Levinas and Ricoeur: two modalities of self

Part 1 (Levinas)

NOTES

Delivered on the 10th August 2003

Continental Philosophy Group

Let me begin by explaining the title. I chose the word modality because both Levinas and Ricoeur use the term, and because the phrase modality of self succinctly expresses the development or the denouement of subjectivity, in sharp contrast to the concept of the self as substance, or the self as a substratum of a subject. Whatever the argument, it is irrefutable that the terms self and subjectivity are intricately connected, and that they are often interchangeable. I will not make any strict distinction between the two, except to say subjectivity is part of the philosophical tradition, which better delineates the concept of selfhood within that very tradition.  Whatever the case, both of our thinkers are reacting against the idea of a substantial self, but both are wanting to retrieve subjectivity in a very modified form; Ricoeur through hermeneutic discourse, and Levinas from beyond thematisation. Ricoeur reminds us that Descartes’ ambition, which was engendered in the mind by the emergence of doubt, was to attain the certainty of a self-positing I invested with the ambition of establishing, a final, ultimate foundation (SA4). Foundation here means a foundation for knowledge (hence an epistemological basis), which Ricoeur explains leads to a shift from the question who exists? to the more substantial question what exists? The implication of this What? (as substance) with traditional ideas of will and soul made of the self a fixed entity, a conceivable object analogous to the phenomenality of the external world, this can involve nothing but a kind of point like ahistorical identity of the I in the diversity of its operations; this ideality of the same that escapes the alternatives of permanence and change in time, since the cogito is instantaneous (SA17).  

There is however another tradition, which Ricoeur calls the shattered cogito. Shattered because the Cartesian cogito is refuted uncompromisingly. Using Nietzsche as a representative of this tradition (if not its initiator, at least in the modern context), Ricoeur points out that Nietzsche in his Course on Rhetoric argues that tropes …do not constitute ornaments added onto a discourse that is by right literal and non-figurative, but instead are inherent in the most basic linguistic functioning (SA12). In applying this argument to the idea of the self, Nietzsche was able to contend that truths were rhetorical illusions or lies serving as expedients for the preservation of life. According to Nietzsche when we speak of the self in the Cartesian way, we are actually engaging in a kind of metalepsis (the mistaking of a consequence for a cause).  What we call the self therefore, is a product of rhetorical effects, and is not itself the cause, original point or foundation for knowledge. Given this rhetorical play, Nietzsche will allow of a multiplicity of subjects inside the one nominal identity vying against one another for the sake of survival (the will to power), within a field of rhetorics. This anti-Cartesian attitude has spawned the post-modern condition of the fragmented ego best exemplified perhaps in Roland Barthes’s phrase the death of the author. While Ricoeur endeavours to steer a middle course between the self as substance and the shattered cogito of post-modern thought (which we can also describe as the decentering of the subject), by stating that his investigations will confirm the claim that I formulate here, namely that the hermeneutics of the self is placed at an equal distance from the apology of the cogito and from its overthrow (SA4), Levinas attempts to expose us or to allow us to experience a subjectivity that cannot be contained by conceptual thought or cannot be grasped by traditional forms of logical thinking, which have anchored the self to a field of light and presence. Both thinkers therefore, are trying to retrieve subjectivity by examining its modalities as a living process. For Levinas however, it is not a question of a modality of essence, but a modality of subjectivity that itself transcends being. 

Levinas has written two great works, Totality and Infinity (1966) and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1977). I will be concentrating on the latter work for two reasons: because in this work Levinas has come to grips with his own use of language which had been scrutinised and criticised by others; secondly, OB has a greater relevance to our topic, because it is in this work that Levinas deals directly with subjectivity. Suffice to say that in Totality and Infinity, Levinas had introduced the idea of the relationship between the self and the other. This relationship entails an experience of alterity, it cannot be grasped by the conceptualisation of Western thought (which thinkers like to call the Greek logos), and is itself the signifyingness of my existence. The self (as Totality and Interiority) is depicted as an entity which operates within the realm of the Same. Now the Same in the context of the Greek logos is always trying to tame the Other (Infinity and exteriority), and in so doing brings it into the conceptual framework of being. Hence the Same as ego assimilates alterity into its Totality, and does not allow the Other to come forth as Other. The encounter with alterity Levinas famously described in the phrase the face of the other. Though the word face describes an appearance or an epiphany, Levinas insisted that it was not assimilable within the confines of ontology. The face was not an entity among the many entities assembled in the field of being. The face is the trace of the other beyond or outside the field of being. The difficulty here of course is that Levinas has to resort to traditional language and discourse, and he was menaced by the constant danger of transforming the other, into a projection or reflection of the Same. 

If language is the realm of being, or if it is within this realm and part of being, how can we use it to describe what is beyond being? Any transgression the argument goes is brought back into the realm of being as soon as something is either uttered or written. The project therefore, is constantly being undermined because language is phenomenality itself, and the fact that language itself through a metaphoric movement creates the condition of interior and exterior.  Interior and exterior are dimensions of language. Furthermore language as the realm of being brings things into the light, it brings things into our presence. Yet Levinas wanted to transcend being, and move beyond the light. Again Levinas in speaking of the face of the other could not free himself from this very metaphor of light that circumscribes the face of the other as an epiphany. Jacques Derrida poses the question who will ever dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? And as for Levinas’ attempt to describe the encounter with the alterity as an experience beyond traditional ontological language, Derrida continues the attempt to achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse by means of philosophical discourse, which can never be shaken off, cannot possibly succeed within language. (WD110).

The later work Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence is Levinas’ attempt to overcome the problematics posed by Derrida. Simply put, Levinas’ attention is to expose a radical subjectivity which will not allow itself to be circumscribed by the determinations of being. The self as non-substance and non-being signifies the on-going condition of one-for-the-other, this condition is an otherwise than being rather than a being otherwise. Futhermore, this condition implies that I am substituted by the other, and reveals a condition where subjectivity is shown to be a primordial and non-chosen form of subjection to a responsibility for others. 

Responsibility is a central term in Levinas’ thinking. The self standing in a pre-conscious, pre-willing and immemorial non-site is inhabited by the other, and it is drawn out of itself in a radical passivity in which it has no choice. Hence the claim of metaphysics that self-consciousness is an entity present to itself in the present and the ultimate foundation or beginning for subjectivity and knowledge is refuted. Yet the self is not the shattered cogito of Nietzschean thought either, but an ineluctible response to the other’s demand as he calls me from a beyond that cannot be determined by any essence, beingness or being there.

I will be examining the first chapter of OB, but before I do this let me make three points. 

1.	Levinas’ other is not a negation of being. It is not the Parmenidean way of non-being, or Hegel’s negative. Non-being as Levinas himself explains is simply the complement of being, and is fully implicated in its beingness. Both can be examined conceptually, and as Hegel showed the negative through a dialectical process can be internalised into the limits of being. Levinas’ other is to be considered pure exteriority (called by Levinas illeity), and can never be internalised.
2.	What is so bad about ontology? Levinas does not deny that ontology is a valid field of investigation. He himself lies very close to phenomenology, but he does object as we have seen to the self being regarded as an original source, and that the self’s identity is a presence-to-itself. Subjectivity precedes ontology, and is not an outcome of it. Levinas’ claim is that if this fact is not recognised, we will never experience the self as the condition of one-for-the-other. According to Levinas this condition gives life and death their significance, and not a philosophical enquiry on being. If we implicate subjectivity with ontology and make of it a foundation, we will be constantly veering toward an inescapable monadology that can only lead to nihilism as it has done in the Western tradition. This Levinas considers a violence inflicted by the Same on the Other. In addition, the one-for-the-other is a painful condition not without its own violence, but the coercion we face in responding to the other, is a lesser violence than that of ontology. Its repercussions are such as to produce signification and not the impasse of nihilism. 
3.	The process of subjectivity, the movement characterised by the one-for-the-other, is an ethical one, simply by virtue of having to face the other. Subjectivity itself is the breach, the gap, the knot, the node, the irruption within the discourse of being. Because the other in proximity commands the subject, it is necessarily ethical. Hence any formation of subjectivity is implicated in an ethical encounter. In this sense ethics precedes ontology, but this is not the typical ethics that we encounter as a branch of philosophy. It is simply the contemporaneous movement that accompanies subjectivity; subjectivity itself as a response is an ethical response, or the very transcendence of being. Peperzak explains: this declaration excludes not only the thesis of most modern philosophies, according to which ethics comes after epistemology and a non-normative ontology have established the foundations of all truth, but equally excludes the thesis that all ethics (in the traditional sense of modern philosophy, including social, legal, and political philosophy) should be the foundation of epistemology and metaphysics of ontology (111). And again: The qualification of transcendence as ‘ethical’ does not oppose any metaphysical interpretation; it does not privilege ethics over metaphysics, but it does insist on the simultaneity of metaphysics and ethics and their transcendence with regard to ontology and the privileging of any pre- or not-yet-ethical practice, feeling, or theory. The ethical belongs to transcendence; it is an unavoidable but partial name for it, just as the Good is not simlply a name for the primacy of morality (112).

I will now turn to Chapter 1 of Levinas’ OB, which will suffice I believe as an introduction to his thinking.

1.	Being’s “Other”

As we stated earlier, Levinas is not attempting a negative theology, nor is he trying to establish a kind of dialectical relationship between being and non-being. The other surpasses or transcends the complement of being and non-being: Being and not-Being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being (OB3). How are we to think of this otherwise than being? If it cannot be conceived, why pose the question at all? Why have a quest at all? The fact is that guided by the verb to be, both being and beings in the world are woven together in a common fate and put into a conjunction, the interwoven; Levinas calls it the interest that we have in maintaining such a conjunction. In this section Levinas hints that transcendence is a disengaging movement, because subjectivity is the process of a self which escapes being by reaching for the other. However, this process is not an intentionality or a choosing but a passivity onto which a demand is put; a nonchosen, pre-autonomy, and in that sense pre- or an-archic patience or passion, the patience of a passion preceding and therefore questioning all attempts or thoughts of autonomy and autarchy; passivity as a dynamic fact that uses, empties, wears out, disactivates and undoes or ‘de-fects’ its own facticity.(P86) But why this evasion of the all-encompassing being of which there seems to be no ‘outside’? Even Heidegger’s phenomenology, which through its Dasein (French il y a) strips being of all its determination cannot prevent our ultimate horizons from being (sic) determined by being. As Peperzak again explains: If the essence of being is the ultimate horizon, it excludes the possibility of exceptions; and if the existence of human life (and thus, of human death) is understood or lived as a mere moment, an incident or accident of being’s ruling, then the monopoly of ontology would take away any exceptional significance. Life and death in so far as they are yours or mine would be without meaning.(P87) I think  that we are closer to the point of  Levinas’ discussion on subjectivity – ontology has been used to determine us, ourselves and the world into a conjunction and nothing else; it universalises us to such a degree that our selves lose their significance through a kind of levelling. Subjectivity is the movement that disjoins the conjunction,(4OB) and disengages from such determinations which weave among incomparables a common fate, (4OB) in moments of meaningful exceptionality in both life and death. Levinas sees subjectivity as becoming overwhelmed by the simple declarative there is, which vitiates the attempt to achieve this disjoining. There is in fact reinforces the conjunction rather than transcending it. Both Plato’s Good and Descartes’ Infinite exemplify attempts that have fallen back into being’s determinations.   

2.	Being and Interest

The essence thus works as an invariable persistance in essence, filling up every interval of nothingness which would interrupt its exercise.(OB4) Levinas goes on to propose how egology has developed in the philosophical tradition: egos from Descartes to Hüsserl (and even Heidegger) have been thought of as monads, a history of monadology. Every ego as a monad lives for its own interest, and wants to persist in being (sic) what it is, among the many entities of the world. This conatus of being involves a dramatic struggle between every ego, a situation which Levinas claims leads to a multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another, and are thus together. (OB4) Here we return to the violence alluded to earlier in the paper, where the ego’s interest is first and foremost in conflict with others’ interests. Such a determination of the ego in our tradition is responsible according to Levinas for the idea of the immanent self. An immanent self is a self-containing and original entity. Levinas’ most striking claim is that this clash of beings must be resolved. This resolution is the task of reason which must reign in order to produce the terms of peace to alleviate the clash of egos. Rational peace Levinas goes on to argue, is calculation, mediation and politics. The struggle of each against all becomes exchange and commerce. (OB4) In other words, the peace is maintained among beings by equilibration and reciprocity, where each being’s interest is always on the lookout either to make concessions or to watch for future compensation. The unquestioned importance of calculation in this scenario compels us to prefer commerce to war. In such a tradition it is no wonder that utilitarianism is the preferred kind of ethics for the world of exchange and commerce realised by the Mitsein of its citizens. (Peparzak89) At this point it is difficult to know whether Levinas is engaging in a vigorous polemic against this kind of egology, or whether he is saying that it is a necessary condition but that it should not be the philosophical edifice upon which our thinking about subjectivity is built. Already the hint is present that subjectivity is an exposure and a movement toward the other that transcends calculation because such a movement involves neither compensation nor thanks from the other. The other demands our total submission. Once this is realised reason would then be a second tier movement which prevents us from losing absolutely our identity in our transition to the other. Subjectivity as the unhinging of the self from the self, or as a stepping forward from itself enters into an assembled present by virtue of reason which preserves its identity through memory and history. Furthermore, as others come into our network of social relations reason builds an impartial and balanced economy of rights, power and consumption, ruled by the standards of equality, reciprocity, and lawful universality. (Peperzak89)     

3.	Saying and Said (le dire et le dit)

If through the determinations of being, all entities and beings are manifested in the light of phenomenology, how are we to conceive of Levinas’ subjectivity which is ex-ceptional and beyond the light? Metaphors of sight will no longer do; the look that surveys things in their totality will not suffice. However, as Derrida had pointed out language is this very process of manifesting, and hence it is a system of imposing determinations. Language and ontology are thus implicated. As soon as we transgress this implication through speech, we are immediately and inevitably pulled back into those determinations set by the logos.  In Totality and Infinity, Levinas had tried to undermine ontological discourse by a language that was itself ontological. Derrida’s brilliant deconstructive approach showed that this was an almost impossible task, though Derrida’s own use of differance left an opening for Levinas through which he was able to manoeuvre his way out of the absolute silence of the unsayable.

As we said earlier, subjectivity is the response elicited by the movement of one-for-the-other before any intentionality takes place. While beings seek an economy of compensation for their own interest, the self emerges through the imperative calling of the other who can demand of it suffering and sacrifice. Ontology, Levinas argues, by virtue of its compensatory nature reduces itself to a word-play or a game. The disruption of this frivolity is achieved by the self’s disinterestedness, the condition of not partaking in the game of being. Now the responsibility spoken of above and this very disinterestedness are not realised through objectifying discourse which freezes and congeals the process of the self, but by what Levinas calls Saying. Of this Saying Levinas says: It is antecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the liguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding language, it is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification.(OB5) In other words the very process of language is the movement toward the other. After all both the spoken and the written word is uttered or written for another, even if the other is the author him/herself, and it thus passes beyond itself in a process that can never achieve closure, but which consequently disengages itself from the play of the Same. This process of Saying is not exactly language, it is a fore-language, but does inevitably end up in language. This ending Levinas has called the Said, it is the procedure that thematises the Saying: the pre-original saying does move into a language, in which saying and said are correlative of one another, and the saying is subordinated to its theme.(OB6) This pre-original saying is not within the realm of being, but is our subjectivity responding to the other before the violence of thematisation, Saying implies the disclosure that a subject is close to another through a proximity which has always already made the subject responsible for the other. (Perpezak92) However, such a Saying which is beyond vision, cannot be sustained, because its correlation with the Said demands manifestation and hence an absorption into ontology. Therefore given this situation, the Saying in a sense is always betrayed, it is a price which it has to pay, though it does leave behind a trace in the very heart of the Said. Levinas explains language permits us to utter, be it by betrayal, this ‘outside’ of being, this ex-ception to being, as though being’s other were an event of being. Being, its cognition and the Said in which it shows itself signify in a Saying which, relative to being, forms an exception; but it is in the Said that both this exception and the birth of cognition show themselves. (OB6) At this stage I shall just comment on three of the above words. 
1.	betrayal - because whatever we utter in response to the other is immediately absorbed into and dominated by the Said into doxic theses and formal logic.   
2.	ex-ception - because this Saying as the pre-original transcends the limits of thematisation, albeit only for a while.
3.	signify – because the subject in its saying is given meaning.

Levinas takes an interesting turn. Although the thematisation of the Said dominates the Saying, it in turn can be undermined by an Unsaying; the Said which Levinas places within the confines of a synchrony is unravelled by a contemporaneous and diachronic movement that cannot rest in a fixed thematisation. This Unsaying resembles in some ways Derrida’s deconstruction, which shows that all texts are unstable through a close reading of those very texts. Texts are unstable because they have no foundational or temporal point which can have absolute authority. Texts mean something outside of themselves, and are thus always open to varying interpretations. Likewise the themes attempted by philosophy at its very dawning, have always been accompanied by Skepticism. Levinas does not regard his thinking as a kind of skepticism, but he does regard it as an allied movement. Skepticism itself must always be betrayed by its own claim to universality, but once it has done its work as a diachronic movement, it will resurface when philosophy reestablishes its synchronic themes. Skepticism can provide us with encouragement to move toward what is other than being: if, after the innumerable ‘irrefutable’ refutations which logical thought sets against it, skepticism has the gall to return (and it always returns as philosophy’s illegitimate child), …it is because a secret diachrony commands this ambiguous or enigmatic way of speaking, and because in general signification signifies beyond synchrony, beyond essence.(OB7) This movement of the Saying has two significant operations: firstly, it by-passes both dialectical and hermeneutic language. Levinas calls this a proleptic demand. The themes of monstrative or apophantic texts can never exhaust what is beyond them, since they are always aiming at what is other. Secondly, the responsibility placed upon us as subjects cannot be avoided and is prior to any emergence of phenomenology and logical discourse.  

4.	Subjectivity

In our response to the other’s demand, we are invaded, split and taken hostage by the other. The self as a subject is always split in its interiority by the pure exteriority of the other. What is outside is also paradoxically inside, and there occurs a substitution of one by the other. When the philosophical tradition speaks of a self as a self-conscious presence to itself it betrays a synchrony that is composed and hence cannot be original and foundational. We are not free in the formation of our own identity, because freedom itself is already part of the historical and ontological order of the Said. But who are we? And does the verb to be have any legitimacy here. Levinas states, to conceive the otherwise than being we must try to articulate the breakup of a fate that reigns in essence, in that its fragments and its modalities, despite their diversity, belong to one another, that is, do not escape the same order, do not escape Order, as though the bits of the thread cut by the Parque were then knitted together again.(OB8) The interesting image in this passage is that of the knot or node. The self is not a self-willed freedom, which is determined by history and in turn determines it, but a knot that ties together a tear in the fabric of being. We are an irruption, we move to an outside and beyond determinations. We are not original self-determining beings at home in a place called freedom.  Subjectivity is in no place, has no substance and is not the actualisation of a potentiality, but a unicity outside of the commumnity of genus and form,(OB4) and is in fact outside of itself. This outside of itself however is not identical to the Heideggerian ec-stasis rooted in a particular soil and at home. We are situated outside like a node on a fabric which had been torn in an immemorial past. The node is always outside keeping the fabric intact. The self is seen as a restless entity by virtue of the fact that it projects itself toward the outside. The significant point however, is that once outside, the self can never return to where it came from, it can never return to itself, it can never recuperate an original historical foundation as a point from whence knowledge is anchored. Hence meaning can never be a recovery through the nostalgia of what I really am. I will never return from where I departed, as I make my way toward the infinite other. Perperzak remarks: Levinas does not take sides in the battle between those who maintain the ideal of the Enlightenment and those who abundantly argue for the death of the subject. His response to the solidarity of modern and antimodern reactions to the ideal of an autonomous subject consists in a redefinition of subjectivity.(98) I wonder whether the word definition is appropriate here given that Levinas seems to consider philosophy as the process of discovering language by the abuse of it, and deconstituting its conceptual congealments. 

5.	Responsibility for the Other

It is now clear that Levinas thinks of subjectivity as a response to the imperative of the other, which is comtemporaneous with being, but is not part of it. The subject’s Saying to the other onstitutes meaning to a self that is always being driven away from its own identity (sameness). This identity is never stable. Examples of the Saying are greeting, thanking and praying. Because these sayings pass through to the other, they are implicated in the movement of time. The Saying is therefore a process of temporalisation. However, if time is in being, if time has essence, then subjectivity is not ex-ceptional as Levinas claims, but part of being. But by ex-ceptional Levinas is not arguing that subjectivity is outside of time or that it never enters being. Subjectivity and the other do not occupy the place of eternity, which Levinas dismisses as a concept modelled on the world of being and time. By eternity the philosophical tradition merely means an eternal presence made up of now moments, and into which past and future moments are recuperated. This idea conspires with synchronicity.  Levinas accepts that subjectivity, as a Saying is a temporal process. If subjectivity is like the knot in a piece of fabric at this very moment, then it is also an event or a denouement, and hence temporal. We find that subjectivity is temporalisation that is both outside and inside of being; time therefore is equivocation, and so are we. On the one hand, it is monstration of essence and re-cuperation, Hüsserl’s time on which consciousness recovers itself through the operations of retentions and protentions. On the other hand, time passes, and therefore passes past its own thematisation. If it has always been so, then there is a time that cannot be recovered, an immemorial time. The self partakes in being because it has an identity, but it also passes past its own identity at the very moment of its response. This kind of time can be conceived as instants falling out of phase with themselves. The self therefore, in Saying and as temporalisation, operates within two temporalities; it links the two temporalities through the Said. It has a foot in both camps, but it can also disconnect the two with its continual falling out of phase with itself. This falling out of phase is not in being’s time, where things and thoughts can be recuperated in memory and history; this falling can also be described as a being pulled out of my radical passivity by the other toward the other. When I give thanks, this Saying of the thanks to the other persists in a differnet time: ‘time’ thus hides two radically different temporalities: the time of essence, and the time of responsibility. The latter happens in Saying, not in the epos – the word or the epic of the Said – of thematic and historical syntheses. Saying signifies otherwise than the Said, for example in greeting, but inevitably turns into a Said whenever someone thinks about its signification. Saying is therefore equivocal; it wavers between two times, connecting and disconnecting them.(Peperzak101)  My response betrays a pre-memorial time beyond being’s temporality. This pre-memorial time is non-original and an-archic. 

6.	Essence and Signification

To understand this operation of time, we need to look at the structure of responsibility. Ontology is the time of the present (the nunc stans), which has the capacity of recuperating into its realm the past and the present, and which manifests itself to us as the Said: such as narrative, history, epos. When the self acquires an identity it is within ontology and its time, but when the self is a response that must go out of itself, it possesses a different modality of time, and it does not enter into the present. This can be more accurately described as subjectivity. The subject cannot be in the present because its response to the other cannot be thematised, or cannot be produced or re-presented in a synthesis of past, present or future.  Not because I cannot remember any past, but because the very structure of the response is immense. Response is not a question of satiety, desire, need or will, but an unavoidable process that is never enough. Its immensity betrays its non-origin, its movement is goodness itself.  Whereas the entrance into the present is the possibility of my freedom and of what I can chose in life, the Good chooses us, is part of our very subjectivity and is why we are ex-ceptional. So when we speak of two modalities of time, we can say that one is the assemblage assembled by ontology that produces identity, while subjectivity in its immensity is an incommensurability with all present time and its representation in the philosophical tradition. The structure of responsibilty however, apart from the subject, also requires the other who actually demands the response. The other acording to Levinas provokes this responsibilty against my will, that is, by substituting me for the other as a hostage. All my inwardness is invested in the form of a despite-me, for-another. Despite-me, for-another, is signifiation par excellence. And it is the sense of the ‘oneself’, that accusative that derives from no nominative; it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself. (OB11) 

Levinas’ thinking is all about signification, he is exploring how meaning can be produced for us in life. The synthesis and assemblage of beings, which we call knowlegde can never provide meaning for us. Responsibility in fact produces signification for us and not knowledge. And it can only be produced if the other initiates it. Levinas had a point in introducing the grammatical terms nominative and accusative. Whereas the former evokes a self that is the source and operator of this process, and through a hermeneutic procedure reflectively turns toward itself and discovers its origin and foundation, the latter is an after effect of a verbal process, it comes at the end of a verbal vibration. Levinas’ subjectivity can only inhabit this accusatory site, which is unidirectional and cannot return to itself as a foundation of knowledge. It can only head toward the other, which incidentally is not a personalised other unlike Buber’s I-thou relationship. Levinas sees Buber’s I-thou relationship as a relationship between two consciousnesses comprehended in time. Levinas’ other is an infinite other, and he calls this other illeity, which is neither symmetrical with me nor conjoined in any essence: the illeity in the beyond-being is the fact that its coming toward me is a departure which lets me accomplish a movement toward a neighbour.(OB13) But illeity itself is not anyone or anything in particular. The subject however, is not universal. Because the response is a particular one, the subject moving outside of itself is an ex-ception: here the unicity of the ego first acquires a meaning – where it is no longer a question of the ego, but of me. (OB14)

7.	Sensibility

If the metaphor of vision belongs to the domain of essence, then it is best to describe Levinas’ thought as a kind of haptology. Our subjectivity beyond being is nevertheless vulnerable and exposed in a corporeal state: vulnerabilty, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than all patience, passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for the others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity. (OB15)  This language of passivity is enveloped by the evocation of touch. This tangibility (in its extremity called sensibility by Levinas), entails an enjoyment (jouissance) in which we may include respiration, eating and bathing. But this is no return to some kind of hedonism, it is the very act of signification: to respond to the other’s touch though involuntary, is itself the giving of signs, the expression of myself going out of itself: denuding itself of its skin, sensibility of the surface of the skin, at the edge of the nerves, offering itself even in suffering – and thus wholly sign, signifying itself.(OB15) This is not the old dichotomy between the sensible and the intelligible, Levinas considers the corporeal and the spiritual as one, as when he speaks of the Saying as a breathlessness of the spirit expiring without inspiring. (OB14) How can we understand this statement? The movement of subjectivity toward the other is an expression and a sensibilty. When the Saying stops, the spirit has expired. At this moment of cessation signification is achieved. At this very moment of cessation, the time of being is suspended or interrupted, and the self finds itself in a null-site of the in-between of gathered beings. Again it must be stressed that responsibility is involuntary, and is non other than goodness itself. It all consists of the breakup of essence, which Levinas deems ethics, or which we could perhaps call proto-ethics. (William J. Richardson)

8.	Being and beyond being

Three words have turned out to be very significant in Levinas: responsibility, substitution and proximity. Let us recall that as subjects we respond to the command of the other; that this response is pre-original, pre-willing and not transcendental. Furthermore the response cannot enter into any ontological category, which would be defined in terms of temporality and origins. Given that traditionally the word responsibility connotes consciousness or will, the choice behind the word is surprising. But Levinas charges the word with the very givenness prior to choice. This kind of responsibility is also ethical in a pre-original sense in that it produces itself as the deconstruction of origin, as its destructuration and interruption.  Substitution is the condition of being obsessed by the other, and subsequently interrupts our identity. Proximity on the other hand is the nearness that allows both responsibility and substitution to occur. But again this term must not be seen under any ontological category, which would make of it a distance that is deminished. Though the term may conjure up a spatial dimension, it is not spatial in character. Levinas explains that he has conceived of proximity qua saying, contact, sincerity of exposure, a saying prior to language, but without which no language, as a transmission of messages, would be possible.(OB16) This last point is important, since it must not be thought that Levinas is attacking ontology and consciousness, but that only an an-archical provocation in ourselves can lead the way to an act of consciousness. 

9.	Subjectivity is not a modality of essence

It is clear now that Levinas’ modality of the self does not enter fully into the realm of entities, and that its subjectivity is not a way of being. Just as Kant surmised that the temporal series of experience unfolded in our sense of duration and succession is difficult to integrate into the synthesising process of the understanding and its accompanying formation of objectivity, so Levinas, albeit in a different way, claims that the mode of time does not necessarily correspond to the mode of being. It is at this precise point that Levinas has turned against both Hegel and Heidegger for allowing all modes of temporality to be encompassed by the determinations of being. In Hegel the essence of subjectivity is immanence of self-consciousness and knowing; in the movement of the concept everything ultimately is known absolutely. Thinking is being, and being is all in its overcoming of negativity. In Heidegger subjectivity is a function of Being, which he calls an epoque; it presupposes a Dasein through which essence manifests itself. In Levinas subjectivity stands for the other, it therefore can neglect its own conatus and moves in the excessive overflowing of goodness that cannot be captured by or gathered in the light of being. The self or the human subject cannot be simply outlined as a modality of being, but as a modality of the ex-ceptional exemplified in responsibility, substitution and proximity. Subjectivity in a sense is the good, and  to reduce the good to being, to its calculations and its history, is to nullify goodness.(OB19)