Because Levinass
aesthetics was formed within the cauldron of such a philosophic history, let us look, very
briefy, at some of its elements.
The genesis of Levinass challenge to the ontological tradition in philosophy can be
traced to a series of texts published during an eleven-year period between 1934the year
after Heidegger joined the Nazi Party upon Hitlers ascension as Chancellor and when
Levinas wrote 'Refections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, implicitly linking Nazism`s
'new, biological conception of man to Heideggerian fnitude of being-and 1947, the
year of Existence and Existents, composed largely while still in a German labor camp.
21

Levinas had personally studied with Heidegger in 192930, and many of the terms of his
antiontological ethical philosophy were developed in specifc response to Heideggerian
fundamental ontology. Heidegger was of crucial importance to Levinas not for his betray-
al of the integrity of philosophy, however, but for something close to opposite: because
his work sum[s] up, as he later wrote, a whole evolution of western philosophy [Phi-
losophy and he Idea of Infnity 53]. Heidegger`s fundamental ontology claimed that the
question of being had been submerged or forgotten by two millennia of metaphysics, but
what that claim had itself suppressed, according to Levinas, was the essential possibility
of elemental Evil.
22
An elemental evil is a necessary one, evil as an intrinsic part of be-
ing, rather than evil as the privation or lack of what is good, and it is on the basis of such
a notion of being, which Levinas arrived at not theologically but through phenomenologi-
cal analysis of pain and suffering, nausea, and alienation, that he challenged Heideggers
ontological philosophy. Using the French term mal, or evil, in close association with its
meaning of hurt, he writes in Existence and Existents:
21. For commentaries on Reections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,' see Horowitz and
Horowitz, Is Liberalism All We Need? Prelude via Fascism, as well as the Milchman and Rosen-
berg collection Postmodernism and the Holocaust, especially the essays by Fabio Ciaramelli, Rob-
ert John Schefer Manning, Tina Chanter, and Helmut Peukert.
22. This phrase is from Levinas's 1990 preface to Reections on the Philosophy of Hitler-
ism,' composed ffty-six years after the essay's original publication in 1934. The emphases are
Levinass.
26
We shall try to contest the idea that evil [mal] is defect. Does Being contain no
other vice than its limitation and nothingness? Is there some sort of underlying
evil in its very positivity? Is not anxiety over Beinghorror of Beingjust as
primal as anxiety over death? Is not the fear of Being just as originary as the
fear for Being? . . . Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. . . . There is
a pain in Being [Il est le mal detre]. [45; 9]
What results from Levinass contestation is the notion of being as il y a, which is
an excess of nonsense over sense, an excess of an anonymous being that disallows, by
assimilating and negating, all that is outside itself: a kind of black hole of meaning or
state of radical nonalterity or sameness which precipitates the formation of the subject as
egoprecipitates it, that is, as otherby means of the latters resistance to its anony-
mous overfow of indistinction and nonidentity. That resistance comes in the form, partly,
of states of nonconsciousness and sleep that are not, in Nietzsches terms, the opposite of
consciousness [Beyond 201, sec. 3], but are elements of a fundamental passivity which
forms an essential groundwork of identity. It is as though the self, being too full of itself
with a sense of the ceaseless, meaningless activity of its own being, with its own insom-
nia, takes a leap outside itself, calls a halt or at least suspension to such activity, and fnds
the elements of its own gratifcation, its own desires, in that which is 'other to itself.
Originary to the self, in sum, originary to the formation of its ego, is a splitting or
fracturing of self-identity which conditions receptivity to what Levinas will call, in his
later work, otherwise than being: to an absolute alterity, an exteriority or discontinu-
ity that puts that very identity in question, compelling the opening up and uprooting of
the subjects positionality and placing the self in a grammatically accusative position, a
me rather than an I. Such alterity acts as a demand, a compulsion, in no sense chosen
by the self, which can be neither anticipated by nor assimilated within prior categories
of thought. It is this compulsion, an involuntary responsiveness, that I have likened to
Hucks act of putting himself in service to Jim; but such an act, in its anti-moral subver-
sion of social and political authority as well as incitement to ethical transcendence with-
out recourse to any settled sense of self, is by no means unique in American literature;
and it is the effect of the argument of Reality and Its Shadow and later essays to suggest
that such compulsion and involuntary responsiveness may be rooted in a larger dimension
of literary diaspora and ontological exile of identity in which the self is called from its
base or home of identity, to which it does not return, but without being able to discon-
nect or free itself wholly from that home. Transcendence and exteriority beckon toward a
fulfllment whose possibility is impossibility:
Literature is the unique adventure of a transcendence beyond all the horizons of
the world, which even the boldest departures do not let us ee. Only art would
let us take offbut for the fact that in that conquest of exteriority, we must
remain for ever excluded; for, if it did offer shelter to the poet, exteriority would
have lost its very strangeness. [The Poets Vision 134]
At issue, in such Mosaic-like exclusion, is not self-denial or renunciation, but what
Levinas calls non-indifference, a self-overcoming or negating of a necessary egotism
or indifference, which is also a disinteressement or forgetfulness of being (esse).
23
Out of
forgetfulness of being and the diasporic consciousness which follows in its wake arises a
nomadic memory:
23. See Cohen, Elevations 16364, for a discussion of Levinass use of this term.
diacritics / winter 2008 27
From the depths of sedentary existence a nomadic memory [in literature] arises.
Nomadism is not an approach to the sedentary state. It is an irreducible rela-
tion to the earth: a sojourn devoid of place. Before the darkness to which art
recalls us, as before death, the I, mainstay of our powers dissolves into an
anonymous one in a land of peregrination. It is the I of the Eternal Wanderer,
identifed by gait rather than location, along the border of non-truth, a realm
extending farther than the true. [The Poets Vision 136]
Such nomadic memory entails a sort of tragic harmonics, a musical impowerment, in a
region nonconceptual (of the image), antiepistemological (on the border of untruth) and
nonmoral (of the mal, the evil and the hurt, of existence): a region that is trespassed most
often, in literature, by the genre of tragedy. In classical times, music had been closely
associated with poetry, tragedy in particular; and Aristotle thought there was a morally
signifcant resemblance between the external movements of rhythmical sound and 'the
movements of the soul [Butcher 132]. But for Levinas, it is not the soul with which trag-
ic art resonates but the formation of the ego out of horror (horreur) of being. In classical
and Shakespearian tragedy, the hero typically experiences an event that causes her or him
to undergo a radical disorientation and loss of self-identity, an insuffciency of self, ego,
and consciousness. In order for this to occur, the event must be experienced not merely as
destructive, but as inexplicable and indeterminateas nonconceptual and communicable
only by means of musical images. When Sophocless Oedipus, for example, blinds
himself after learning that he has married his mother and murdered his father, he gives
expression to just such horror. The suffering he must endure is out of all proportion to
any conceivable explanation or justifcation for it-whether that justifcation be viewed
in terms of theodicy (Gods justice) or hamartia (Aristotelian tragic faw). Tragedy dra-
matizes the invasion of Unmeaning into the heros life and consciousness: an Unmeaning
that is not meaningless in the sense of being the opposite of meaningful, but rather
belongs to a netherworld in between, in violation of the law of the excluded middle. This
invasion forecloses any possibility of the heros recovery of his former self-assurance
and settled state of identity. Unlike the epic poet, who acts as a mouthpiece of the gods,
the tragic poet is a mouthpiece of Unmeaning. From beneath representation, a diasporic
disorder arises, spilling into and subsuming any form of order.
5
The source of such disorder, the temporal counterpart of the il y a but arising in art from
its interstices, is the entretemps. According to the account in Reality and Its Shadow,
where it was originally and most fully presented, the entretemps is a between time
or 'meanwhile that eternalizes, or suspends indefnitely, the evanescence of the pres-
ent moment, a sort of permanent interruption [811]. Levinas illustrates the entretemps
mostly with reference to the plastic arts, to statues and paintings, but he makes clear that
it is equally applicable to narrative fction. Just as 'Eternally, the smile of the Mona Lisa
about to broaden will not broaden [9], so too in fction the action told will return as the
same, the identical, action. Such a mode of time is something inhuman and monstrous
[11]. What is inhuman or monstrous about the entretemps, in particular, is that it deprives
the present moment of its essential characteristic: its evanescence or dissolution. To
deprive the present moment of its ability to pass is to abolish both the future and the
past.
Yet the entretemps, like the songs of the Sirens who lured Odysseuss men to their
death, is also enthralling. Science fction sometimes portrays characters who are given
the fantastic and intoxicating power of stopping or slowing down time, but although what
28
the entretemps conveys may be fantastic and intoxicating, it is not, Levinas insists, a
powerand nothing shows this better than the fact that the entretemps is not just a purely
aesthetic time but that it also characterizes the time of dying, which cannot give
itself the other shore. Alluding to his critique of Heideggers account of being toward
death, Levinas says: What is unique and poignant in this instant is due to the fact that
it cannot pass. In dying . . . one is in the interval, forever an interval [11]. For when the
instant passes, one no longer is. Like the characters in Edgar Allan Poes tales, notably
The Premature Burial, but many others as well, death is experienced as an event which
defeats all attempts to master or control it, negating human possibility by frustrating con-
summation. Heidegger, according to Levinas, misses the point when he refers to death
as the possibility of impossibility, or Nothingness, for such an account neutralizes the
radical alterity of death by assimilating it to the self-comprehension of the subject as an
existential structure of possibility. Nothingness is just the counterimage of the Christian
Afterlife, a picture which reassures Dasein of its manifold, if fnite possibilities-of its
virility [see TO 6973]. It is our rituals and practices around the treatment of the dying,
the burial of the dead, and the preservation of their memory that give meaning to death,
not the existential experience of the consciousness of death.
In order to foreclose such neutralization of deaths radical alterity, Levinas inverts
Heideggers formula of death as the possibility of impossibility and calls it instead the
impossibility of possibility, by which he means to indicate deaths radical exteriority
to, its transcendence of, human consciousness as possibility. Death is what eludes all at-
tempts to master it; in our relation to death, we live in the eternal suspension of the future,
what paralyzes and negates any present. Whether in the time of dying, or the entretemps
of the artwork, by repeating or eternally suspending the present as present, one is locked
in a nightmare of the eternal return of the same.
This phrase denotes the Nietzschean notion frst advanced in The Gay Science [273
74, sec. 341, The Greatest Weight] and elaborated at length in Thus Spoke Zarathustra
[e.g., 179, Of the Vision and the Riddle], a notion that tragically affrmed a person`s
ability to will the eternal recurrence of even the smallest and most regrettable events
of ones life. The basis for comparing the two notions, eternal recurrence and the entre-
temps, is the critique of time on which they hinge. If the entretemps is like the moment
before death, and every moment of life is, potentially, the moment before death, then the
entretempsand eternal recurrence, in a different waymight be regarded not so much
as an inhuman and monstrous time but as an exposure of a certain monstrosity of time
that is concealed by both the classical (metaphysical) and modern (ontological) accounts
of time.
24

Classical metaphysics, according to Heideggers critique, with which Levinas large-
ly agreed and which Nietzsche anticipated, equated time with the being or presence of
inanimate objects, rather than with the kind of being characteristic of humans, what he
called Dasein, or being-there. Such a metaphysics of presence posits time as an infnite
succession, a fowing stream, of 'nows or punctual instants that are continually present-
at-hand, at once passing away and arriving. But by viewing such instants only in terms of
eternity, it deprived the moment of that which was necessary for it to be, its evanes-
cence. Levinass entretemps is essentially a dramatization of this fact, viewing the mo-
ment from the inside-out and fnding there, instead of Plato`s 'moving image of eternity,
an eternity which does not move.
On the other hand, from a Levinasian and Nietzschean perspective, the alternative
offered by Heidegger did not fundamentally challenge what is presupposed by the clas-
sical picture: the integrity and coherence, the wholeness, of the moment. According to
24. For discussions of the contrast between (classical) metaphysics and (modern) ontology,
see my Language and Being and The Ontological Turn.
diacritics / winter 2008 29
Levinas, Heideggers positing of an existential continuum of past, present, and future,
a projective structure of possibility across a fnite temporal horizon, merely duplicates
the metaphysical traditions reduction of time to a self-present instant by making that
continuum a sort of whole, and therefore simultaneous and instantaneous, rooted in Da-
seins projection of itself. Such a temporal horizon negates the diachronic nature of time:
both the alterity of the future, what is radically unpredictable and not to be anticipated;
and the alterity of the past, what is immemorial and exceeds memory and conceptual as-
similation. In the same way that the meaning of death does not consist in our subjective
consciousness of it but in the rituals around the dead and dying, so too the meaning of
time does not have reference to an existential continuum, to an already constituted series
of punctual instants, but arises from that which, being immemorial or unpredictable, is
other to those instants. As Levinas says in a late aesthetic essay, Poetry and Resurrec-
tion: Notes on Agnon (1973): There, between the present and that which has never been
able to join a present, is situated the between times [entretemps] of poetry or resurrec-
tion [12].
By that which has never been able to join a present, Levinas refers principally to
an immemorial (or unrepresentational) past that cannot join a present because it
is in excess of any such present; it is an exteriority, a diachronic transcendence, that
is the reference point of the resurrection enacted in poetry. But the connotation of a
suspended eternity, suggesting the original meaning of the term entretemps, is present
as well; as though Levinas were signifying, using exactly the same words, both the hor-
ror of a timeless eternity and the transcendence of a diachronic time. Nietzsches notion
of eternal return, as an eternal return of the same, yet always different has a similar
ambivalence.
Tragic art, for both Levinas and Nietzsche, is affrmative, a 'saying Yes to life, in
Nietzsches words [Twilight 110]and it is such by virtue of its encounter with a horror
not just of being but of time. In the same way that the il y a, an excess of anonymous being,
serves as the tragic basis of ethics, so too the entretemps, an excessiveness of time from
within the heart of the instant, and a subversion of both the metaphysical and ontological
conceptions of time, serves as the tragic basis for a diachronic, aesthetic transcendence.
It is in the interiority of the moment that the alterity of time is encountered. The source of
poetrys musical impower, its interruption of the synchronic continuities of philosophical
language, is the interstices of time, the entretemps: It is of the essence of art to signify
only between the linesin the intervals of time, between times [entretemps]like a foot-
print that would precede the step, or an echo preceding the sound of a voice [Poetry
and Resurrection 7]. Such signifcation is characterized as 'that exceptional event-that
sovereign forgetfulness, which frees language from its servitude towards the structures
in which the said [le dit] prevails [Servant and Her Master 153]. Providing a satirical
counterversion of the Hegelian account of the death of art via philosophy, Levinas identi-
fes 'the structures in which the said prevails as those of philosophical reason, which is
reputed to love wisdom [and] is all memory, all anticipation, all eternity. [The
language of philosophy] is never-fading, and always has the last word. It con-
taminates with logic the ambiguity inscribed in the trace of forgotten discourse
and never gives itself up to enigma. As the speaker of truth, how can she be
silenced? [Servant, Levinas Reader 158]
She can be silenced, it turns out, by poetrys discontinuous and contradictory lan-
guage of forgetfulness. In Totality and Infnity (1961) Levinas uses the term forgetful-
ness to mean a natural and necessary atheism that makes us forget not what we are
but that we are: that we are not, in particular, self-created but must regard ourselves as
30
such, such forgetting of transcendence being necessary to that very interiority of the
self which makes possible our involuntary receptivity to an ethical encounter with what
is beyond the selfthe transcendence, that is, of the other person.
25
Literary languages
sovereign forgetfulness is similar to such atheistic forgetting in that it occurs in a mode
of time before the worlds creation (that is, of self-creation) and in that it at once pro-
vides access to the interiority of temporal life, with all its suffering, and the affrmation of
a radically other, immemorial or unpredictable time. It is a forgetfulness of being (esse),
disinteressement, that is not sacrifce or renunciation but rather, as Levinas put it, a 'new
kind of passivity, one beneath consciousness, and on the wrong side of being: As
if beyond the ambit of a melody a higher or lower register resonated and mixed with the
chords that are heard, but with a sonority that no voice can sing and no instrument can
produce [Humanism 50]. At the very beginning of Otherwise than Being, Levinas
speaks of his breathlessness in striving to hear a God not contaminated by Being
[xlviii].
Both the entretemps and the eternal return of the same are efforts to deal with the
enigma of time as seen from the perspective of death. The enigma of time is that it is not
something to be gotten outside of (as the metaphysical tradition, with its picture of time
as an infnite succession of punctual instants, had assumed), but it is not fnite either (as
Heidegger, inheriting a view of time as duration and horizon from Bergson and Husserl,
had posited). Rather, the problem of time is the analysis, or opening up, of the moment;
and it is from the post-Kantian perspective of the moment, in common with Levinas, that
Nietzsche has Zarathustra declare, just prior to announcing the eternal return of the same:
behold this gateway. . . . Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end.
. . . The name of the gateway is inscribed above: Moment [Thus Spoke Zarathustra
26970]. The alterity of time can be accessed only by means of the Moment, by means of
that eternity of presentness which is an eternal repetition: that impossibility of time which
is the omnipresence of death. By paradoxically taking responsibility for such impossibil-
ity, Zarathustrawho undergoes cycles of joy and disgust, guilt and happinessdra-
matizes, perhaps, what Levinas also means by tragic affrmation. For his plunge into the
exteriority of the inward is at the same time a self-forgetfulness, a receptivity to alterity,
that carves a path of destruction. To take on an eternal presentness is to destroy, through
forgetfulness, eternal being. It is to resist injustice, including the injustice of death (for
death is always unjust and never natural, according to Levinas), and affrm the moment`s
evanescence, the radical alteritywhat Levinas calls the diachrony [e.g., OB 56]of
past and future.
25. In Totality and Infnity, Levinas says: The idea of infnity, which requires separation,
requires it unto atheism, so profoundly that the idea of infnity could be forgotten [soublier]. The
forgetting [Loubli] of transcendence is not produced as an accident in a separated being; the
possibility of this forgetting is necessary for separation [181]. . . . The paradox of an Infnity admit-
ting a being outside of itself which it does not encompass, and accomplishing its very infnitude by
virtue of this proximity of a separated beingthis, in a word, is the paradox of creation [8990].
Forgetfulness constitutes our existence as separate, created beings; a natural, necessary, but
temporary atheism makes us forget not what we are but that we arethat we are not, in particu-
lar, self-created; but that we must regard ourselves as such, as beings possessed of free will and
autonomy. These views have been traced to a current within the Jewish mystical tradition that fnds
expression in Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhins 1824 book, The Soul of Life (Nefesh Hahayim), such that
the necessity of our forgetfulness would be not just a test of faith but an essential bulwark of cre-
ation. This is to come perilously close, however, to attributing to Levinas a perspective that would
merge ethics and ontologyprecisely what his philosophical work tried so hard to keep separate
or, still worse, to justifying a supposed asceticism, or denial of the body, on his part. What is at
stake in Levinas's ethics is not the denial of the self but the affrmation of the inexhaustibility,' as
Nietzsche says, of its failure.
diacritics / winter 2008 31
From the perspective of death, every moment of life is the moment before death; and
every moment is a suspended eternity within which one is imprisoned. Nonetheless, art,
as the very penitentiary of that moment, dramatizes an exceptional event: the overcom-
ing of deaththe gaining of more lifewithin the externality of the moments inward-
ness. Such overcoming is a sovereign forgetfulness, a Saying of language that signifes
the resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing.
6
These words are from Levinass essay Poetry and Resurrection, on the Israeli writer
S. Y. Agnon (18881970). Agnons works helped to create, in the midst of the destruction
of East European Jewry, a modern Hebrew literature at a time when this ancient language,
which had not been used in everyday, spoken discourse for almost 2000 years, had barely
advanced beyond the stage, so to speak, of its own rebirth. Like Levinas himself, Agnon
was a modernist immersed in traditionalist sourcesthe Bible with its rabbinic com-
mentaries, the Talmud, the Midrash, and medieval literature, down to the Musar works
and Hasidism of more recent centuries (though Levinas was, true to the maskilic and
mitnagdic elements of his Lithuanian background, strongly disaffected by the latter). The
themes of homelessness and exile (galut) are everywhere present in Agnons writings,
most notably in his major novel A Guest for the Night (1939), but these themes are re-
fected by Levinas, in this essay, across the surface of what he calls Agnon`s 'anguish,
which is not an anguish over the end of traditional Jewish life, but over the possible end
of the literature that could bring it to life [Poetry and Resurrection 15]. What Levinas
shares in common with Agnon is a self-exposing modernism complemented by a richness
and depth of religious tradition.
Poetry and Resurrection deepens our understanding of Levinass ethical aesthet-
ics by bringing that aesthetics face to face with Judaism: with Judaism not as a faith or
set of beliefs but as a form of language and mode of expression, an ambiguous and
enigmatic mode of expression
26
that is illustrated in the ancient practice of the melitsah
(fgurative language), which is a 'trope in Agnon`s writing that 'becomes the breaking-
away from a certain ontology:
The Jewish way of life signifed in this ambiguous form of speech [melitsah]
belongs to its mode of expression not only in the way a theme belongs to dis-
course. By its mode of expression that way of life prolongs and redoubles the
enigma. The community of Israel and the things pertaining to its exile, and the
land regainedthese do not have any beginning in the being they spell out! They
attest to that past through ritual. . . . It is as if the land meant nothing but the
promise of land. . . . How can we express that modality, which is totally different
from being? Would not the word beyond be adequate here? Not at all because of
religion, which teaches of the beyond. The opposite would be closer to the truth.
. . . Religion (or, more precisely, Judaism) would be the way in which a desub-
stantiation of being is of itself procured, of itself possiblean excluded middle
in which the limits between life and non-life disappear. . . . The symbolism of the
rite, like the enigma of the Hebraic mode of expression [dire], de-nucleates ulti-
mate solidity beneath plasticity of forms, as taught by Western ontology. [910]
26. On Levinas and the Talmud, including the analogies between Talmudic and literary inter-
pretation, see Levinas, Bad Conscience and the Inexorable; Diffcult Freedom; Nine Talmudic
Readings. See also Cohen, Elevations; Cohen, Ethics, Exegesis and Philosophy; Bloechl, ed., The
Face of the Other and the Trace of God; and Bloechl, Liturgy of the Neighbor.
diacritics / winter 2008 33
The Hebraic mode of expression is rooted in a diasporic, Jewish community, that
has no beginning in being! Rather, it is an antistructural, antiontological practice
of language that has issued forth from the symbol and to which the term beyond, in
an otherworldly sense, is not appropriate. The Jewish way of life reverberates within
language: [It] mirrors, in Agnon, the sonority of the language in which it is expressed. .
. . That life is not just sung; it is itself song [10].
Levinas is careful to distinguish, here and elsewhere in the essay, between the sing-
ing and the songbetween the act of telling and what is toldwhich is a version of his
more basic distinction between the Said and the Saying, le dit et le dire. The Said includes
the totality of language in all its referential and thematic functions. The Saying, on the
other hand, is a condition of possibility of the Said and can be signifed only through lan-
guage, not in it. In attempting to convey the Saying within the Said, language inevitably,
necessarily, betrays itself (which doesnt mean the betrayal shouldnt be committed), for
the Saying leaves in the Said only what Levinas calls the trace of itself, a trace that does
not, however, compromise the exteriority of the Saying to the Said.
Poetry and Resurrection applies this understanding of language, at least implicitly,
to the performance and transmission of literary texts. The most basic point is that since
stories are not self-originating, are not acts of creation, it means that they have refer-
ence to a mode of time beyond themselves, a time that has been forgotten but which
is nonetheless carried, borne, by the discourse, by the Sayingthough not by the story, by
the Saidof the narrative. It is not just that all tellings are retellings, it is that all stories
carry the trace of their prior sayings: of what is said and unsaid, not said and then with-
drawn from what is not said. These retellings, these eternal repetitions of the same
story, are what preserve the irreversibility of its Saying, the undetectability of its origin,
the resistance to its being totalized in a system of the Said. Such incommensurability
of Said and Saying, story and discourse, this necessary narrative uncertainty, necessary
forgetfulness, bears, in its excessive relation to any referential context, the trace of an
immemorial or unrepresentable past, of a radical alerity and transcendence.
27
Language
bears not in itself but in its saying a relation of diachronic discontinuity with its past. As
Levinas comments on Agnon,
And Agnons language, and the life it lets speak (whether in its wholeness or its
disintegration). . . . It all goes back to a past concerning which we are justifed
in wondering whether it could ever have been contained within a present, and
whether today it can be represented. Poetry signifes it, but not in its theme. It
signifes it as song. Its song cannot be reduced to the perfect harmony between
the Saying and the Said attributable to the writers craft, nor to the authors
love for his people, religion or language (to the ahavat Israel). All craft, alle-
giance or commitment aside, the quest for a certain sound (and a sense unsay-
able without it) fnds in Agnon-in that language, that life, that land-a full-
range instrument for its expression. . . . [Agnon's] poetry signifes poetically the
resurrection that sustains it: not in the fable it sings, but in its very singing. [8;
12]
Resurrection is the theme of the principal story of Agnon discussed by Levinas, The
Sign, which tells of what happens when the author, settled in the land of the ancestors,
on the eve of Shavuota festival that commemorates the most important event in Jew-
ish history, the giving of the Torah that was the culmination of the Exoduslearns of
the extermination by the Germans of all the Jews in the Polish town [Buczacz, Galicia]
where he was born [13]. In the dreamlike vision which is then narrated, Agnon sees the
27. On narrative uncertainty, see my The Narrative Act: Wittgenstein and Narratology.
34
dead in what Levinas describes as their absolute place . . . a place that is not a site . . . in
which place is already non-place. At one point, the poet says to two of his last remaining
townspeople:
You said that after the second catastrophe no one was left alive in the town. So
you are yourselves no longer alive! They smiled, then, as the dead smile when
they see that we think they are no longer alive. [14]
Levinass response to this passage is striking:
An enigma set within the enigma. Does not this smile also express the irony the
dead have toward themselves? Are the living completely wrong? Are eternity
and resurrection through poetry free of all illusion? Are language and poetry the
ultimate meaning of humanness? [14]
Notwithstanding the exceedingly high value we have seen Levinas invest in arts sub-
versive ethics, arts diachronic modes of time, the answer to this question is clearly no:
literature and poetry are forms of action that gain their value from being part of a human,
if broken and highly indeterminate chain of transmission, one in which the critic, Levinas
stresses, plays a vital role. It might be noted that Levinass rhetorical questions, by which
he has inserted himself into the narrative discourse on a level with Agnon, implicitly as-
similate the opposition between life and death to that of life and art, tying the value of art,
once again, to its tragic functions. Indeed, to believe that language and poetry are the
ultimate meaning of humanness is to endorse that hypertrophy of art which Levinas
warned against; and to undermine the very real and important tragic potential art and
poetry can have, and which Levinas indicates, in the fnal section of his essay, Agnon`s
work does have.
28
That section starts off with a fairly lengthy quote from the story referred to above,
The Sign, whose words are sharply, bitterly ironic in a manner characteristic of Jew-
ish modernismbut going back to the Biblewith an underlying sad sincerity to which
Levinas is acutely sensitive:
Six million Jews assassinated by the Gentiles among us. A third of Israel has
been killed, and the other two-thirds are orphaned. . . . It was a great thought
that He who lives eternally had, to have chosen us from among all the peoples,
to give us the Torah of Life, although it is a little diffcult to understand why he
created facing us, a kind of human beings that would take our lives because we
observe the Torah. [15]
In a late essay, Useless Suffering (1982), which his commentary on this passage an-
ticipates, Levinas examines religious doctrines such as Leibnizs theodicy (Gods jus-
tice) concerned to justify God`s role in creating evil and in allowing it to fourish, and
28. Nietzsche, too, warned against a hypertrophy of art which he saw incarnated in the music
of Wagner and the philosophy of Schopenhauer: an antitragic overvaluation of the artist as a
priest, a kind of mouthpiece of the in itself of things, a telephone from the beyond [Geneal-
ogy 53839, Third Essay, sec. 5]. Nietzsche also critiqued the theory of lart pour lart as a
concealed morality inimical to what was most vital to the tragic artist: to be a genius of com-
munication [Twilight of the Idols 812, sec. 24]. Similar sentiments and views are conveyed in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra [14952, Of Poets] and Ecce Homo [703, Why I Am So Clever, sec.
5; 72930, The Birth of Tragedy, sec. 3]. It is in the latter passage, in Ecce Homo, that Nietzsche
declares himself to be the frst tragic philosopher,' one of whose attributes is a (quasi-Levinasian)
radical repudiation of the very concept of being.
diacritics / winter 2008 35
concludes that although theodicy in this very broad sense has been a component of much
Western thought, its role has come to an end with the Holocaust. The Holocaust, with its
murder of one million children because their great-grandparents may have been Jewish,
was 'the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering. Referring to Kant`s effort to fnd a
self-determining, self-suffcing structure of consciousness rooted in the Sensibility, and
employing the term mal with the same ambiguity of connotation of evil and hurt that
we have seen before, Levinas says,
the denial and refusal of meaning . . . is the way in which the unbearable is
precisely not borne by consciousness. . . . Suffering, in its hurt and in its in-spite-
of-consciousness, is passivity. . . . The passivity of suffering is more profoundly
passive than the receptivity of our senses. . . . All evil refers to suffering. It is the
impasse of life and being, their absurdity. . . . Thus the least one can say about
suffering is that in its own phenomenality, intrinsically, it is useless, for noth-
ing. [9193]
At the heart of Levinass diagnosis of Western thought is his recognition that the motive
force driving the construction of the moral systems of the West is the need to give mean-
ing to suffering; and that it is that same need which has been the source of those same
systems` immorality and injustice, terror and genocide. It is not Hitlerism that defned the
nature of evil, but its effacement of the human, its ontological denial of the powerlessness
at the heart of consciousness, that constituted its demonic power. It was that denial, that
ontological need, which lay at the source of its violence and hatred of the other. The es-
sence of Hitlerism was its radical incapacity to deal with the impower, the suffering and
evil, at the heart of human being.
Levinas expresses everything he thinks is dangerous about efforts to justify suffering,
whether metaphysical or ontological, when he says, 'the justifcation of the neighbor`s
pain is certainly the source of all immorality ['Useless 99]. To say that the justifcation
of the neighbors pain is the source of immorality is to say that I do not have the right to
give meaning to that which, in others, may be inexplicable in myself; and that it is part of
the nature, of the very meaning of suffering, to be unmeaningful in oneself. The justifca-
tion of the neighbor`s pain begins with the justifcation of one`s own pain and the justif-
cation of ones own pain, begins with the denial of the meaninglessness of suffering, the
denial of the elemental nature of evil.
It is tragic art`s ability to refuse all justifcation for suffering, and to take on the
impower at the heart of human being, that constitutes its ethical transcendence. For to
refuse to justify suffering is, on the one hand, to resist the barbarism of reason: to resist, as
Levinas says in his comments on Agnons The Sign, comfortable theodicies, consola-
tions that cost us nothing and compassions without sufferingto recognize Evil in evil
and Death in death [16]. On the other hand, that refusal is also a tragic affrmation of the
alterity of the self: of a self-forgetfulness that fnds within its own impower the ability to
give meaning not to ones own suffering, which is always meaningless, nor to the suffer-
ing of the other, which is always questionable, never to be presumed, but to my suffering
for the suffering of the other: which is more generally an affrmation of the asymmetry
of the relation between self and other, a recognition that such relation is not a function of
some common essence shared by individuals, but of those individuals in an interhuman
relationship, such that the very basis of community is its dedication to those who are other
to that communitythe inevitable binding into a community of those human beings
who are dedicated to the other man [15].
In Ethics after Idealism, Rey Chow cannily identifes, as a point of convergence in
opposing models of critical theory and cultural studies, an idealization of the other as
36
essentially different, good, kind, enveloped in a halo [xx], which implicitly privileges
ones own otherness, whether theoretically or culturally. Is there something to be learned
from the way Levinas draws on the tradition and culture within which his own Jewish
identity was shaped to critique Western universalism, yet refuses to privilege the concept
of otherness per sewhether based in Jewish election or anything elsebut rather
the capacity of the other to put our settled sense of self at risk? Levinas, an observant
Jew, once went so far as to say, Judaism is not a religionthe word does not exist in
Hebrewit is much more than that . . . [qtd. in Malka 130]. This statement is indicative
of the extent to which Levinas saw his identity as a Jew, his identity as a person bound to
a certain tradition, people, and set of texts, not as the basis for criteria of judgment, but as
the starting point of a process of ethical self-critique continuous with that of philosophy.
Wittgenstein once said: Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same [Tractatus
6.421]. Levinas would say, rather, that aesthetics is at its best 'frst in ethics. But they
are also the same, for Levinas, in that what is at issue, most generally, in Levinass
aesthetics is what is at issue in his ethics, the alterity of language as a nonmeaning-
based, nonconceptual, and nonontological form of signifcation that signifes not for but
to a subjectivity, to the constitution of subjectivity. This process of signifcation is partly
destructive, entailing a shattering of identity through a force or shock from the outside
which interrupts or disrupts the habitual categories and ways of thinking and perceiving
of the ego. Because art and literature are not obedient to the language of philosophy, they
are better able than any other language, perhaps, to dramatize the identity of destructive
and constructive processes. Such dramatization goes to the heart of the tragic function.
Tragedy gives expression to, opens up a mode of time for, the nonpresence of things:
it signifes 'something radically exterior by means of something radically interior. It
constitutes subjectivity by delineating the bounds of the ethical, by breaking down onto-
logical and conceptual categories into realms of uncertainty, regions of forgetfulness, that
mark the limits of transcendence. The invasion of Unmeaning into the self precipitates an
experience of meaning outside the self. Art and literature, it might be said, attempt, fool-
ishly, wastefully, wantonly, with sovereign forgetfulness of their own self-preservation
and identity, what philosophy would never have the courage to attempt: the representa-
tion of the unrepresentable, the taking on, full in the face, of the horror of the il y a and
the eternal presentness of the entretemps. It is art and literature, by entering the moment
from the wrong side of being, from beneath consciousness, with a new concept
of passivity, that can give breath to that moment and a resonance to that beyond
[Humanism 50]. Nonetheless, in that conquest of exteriority [transcendence], we must
remain for ever excluded, for if exteriority . . . did offer shelter to the poet, Levinas
says, ever-mindful of the unrepresentable, the unpredictable, without which the whole
idea of otherness or alterity would be a sham, exteriority would have lost its very
strangeness [The Poets Vision 134].
What has most impeded recognition of the ethical nature of Levinass aesthetics is
the radicalism of his ethics. Ethics for Levinas entails a shattering encounter with fail-
ure and insuffciency, which is represented in Judaic thought as well as in classical Greek
and Shakespearean tragedy, and which Levinas drew on in those frst works produced
after his emergence from a Nazi labor camp: an 'aesthetic source of his ethics, a 'frst
ethics, which shaped the tragic, deeply language-oriented nature of his philosophy to the
end. What Levinas meant by otherness does not separate it from the culture or cultures
in which it acts but is rather an alterity accessed by means of those cultures. All litera-
tures, Levinas would agree with Deleuze and Guattari, are minor literatures [see Deleuze
and Guattari, Kafka]. All literatures, that is, even the major ones, even the ones that
dont want to, dramatize to greater or lesser degrees a potential to subvert the dominant
social and political norms of the cultures in which they are produced. But that potential,
diacritics / winter 2008 37
Levinas insists, is predicated on literatures fractured timelessness: its ability to dramatize
language`s self-overcoming, its signifcation of an immemorial past, an unpredictable
future, within the externality of the moments inwardness.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT P, 1967.
Agnon, S.Y. A Guest for the Night. Trans. Misha Louvish. New York: Schocken, 1968.
________
. The Sign. The Complete Stories of Shmuel Josef Agnon [in Hebrew]. Vol. 8: The
Fire and the Wood: The Sign. Tel Aviv: Schocken, 1962.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989.
Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. Bristol:
Thoemmes, 1996.
Bergo, Bettina. The Flesh Made Word; Or, The Two Origins. Stauffer and Bergo 99
115.
Bloechl, Jeffrey, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philoso-
phy of Emmanuel Levinas. New York: Fordham UP, 2000.
________
. Liturgy of the Neighbor: Emmanuel Levinas and the Religion of Responsibility.
Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2000.
Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell,
2003.
Butcher, S. H. Aristotles Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. New York: Dover, 1951.
Carton, Evan. Speech Acts and Social Action: Mark Twain and the Politics of Literary
Performance. The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 15374.
Chanter, Tina. Neither Materialism nor Idealism: Levinass Third Way. Milchman and
Rosenberg 13754.
________
. Time, Death, and the Feminine. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.
Chow, Rey. Ethics after Idealism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.
________
. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Ciaramelli, Fabio. From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil: Remarks on Kant and Ar-
endt. Milchman and Rosenberg 10112.
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Norton Critical Edition.
New York: Norton, 1977. [HF]
Cohen, Richard A. Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas. Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 1994.
________
. Ethics, Exegesis, and Philosophy: Interpretation after Levinas. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge UP, 2001.
Cox, James M. A Hard Book to Take. One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Ed.
Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985. 386
404.
________
. The Uncomfortable Ending of Huckleberry Finn. HF 35058.
Dahlstrom, Daniel, ed. and trans. Moses Mendelssohn: Philosophical Writings. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Po-
lan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002.
________
. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
________
. At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am. Trans. Ruben Berezdivin. Re-
Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington, IN: In-
38
diana UP, 1991. 1150. Trans. of En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me voici.
Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980; reprinted in Psyche:
Inventions de lautre. Paris: Galilee, 1987.
________
. Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason
Alone. Trans. Samuel Weber. Religion. Ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1998. 178.
________
. Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans.
Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000.
________
. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Trans. of
Politiques de lamiti. Paris: Galilee, 1994.
Diprose, Rosalyn. Nietzsche, Levinas, and the Meaning of Responsibility. Stauffer and
Bergo 11633.
Dixon, Robert. The Baumgarten Corruption: From Sense to Nonsense in Art and Phi-
losophy. London: Pluto, 1995.
Doyno, Victor. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: The Growth from Manuscript to Nov-
el. One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald
Crowley. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1985. 10616.
Fulton, Joe B. Mark Twains Ethical Realism. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1997.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Trans. Nicholas
Walker. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Har-
vard UP, 1993.
________
. Foreword: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe. Blackening Europe:
The African American Presence. Ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2004.
________
. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.
________
. Small Acts. London: Serpents Tail, 1993.
Guyer, Paul, Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael
Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 1: 22728.
________
. Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
Hart, Kevin. Ethics of the Image. Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, Volume I. Ed.
Jeffrey Bloechi and Jeffrey L. Kosky. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2005. 11938.
Henrich, Dieter. Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992.
Horowitz, Asher, and Gad Horowitz. Is Liberalism All We Need? Prelude via Fascism.
Diffcult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics. Ed. Asher Horowitz and
Gad Horowitz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. 1226.
Jehlen, Myra. Banned in Concord: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Classic Ameri-
can Literature. The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain. Ed. Forrest G. Robin-
son. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 93115.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. 1788. Trans. Lewis White Beck. India-
napolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956.
Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual Overview. En-
cyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. 4 vols. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 3:
41628.
Lang, Berel. Evil inside and outside History: The Post-Holocaust vs. the Postmodern.
Evil after Postmodernism. Ed. Jennifer L. Geddes. London: Routledge, 2001.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Bad Conscience and the Inexorable. Face to Face with Levinas.
Ed. Richard Cohen. Albany: State University of New York, 1986. 3540. Trans. of
La mauvaise conscience et linexorable. Exercises de la patience 2 (Winter 1981):
10913. An issue devoted to Maurice Blanchot.
diacritics / winter 2008 39
________
. Diffcult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins UP, 1990. Trans. of Diffcile libert. 1963. Paris: Albin Michel, 1976.
________
. Ethics as First Philosophy. 1984. Trans. Sen Hand. The Levinas Reader. Ed.
Sen Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 7587.
________
. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1978.
[EE] Trans. of De lexistence lexistant. 1947. Paris: Vrin, 1981.
________
. Foreword. PN 36.
________
. God and Philosophy. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell,
1989. 16689. Trans. of [title]. Le Nouveau Commerce 3031 (1975): 97128; col-
lected in De Dieu qui vient a lidee. Paris: Vrin, 1982. 93127.
________
. Humanism and An-Archy. Humanism of the Other. Trans. Nidra Poller. Urbana:
U of Illinois P, 2006. 4557. Trans. of Humanisme de lautre homme. Montpellier:
Fata Morgana, 1972.
________
. Ideology and Idealism. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Sen Hand. Oxford: Blackwell,
1989. 23548. Trans. of [title]. Dmythisation et ideologie. Ed. E. Castelli. Paris:
Aubier-Montaigne, 1973. 13545; collected in De Dieu qui vient a lidee. Paris:
Vrin, 1982. 13545.
________
. Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1990. Contains translations of Quatre lectures talmudiques (Paris: Minuit, 1968) and
Du sacr au saint (Paris: Minuit, 1977).
________
. Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht:
Marinus Nijhoff, 1981. [OB] Trans. of Autrement qutre au au-del de lessence.
Paris: Librairie Generale Francaise, 1974.
________
. 'Philosophy and the Idea of Infnity. 1957. Collected Philosophical Papers.
Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. 4760.
________
. Poetry and Resurrection: Notes on Agnon. PN 716.
________
. The Poets Vision. PN 12739.
________
. Proper Names / On Maurice Blanchot. Trans. Michael Smith. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1996. [PN] Trans. of Noms propres (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975) and Sur
Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975).
________
. Reality and Its Shadow. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Collected Philosophical Pa-
pers. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987. 113. [RS] Trans. of La ralit et son ombre.
Les temps modernes 38 (1948): 77189.
________
. 'Refections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism. Trans. Sean Hand. Critical Inquiry
17 (Autumn 1990): 6371. Reprinted in Diffcult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas
and Politics. Ed. Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.
311.
________
. The Servant and Her Master. Trans. Michael Holland. The Levinas Reader. Ed.
Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 15059. Trans. of La servante et son matre.
Critique 229 (1966): 51422; reprinted in Sur Maurice Blanchot. Montpellier: Fata
Morgana, 1975. 2742,
________
. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1987.
[TO] Trans. of Le temps et lautre. Le choix, le monde, lexistence. Ed. J. Wahl.
Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947.
________
. Totality and Infnity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
Trans. of Totalit et infni. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961.
________
. Useless Suffering. Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith
and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 91101.
Levinas, Emmanuel, and Jill Robbins. Interview with Francois Poirie (1986). Is It
Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Jill Robbins. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001. 23-83.
40
Longneaux, Jean-Michel. Nietzsche and Levinas: The Impossible Relation. Stauffer
and Bergo 48-69.
Malka, Salomon. Emmanuel Levinas: His Life and Legacy. Trans. Michael Kigel and
Sonja M. Embree. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2002.
Manning, Robert John Schleffer. 'Serious Ideas Rooted in Blood: Emmanuel Levinas`s
Analysis of the Philosophy of Hitlerism. Milchman and Rosenberg 12536.
Marx, Leo. Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn. 1953. HF 33649.
McCaffery, Steve. Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston: North-
western UP, 2001.
McDonald, Henry. American Literary Theory and Philosophical Exceptionalism. Rhet-
oric Review 22.2 (2003): 10520.
________
. Henry James as Nietzschean: The Dark Side of the Aesthetic. Partisan Review
3 (1989): 391405.
________
. Language and Being: Crossroads of Modern Literary Theory and Classical On-
tology. Philosophy and Social Criticism 30.2 (2004): 187220.
________
. The Narrative Act: Wittgenstein and Narratology. Surfaces 4.4 (Feb. 1995):
123.
________
. The Ontological Turn: Philosophical Sources of American Literary Theory. In-
quiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45.1 (2002): 334.
Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg, eds. Postmodernism and the Holocaust. Amster-
dam: Rodopi, 1998.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Ran-
dom House, 1968.
________
. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Basic Writings 179436.
________
. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Basic Writings 1144.
________
. Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Basic Writings 655791.
________
. The Gay Science [La Gaya Scienza]. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vin-
tage, 1974.
________
. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Basic Writings 437600.
________
. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R. J. Hol-
lingdale. Baltimore: Penguin, 1961.
________
. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Middlesex, UK: Penguin 1968.
Norton, Robert. Herders Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1991.
Peukert, Helmut. Unconditional Responsibility for the Other: The Holocaust and the
Thinking of Emmanuel Levinas. Milchman and Rosenberg 15566.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Premature Burial. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales. New
York: Library of America, 1984. 66679.
Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Free Press, 2005.
Robbins, Jill. Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
Smith, Janet, ed. Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race. New York: Hill and Wang,
1962.
Spargo, R. Clifton. The Ethics of Mourning. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.
Stauffer, Jill. The Imperfect: Levinas, Nietzsche, and the Autonomous Subject. Stauffer
and Bergo 3347.
Stauffer, Jill, and Bettina Bergo, eds. Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Cer-
tain God. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.
Thompson, Chris. The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Leo Bronstein, and the In-
terhuman Intrigue. Textual Ethos Studies, or Locating Ethics. Ed. Ann Fahraeus and
Ann Katrin Jonsson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. 31532.
Toumayan, Alain P. Encountering the Other: The Artwork and the Problem of Difference
in Blanchot and Levinas. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2004.
diacritics / winter 2008 41
Twain, Mark. The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut.
Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. Ed. Edmund Reiss. East Rutherford, NJ:
Penguin, 2004: 825.
________
. Fenimore Coopers Literary Offences. The Norton Anthology of American Liter-
ature: 18651914. Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: Norton, 2007. Vol. C: 294302.
________
. Life on the Mississippi. New York: New American Library, 1961.
Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.
Wyschogrod, Edith. The Art in Ethics: Aesthetics, Objectivity, and Alterity in the Philos-
ophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Ethics as First Philosophy. By Adriaan T. Pepperzak.
New York: Routledge, 1995. 13750.
________
. Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. New York: Fordham
UP, 2000.