I—
Light and Power:
An Ancient Clandestine Friendship

In "Diachrony and Representation" (1985), we find Levinas still engaging the question of vision, giving thought to the ocularcentrism of our civilization:

The sphere of intelligibility—the reasonable [du sensé ]—in which everyday life as well as the tradition of our philosophic and scientific thought maintains itself, is characterized by vision. The structure of a seeing having the seen for its object and theme—the so-called intentional structure—is found in all the modes of sensibility having access to things. . . . But it is apparent that it is also found in the company human beings keep among themselves, between beings who speak to one another, and of whom it is said that they 'see one another' ['qu'ils se voient ']. Thus the priority of knowledge [connaître ] is announced.^[28]

For Levinas, as we shall see, it will always be the sociality or ethics of the gaze, and in particular, the relation between my gaze and the presence of the other (autrui ), that constitutes the problematic which thought must engage. "We must," as he says in Totality and Infinity , a much earlier work, "analyze more closely the privilege of vision" (TaI 189, TeI 163). Thinking of Heidegger's account, according to which (on Levinas's reading) the gift of the light is the opening or clearing of an openness for vision to take place, Levinas argues, as if registering what must be an objection to such an account, that "a being comes as though from nothingness" (ibid.). And he

concludes his remarks on vision by saying that "we find this scheme of vision from Aristotle to Heidegger" (ibid.). The problem, for Levinas, is thus clear: "in the light of a generality which does not exist is established the relation with the individual" (ibid.).

According to Jacques Derrida, Levinas was the first philosopher to give thought to "the ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and technico-political possession."^[29] On Derrida's reading, Levinas was already formulating an argument against the hegemony of vision in his Théorie de l'Intuition dans la Phénoménologie de Husserl . In that very early work, Levinas argues against the imperialism of theoria , the primacy of theoretical consciousness and its theoretical glance. For Levinas, even transcendental phenomenology, Husserl's method for rescuing the phenomenon, experience, from the violence of a philosophical thought that would betray it by requiring it to satisfy the ideal of objectivity, intelligibility, transparency, and lucidity, is ultimately guilty of intrigues with violence, reducing the radically other (autrui ) to the same. For Levinas, the entire history of philosophy—its humanism and its Enlightenment—can only be a history of its commitment to light: the "violence of light." (In fact, even the word "history" derives from a root which refers to sight. History consists of the stories that are told by those who were eyewitnesses to the events in question. But does this necessarily mean, as Giorgio Agamben implies,^[30] that in overcoming the metaphysics of presence, this original experience of history, seemingly bound to the authority of the gaze, must be also be overcome?) However, as we shall see, Derrida is surely right in maintaining that Levinas did not, and perhaps could not, overcome the authority of the gaze and liberate his ethics from the vision-generated, vision-centered rhetoric out of which philosophical thought has always been constructed. "How," Derrida asks, "will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of the other free itself of light?"^[31] "What language will ever escape it?"^[32] On my reading, however, Levinas already understood this point of difficulty. In any case, it must, I think, be acknowledged that Levinas, without twisting free altogether of the ocular language—as he says in Totality and Infinity ,^[33] "Ethics is the spiritual optics"—succeeded nevertheless in suggesting, albeit, perhaps, with too much equivocation or discretion, a significant challenge to the dominant way of understanding (re-presenting) vision, questioning the historical inevitability of the subject-object structure and stressing the primacy of being sensibly affected over against the sovereignty claimed by cognition and theoretical contemplation.^[34]

In an essay on Samuel Beckett's Endgame , Adorno observes that "Ontology comes into its own as the pathogenesis of the false life."^[35] Throughout his work, Levinas associates the historically dominant concepts of ontology—truth, knowledge, reason, reflection, objectivity, and certainty—with a philosophical discourse saturated by the power of light and the violence of a logic of the same.^[36] This association constitutes the grounds for his relentless and unsparing critique of the "ontological imperialism" (TaI 44, TeI 15) inherent in all these concepts peculiar to our philosophical tradition:

The light that permits encountering something other than the self makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego. The light, brightness, is intelligibility itself; making everything come from me, it reduces every experience to an element of reminiscence. Reason is solitary. And in this sense, knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world.^[37]

Knowledge, the bringing of light, is always only an instrument of ego-logical power, ego-logical mastery:

To know amounts to grasping being out of nothing or reducing it to nothing, removing from it its alterity. This result is obtained from the moment of the first ray of light. To illuminate is to remove from being its resistance, because light opens a horizon and empties space—delivers being out of nothingness. . . . The ideal of Socratic truth rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. Philosophy is an egology. (TaI 44, TeI 14)

The hermeneutical glance, seeing the other person as something, inevitably subjects the other to the violence of classificaiton, a system of categories. Hermeneutics too must therefore be repudiated, insofar as it consists in a showing, a making-present, a bringing-to-light, that assume the possibility of a complete convergence, a total correlation, between the subject and the object of knowledge, or that assume "revelation" to bring a totally determinate "essence" to light, in both cases reducing the other to the same. Reason, which is the demand for universality of knowledge, favors "the unlimitedness of light and the impossibility for anything to be on the outside" (TO 65, TA 48). Light, servant of a totalizing Reason that encompasses everything within its universality, reduces transcendence to the immediate presence of "evidence," its most lucid immanence. Light and Reason are allies because Reason demands total lucidity, total transparency, total visibility. Charging Heidegger—but, I think, inaccurately, unfairly—with an

"ontological imperialism" driven by the metaphorics of light, Levinas contends that, for Heidegger,

what commands the non-coinciding of thought with the existent . . . is a phosphorescence, a luminosity, a generous effulgence. The existing of the existent is converted into intelligibility; its independence is a surrender in radiation. . . . Reason seizes upon the existent through the void and nothingness of existing—wholly light and phosphorescence. Approached from being, from the luminous horizon where it has its silhouette, but has lost its face, the existent is the very appeal that is addressed to comprehension. (TaI 45, TeI 15)

Taking truth out of this metaphorics, Levinas accordingly asserts that, "If truth arises in the absolute experience in which being gleams with its own light, then truth is produced only in veritable conversation or in justice" (TaI 71, TeI 43). This, it could be said, is the point where one must locate Levinas's "linguistic turn": until we are situated in language, we cannot "know" what we are seeing—we may not really see until conversation with others makes us (able to) see.^[38] But justice may still depend on seeing—although it must, according to liberal constitutions, be blind to some consequential differences.

There are instructive affinities in this regard with Walter Benjamin, who was likewise compelled to begin his thinking with the recognition that, as he worded it, "The gaze [Blick ] is the natural propensity [Neige ] of the human being."^[39] Derrida might say that this propensity is precisely our phototropism. It is also our cognitive and volitional directedness, our intentionality. Thus, another affinity between Levinas and Benjamin: they both challenge intentionality because of its inherent willfulness, its egoity, its reduction of radical transcendence, its refusal of exposure. For example, in the Preface to Totality and Infinity , unfortunately ignoring Husserl's late manuscripts, where the Stimmung of a primordial, corporeal intentionality, a fungierende Intentionalität , is brought to articulation, Levinas writes: "intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing, as intentionality, already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preëminently non-adequation ." (TaI 27, TeI xv. Also see OB 23–59, AE 29–76. But also note TaI 23, TeI xii, where he broaches the intriguing thought of a radically different vision, a wholly different way of looking and seeing, and where, correspondingly, instead of rejecting intentionality altogether, he suggests the possibility of a different intentionality, "bereft of the synoptic and totalizing virtues of [normal, modern] vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type." It is toward the elaboration of such a

vision, a vision of radically different character, that my reflections on Levinas, here, may indicate the way.) As for Benjamin, it is in his "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama , that we find his strongest argument against intentionality:

Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones. The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas. The proper approach to it [Das ihr gemäße Verhalten] is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption [Eingehen und Verschwinden ] in it. Truth is the death of intention [Die Wahrheit ist der Tod der Intention ].^[40]

If the gaze is the ultimate manifestation of willful directedness, of phototropic intentionality, it is also, as Benjamin's carefully chosen word, Neige , suggests, not only our natural propensity, but also our decline, our fall into the dregs.

"We contest vision its primacy in being." For Levinas, it seems, vision—and its accomplice, the light that makes vision possible—inevitably effectuate a "suppression of the other" (TaI 302, TeI 279). "Transcendence," he insists, cannot be understood in terms of a vision of the Other, but only in terms of a primordial "donation." A "sacrifice" (TaI 174, TeI 149). "Vision," he says, "is not a transcendence. . . . It opens nothing that, beyond the same, would be absolutely other, that is, in itself. Light conditions the relations between data; it makes possible the signification of objects that border one another. It does not enable one to approach them face to face" (TaI 191, TeI 165–66). One might suppose that, with the concession that vision takes place within a field, and that this field is bounded by a horizon that opens out into the invisible—an account of vision that we find in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas would admit the transcendence in vision. Instead, he argues, against Heidegger, that

to see is always to see on the horizon. The vision that apprehends on the horizon does not encounter a being out of what is beyond all being. Vision is a forgetting of the there is [il y a ] because of the essential satisfaction, the agreeableness [agrément ] of sensibility, enjoyment, contentment with the finite without concern for the infinite. (TaI 191, TeI 166)

Levinas articulates well, here, Heidegger's critique of a "fallen" vision. But Heidegger draws a crucial distinction between the "forgetful" vision of everyday life and a vision that is grounded in ontological recollection. Levinas does not seem to recognize this distinction—at least not in this text.

Here, his sweeping indictment sees no alternative potential: the fault in vision is hopelessly essentialized. In a later writing, however, while still arguing against vision, he suggests a very different experience with vision, one in which its "passivity," its "subjectivity," "subjectivity" in the sense of "subjection," and not is outwardly directed intentionality, its assertive willfulness, comes to light:

Sight is, to be sure, an openness, a consciousness, and all sensibility, opening as a consciousness, is called vision; but [even] in its subordination to cognition, sight [still] maintains contact and proximity. The visible caresses the eye. One sees and hears like one touches.^[41]

This experience of the "caress" is a significant concession, because it follows Merleau-Ponty in suggesting that there is, or could be, a gaze that is not bent on domination, not driven by the need to reduce the other to the same: a gaze, therefore, "beyond being," beyond ontology. And, as we shall see, it also has implications for the extension of the ethical relation into the political context of justice.

Levinas's attitude toward vision is actually quite complicated, because, even in Totality and Infinity , where there are passages in which he condemns vision in a seemingly sweeping indictment, there are also passages where (in an unfair misreading) he attacks what he takes to be Heidegger's fatalism and hints at the possibility of an interruption in the history of a totalizing and reifying vision:

[the] interpretation of experience on the basis of vision and touch is not due to chance and can accordingly expand into a civilization. It is incontestable that objectification operates in the gaze in a privileged way; [but] it is not certain that its tendency to inform every experience is inscribed, and unequivocably so, in being. (TaI 188, TeI 163)

Indeed, in the Preface to this work, in addition to the remark (already cited) about a radically different "type" of vision, he even seems to recognize for vision an emancipatory and redemptive service:

We oppose to the objectivism of war a subjectivity born from the eschatological vision. (TaI 25, TeI xiv)

This radically different way of seeing—but is it really a question of seeing with the eyes, or should this reference to "vision" be read as "merely" metaphorical?—is even recognized to be crucial for the emergence of a radically different form of subjectivity—a subjectivity "founded in the idea of the infinite," a subjectivity, therefore, in which the ethical vocation would be taken to heart. (A major concern of Levinas's work consists in articulating and bringing forth an experience and conception of the subjectivity of

the subject that would be radically different from, and indeed an uncompromising repudiation of, its entire historical formation as represented and produced by the culture of modernity. Briefly stated, the difference is between the subject as an ego-logical center of power, an origin of activity for the sake of its self-preservation and self-interest, and the subject as subjected by way of flesh and sensibility to the categorical moral imperative embodied in the other person.)

There is a passage in Totality and Infinity (TaI 89, TeI 61) where Levinas speaks of "seeing in justice and injustice." So it might seem that he is ready at least in principle to trust our eyes, to entrust the difference between justice and injustice to the capacity of our eyes for seeing the difference. But there are persistent equivocations in his discussions of seeing, of vision—equivocations, for example, that make many of his readers think it uncertain whether he is actually referring to our experience with vision or whether, instead, he is speaking "merely" metaphorically, and whether he is recognizing the possibility of a different way of seeing, or instead merely calling for the end of an ocularcentric ethics, morality, and politics.

I will argue that Levinas's references to vision are not "merely" metaphorical, but that their strangeness and peculiarity are due to the fact that he wants to "withdraw" from vision as it is commonly realized in our culture and correspondingly represented by reflection in philosophical thought, and that he wants, moreover, not only to disturb, to question, to interrupt such vision, but to evoke in us a radically different vision. I think it also true, however, that to some extent, the perplexing ambiguities surrounding vision in Totality and Infinity are due to the fact that his thinking was undergoing a transition in that work from an account of the ethical relation in terms of the gaze to an account in which what he calls "saying" becomes the crucial medium for evoking the deep experience of the ethical relation toward which he is directing us.

For the most part, however, both in his early and in his late writings, Levinas regards vision—and the hegemony of vision as paradigm of knowledge, truth and reality in the thinking of philosophy—with unqualified suspicion. Examining "the formal logic of the gaze" (TaI 289, TeI 265), he concludes that it is a "panoramic look" (TaI 220, TeI 195; also see TaI 294, TeI 270–71) inherently blind to manifestations of infinity and allied with the forces of totality: the gaze, he says, "totalizes the multiple" (TaI 292, TeI 268; also see TaI 305, TeI 282). And it imposes a reified presence on all the beings that it encounters.^[42] Formulating his disagreement with Husserl, and thus, a fortiori, with all versions of transcendental idealism, Levinas argues that vision "is essentially an adequation of exteriority [otherness]

with interiority [i.e., the conditions of sameness imposed by ego-logical subjectivity]: in it exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplative soul and, as an adequate idea , revealed to be a priori, the result of a Sinngebung . The exteriority of discourse cannot be converted into interiority [as idealism always tries to do]" (TaI 295, TeI 271. See also Ethics and Infinity 87). An equally offensive adequation can be found, mutatis mutandis , in the gaze that operates in the discourse of empiricism, for its objectivism is a requirement, a condition, that the "subject" imposes on the field of its gaze. But in this indictment of vision, is he not essentializing it? Is he not assuming the impossibility of altering it?^[43]

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas attempts to counter the domination of vision and its supposedly insurmountable epistemo-ontological norm of adequatio by reminding us of the invisible, the limits of our vision and comprehension, and the desire of the spirit for a recognition of that which exceeds the presence of the given:

Invisibility does not denote an absence of relation; it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. Vision is an adequation of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses. Non-adequation does not denote a simple negation or an obscurity of the idea, but—beyond the light and the night, beyond the knowledge measuring beings—the inordinateness of Desire. Desire is desire for the absolutely other. (TaI 34, TeI 4)

It is a question of a "metaphysics" that, in opposition to the totalizing and reifying effects of "ontology," "desires the other beyond satisfactions," which therefore" understands the remoteness, the alterity, and the exteriority of the other. For Desire, this alterity, non-adequate to the idea, has a meaning. It is understood as the alterity of the Other and of the Most-High" (ibid.). In a strikingly similar spirit, Max Horkheimer, in a 1970 conversation with Helmut Gumnior, evoked what he called our "Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen" (longing for the wholly other).^[44] But for Horkheimer, traumatized by the Holocaust, resorting to this evocation is an admission that philosophical thought is powerless and hopeless in the face of a future he sees continuing the totalitarian exclusion of the radically other. Levinas is perhaps able to sustain a deeper faith in the promise of redemption; but his faith is constantly exposed to suffering. The promise, the eschatological vision—nothing more, now, than the trace of a passing trace—is endlessly deferred.

Longing for the wholly other. But how is the wholly other to be seen? How is the gaze to relate to the invisible? How can one put the wholly other

into images? Levinas partially answers these questions by defining a difference between "disclosure" (dévoilement ) and "revelation" (révélation ), correlating disclosure with vision and revelation with speech:

To put speech at the origin of truth is to abandon the thesis that disclosure, which implies the solitude of vision, is the first work of truth. (TaI 99, TeI 72)

"To disclose a thing is," he says, "to clarify it by forms: to find for it a place in the totality" (TaI 74, TeI 47). Benjamin is helpful here, because he, like Levinas, wants to distinguish between a "revelation" of truth and its totalizing, reifying "exposure." Thus, in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to the Trauerspiel essay, he states that "truth is not a process of exposure [Enthüllung ] which destroys the secret, but a revelation [Offenbarung ] which does justice to it."^[45] To do justice to the truth is to protect and preserve its dimensionality of concealment, its reach into the invisible. Only in this way is the truth saved from dogmatism, pretensions to absolutism, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of power. Only in this way are the limits of human reason, shattered and left in ruins when it attempts to exceed its horizons, its conditions of possibility, recognized and granted their measure. But why does Levinas think that placing the origin of truth in speech gives it more protection from reification than vision? Or is it a matter of protection? If speech is the origin of truth, that is because it is communication. But speech can deceive—and a wink, a glance, a look can speak, sometimes, more plainly, more revealingly, more consolingly, than words.

Unfortunately, there are times when Levinas connects disclosure in an essentializing way not only with vision, but also with phenomenology, the method for thinking about the dimensions of our experience as lived that he inherited from Husserl, often associating the method—as if in an essential way—with vision, light, knowledge, and disclosure; but sometimes he also recognizes that phenomenology can bring us to the limits of disclosure, where an experience of transcendence could breach the ego's cognitive defenses and leave us exposed and vulnerable. I would argue that, radically conceived, phenomenology can no longer be contained within disclosure and the correspondence theory of truth. Nor must vision be limited to disclosure, to a truth by correspondence and adequation. Against disclosure—and phenomenology as disclosure, Levinas writes:

The welcoming of the face and the work of justice—which condition the birth of truth itself—are not interpretable in terms of disclosure. (TaI 28, TeI, xvi)

Phenomenology, here understood as "the comprehension effected through a bringing to light," is accordingly identified with and limited to disclosure, correlation, equivalence:

[it] does not constitute the ultimate event of being itself. The relation between the same and the other is not always reducible to knowledge of the other by the same, nor even to the revelation of the other to the same, which is fundamentally different from disclosure. (Ibid.)

It may be possible to articulate knowledge of things in terms of a phenomenology of disclosure; but what concerns Levinas is our experience of other people, and this, he believes, since it involves a relation to the transcendent, the infinite, the invisible, cannot be comprehended within such a phenomenology. The other is not a "phenomenon," not an "appearance"—or at least not, I want to add, in the Husserlian sense:

contrary to all the conditions for the visibility of objects, the being is not placed in the light of another, but presents itself in the manifestation that should announce it; it is present as directing this very manifestation—present before the manifestation, which only manifests it. The absolute experience is not disclosure but revelation: a coinciding of the expressed with him who expresses, which is the privileged manifestation of the Other, the manifestation of a face over and above form. (TaI 65–66, TeI 37)

But could there be a different phenomenology, a phenomenology that would be obedient to revelation, a phenomenology that would, by virtue of its openness, its exposure to the other, assist the other in living beyond essence, beyond typologies, "otherwise than being"? Why couldn't Heidegger's radical conception of phenomenology, as formulated at the beginning of Being and Time (letting what is, what is presencing, show itself from out of itself), in which he profoundly alters Husserl's conception, manifest the morally imperative recognition, respect, and care for the other? Why does Levinas equate phenomenology with Husserl's transcendental version? This is, I think, just what he does when he argues that

consciousness does not consist in equaling being with representation, in tending to the full light in which this adequation is to be sought, but rather in overflowing this play of light—this phenomenology—and in accomplishing events whose ultimate signification . . . does not lie in disclosing. (TaI 27–28, TeI xvi)

Disclosing requires of the other, or imposes on the other, a fixed identity; revelation welcomes, is receptive to, the other's deepest identity-transcending, essence-transcending needs. Levinas accordingly believes that, in the pres-

ence of an other human being, vision is confronted with a dimensionality, an invisibility, that it cannot possibly comprehend. Faced with this alterity, the composure of the gaze, its indifferent serenity, is irrevocably shattered:

Behold vision turning back into non-vision, into the refutation of vision within the sight's center, into that of which vision is but a forgetfulness and re-presentation.^[46]

Non-vision, the invisible, the impossibly visible, subverts the discourse of ontology and the pretensions of a rationality, a knowledge, that depends on totalizability and possession.

"Western philosophy," according to Levinas, "has most often been an ontology: a reduction of the other to the same . . . that ensures the comprehension of being" (TaI 43, TeI 13). Thus, Levinas will argue that our ontology has been, and still is, "a philosophy of injustice":

Ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power. It issues in the State and in the non-violence of the totality, without securing itself against the violence from which this non-violence lives, and which appears in the tyranny of the State. Truth, which should reconcile persons, here exists anonymously. Universality presents itself as impersonal; and this is another inhumanity. (TaI 46, TeI 16)

Consistent with this analysis, Levinas tends to regard the world-disclosure constitutive of "knowledge," of "com-prehension," as the principal objective of a systematic, instrumental rationality: "we disclose," he says, "only with respect to a project" (TaI 64, TeI 36).

But, although he certainly does not condemn knowledge as such, does not even condemn instrumental rationality as such, he often seems not to allow or recognize any other form of rationality. In "L'Ontologie Est-elle Fondamentale?," for example, he seems to be suggesting that "the rational reduces to power over the object."^[47] (In this regard, his critique of reason is quite similar to the critique that Horkheimer and Adorno make in Dialectic of Enlightenment . And this suggests that it may be charged with similar objections. Thus, it might be argued, against all three, that the violence is not in reason as such but rather in its abuse, or in its inadequate and onesided development.) Nor is there recognition of a knowledge appropriate to the ethical relation, because all knowledge, for him, reduces the other to the same, the equal:

Knowledge is always an adequation between thought and what it thinks. . . . Knowledge has always been interpreted as assimilation. Even the most surprising discoveries end by being absorbed,

comprehended with all that there is of "prehending" in "comprehending." The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still always a solitude.^[48]

The inherent tendency of knowledge is always, it seems, "the suppression of alterity" and "a thought of the equal" (EaI 66, 91; EeI 71, 96).

Maintaining, moreover, that the "original ethical impulse" is always already violated once it is understood in the neutral impersonal light of reason, Levinas often appears to leave no room for a "public use of reason" on the side of justice—a justice of reason that would side with the different, the other, the stranger, the poor, the widow, the orphan. This is a question that still needs to be worked out within the compass of Levinas's thought.

Justice for the other, justice to the other: Levinas shows us that there are many more dimensions to justice—but also that justice is more aporetic—than philosophical thinking has recognized. Thus he shows that even the conception of consciousness that defines it in terms of intentionality bears on the possibility of a moral and political order in which the other can receive justice. Near the beginning of Totality and Infinity , Levinas distances his thinking from that of Husserl. He writes that

this book will present subjectivity as welcoming the Other [l'Autrui ], as hospitality; in it the idea of infinity is consummated. Hence, intentionality, where thought remains an adequation with the object, does not define consciousness at its most fundamental level. (TaI 27, TeI xv)

This is his principal argument against intentionality.^[49] But he does not want to abandon phenomenology. What he therefore attempts to work out is the phenomenology of a relation to the other that precedes the emergence of intentionality as he understands it—in other words, without intentionality—a phenomenology that does not begin from consciousness. We are not compelled to read this as a denial that there is a legitimate application for the concept of intentionality; it may be read as saying only that, before the symmetry and velleity of the subject-object (noesisnoema) correlation, the subject is always already passively engaged by a more primordial relation with the other: a relation that takes place, as we shall see, in a radically different way.

This means, however, that there is, for Levinas, a radically different subject, a subject whose existence and life the philosophical discourse of modernity has not been willing to acknowledge. In the bourgeois philosophies of modernity, the subject is understood as a self-made ego-logical individual, a solitary monad, confidently defined by its self-containedness,

its self-sufficiency, its self-groundedness, and its resourcefulness in self-preservation. The glorious essence of this subject is freedom: a life measured by its enjoyment of independence and autonomy.^[50] According to the prevailing ideological narrative, this subject desires to be in absolute possession and control of whatever it encounters: its freedom, its autonomy, consists in the pursuit of private interests and pleasures. But, paradoxically, its will to power requires, at the same time, a strong system of ego-logical defenses, ensuring its impenetrability, marking its closure: in order to avoid losing control, this subject must receive nothing. Nor can it give without conditions that would inscribe the gesture in an exchange economy ruled by the logic of equivalence. Thus, the ultimate project of the modern subject's freedom can only lie in a contradiction:

in [guaranteeing] this permanence of the same, which is reason. Cognition is the deployment of this identity; it is freedom. That reason in the last analysis would be the manifestation of a freedom, neutralizing the other and encompassing him, can come as no surprise once it was laid down that sovereign reason knows only itself, that nothing limits it. The neutralization of the other which becomes theme or object—appearing, that is, taking its place in the light—is precisely its reduction to the same. (TaI 43, TeI 14)

For Levinas, this critique of philosophical vision—of its ontology, its cognition, its intentionality, its reason, and the modern bourgeois subject—must somehow be translated into an effective interruption of history, of historical construction:

The breach in totality . . . can be maintained against an inevitably totalizing and synoptic thought only if thought finds itself faced with an other refractory to categories. Rather than constituting a totality with this other as with an object, thought consists in speaking . (TaI 40, TeI 10)

Already announced near the beginning of Totality and Infinity , Levinas's hope for a breach in the continuity of history draws its inspiration, not from vision, but from speech, the binding of the divine breath that is given to all mortals:

The claim to know and to reach the other [l'autre ] is realized in the relationship with the Other [l'Autrui ] that is cast in the relation of language, where the essential is the interpellation, the vocative. The other is maintained and confirmed in his heterogeneity as soon as one calls upon him, be it only to say to him that one cannot speak to him. . . . The invoked is not what I comprehend: he is not under a category . He is the one to whom I speak. . . . The interpellated one is called upon to speak; his speech consists in "coming to the assistance" of his word—in being present . (TaI 69, TeI 41)

This passage demonstrates, I believe, that Levinas is attempting to think the breaching of totality and the possibility of an historical opening for transcendence in terms of a fundamental paradigm shift in our prevailing culture, especially with regard to the way we experience others. What is at stake emerges from the difference between seeing and speaking, gaze and voice, knowledge and acknowledgment. In the relationship borne of speaking, borne of language, visibility is not determinative, not essential. In fact, for Levinas, authentic speech is possible only on condition that the one who speaks recognizes in the other a dimensionality that is inherently invisible.

For Levinas, as for Rilke, the invisible is of the utmost significance. So much weight is given to the invisible that even a utopian imagination, with its images of a more perfect justice, is accused of a certain complicity in violence. For any images that we might produce could only reproduce the same system of repressions; they could never be sufficiently different, sufficiently otherwise. There can be no image or representation of the just and equal society, the "kingdom of ends" where it is the face of the Other that commands unconditionally (TaI 215–17, TeI 190–92). (In this regard, there is a point of convergence between Levinas and Adorno: seeing the danger, a repetition of the same, they both give heed to the ancient prohibition of images of God in Judaic law.) "There is," Levinas concedes, "a utopian moment in what I say; [but] it is the recognition of something that cannot be realized, but which, ultimately, guides all moral action."^[51] "What counts," he says, "is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives" (TaI 28, TeI xvii). Images, however, can function only on behalf of objectifying thought: they belong to a system of controls; they obey what Adorno would call "the logic of identity."^[52] And their origin in spontaneity, in freedom, means that, regardless of contrary appearances, they will always be in the service of the ego and its interests. "I have just refused the notion of vision to describe the authentic relation with the Other [l'Autrui ]; it is discourse, and more exactly, response or responsibility, which is this authentic relationship" (EaI 87–88). This "refusal" of vision is also, for Levinas, a refusal of the image, of representation—and of the sovereignty of the visible, which cannot possibly, even when seen as bounded by a two-faced horizon, give way to the transcendence of objectifying thought. "The metaphysical relation," by which Levinas means our relation to the transcendent, the invisible infinite, "cannot be properly speaking a representation, for the other would therein dissolve into the same: every representation is essentially interpretable as a transcendental constitution [i.e., an effect of the intentionality or will of the ego-logical subject]" (TaI 38, TeI 8). Thus he argues that, "The shimmer

of infinity, the face, can no longer be stated in terms of consciousness, in metaphors referring to light and the sensible" (TaI 207, TeI 182). What matters is not visible.

Not visible. Not an appearance, not something that can "come to light"—not a phenomenon to which any of the methods of phenomenology could possibly do justice. And yet, he speaks of the "shimmer" of infinity. Is this "mere" metaphor? If so, what significance can it carry for our experience? What does it actually mean? Why continue to use a metaphor drawn from vision, referring to something normally visible? Why not concede the visibility of the shimmer, the visibility of the infinite in, or through, or as the shimmer? Why could it not be argued, instead, that the shimmer of the infinite is sensible, is visible—only not for ordinary vision, the way of looking and seeing, namely, that typically issues from the modern (bourgeois) ego-subject? What could his words possibly mean, if the shimmer really could not be seen—not ever, or not at least, say, by the one who wrote those words? If no shimmer of infinity was seen, from where do his words draw their authority? Does Levinas risk more than paradox, more than he supposes, when he withdraws infinity absolutely from the visible—when, for the sake of the ethical relation, he takes the "metaphysical" experience of the other entirely out of the visible, out of sight, rather than extending it from the visible into the invisible?

Far from directing us toward easily settled answers, these questions, provoked by the assumption that the language of vision and light is only metaphorical—but also, even as mere metaphor, entirely in the service of a totalizing immanence, only give rise to more questions, including questions about his turn to the mediations of language, and the way he understands his own work.

In the Preface to Totality and Infinity , Levinas writes:

Peace is produced as the aptitude for speech. The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as a totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds the totality. . . . The experience of morality does not proceed from this vision—it consummates this vision; ethics is an optics. But it is a "vision" without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing, objectifying virtues of vision, a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type—which this work seeks to describe. (TaI 23, TeI xii. Also see TaI 29, TeI xvii, where he repeats his claim that ethics is an optics.)

The equivocations in this passage are intriguing. Ethics is, he says, an optics. This suggests that it is the consummation of a certain vision, though,

to be sure, it is a "wholly different type" of vision: an extra-ordinary vision, perhaps an eschatological vision, but without (utopian) images. And yet, however different, it maintains the ethical within the realm of vision. So a way of seeing—our ordinary way of seeing—is at stake, subjected to the most radical questioning. Furthermore, this ordinary way of seeing, described as a way that imposes silence, is indicted in the name of, and for the sake of, a way of seeing that welcomes speech, welcomes conversation and debate. Here there is not even a hint of hostility to vision as such. Rather, there is a carefully drawn difference between a way of looking and seeing that is allied with the forces of war and violence and a radically different way of looking and seeing. And although the radically other way gives way to speaking, it is not a minor matter that it is in and as an "eschatological vision" that the difference is drawn—and the experience of morality is "consummated." Thus, one might seem justified in complaining that Levinas does not spell out the new "optics," does not elaborate the "phenomenology" of this extra-ordinary vision, does not tell us very much—almost nothing—about the ethical character of this other vision, other way of looking and seeing.

In a later chapter, he writes—possibly falling into the same metaphysics of presence he elsewhere so vehemently rejects—that "Speech refuses vision, because the speaker does not deliver images of himself only, but is personally present in his speech, absolutely exterior to every image he would leave" (TaI 296, TeI 273). But is this not a rather peculiar, or at the very least, a peculiarly limited conception of how vision figures in the speech situation? Is the gaze always driven by narcissism? Is narcissism absolutely unavoidable? When I am in conversation with others, is my looking at them, my seeing them, necessarily or primarily a matter of producing and communicating images? Speech might well refuse such an interaction; but the gaze cannot be reduced to this function. Between mother and infant, between two people in love, between two close friends, a glance, a wink, a look may suffice to console, to assuage some suffering—may be worth a thousand words. Levinas here idealizes speech; but speech, as he knows, can be deceitful, mean-spirited, malicious, cruel. The briefest of looks could enable the hunchback one passes on the street to experience the true height of his dignity.

In "Diachrony and Representation," Levinas asks a question that introduces yet other dimensions of ambiguity in his relation to vision and language:

Does not the "seeing one another" [le "se voir entre humains" ]—that is to say, clearly, language—revert, in its turn, to a seeing, and thus to the egological significance of intentionality, . . . the gathering of all alterity into presence, and the synchrony of representation?^[53]

Here, in this passage, "seeing one another" is not really seeing, but only a metaphor for language, and real seeing, seeing properly so called, is not allowed to be otherwise than ego-logical, turned and directed by a seemingly unalterable obsession with reducing the alterity of the other to the same.

And yet, taking advantage of a double meaning that the French language makes possible, namely the fact that the phrase "il me regarde" means both "he looks at me" (or "he sees me") and "he concerns me" (or "he is of concern to me"), Levinas comments that

qu'il me regarde ou non, "il me regarde."^[54]

The text continues, explaining his understanding of the visible and invisible dimensions of the face of the other which confronts my looking:

I call face [visage ] what, thereby, in the other [en autrui ], looks at me [regarde le moi ]—concerns me [me regarde ]—in recalling . . . his abandon, his defenselessness [son sans-défense ] and his mortality, and his summons [appel ] to my ancient responsibility.

In another text, "The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other," Levinas works with the double meaning to say that

the other "looks at me" ["me regarde "], not in order to "perceive" me, but in [the sense of] "concerning me," in "mattering to me as someone for whom I am answerable."^[55]

Here, however, he sets the double reading in motion only, it would seem, to deny one of the interpretations: the interpretation that remains would, quite paradoxically, entirely withdraw the matter—and the mattering—from the realm of perception, the realm where two gazes would meet. But this withdrawal, if understood straightforwardly, would not be without consequence. The other is supposed to matter to me, to be of concern to me: But how? In what way? Since I and the other are both made of flesh, do we not encounter one another with meaningful eyes, ears, gestures? And do I not therefore need to know from Levinas how my responsibility for the other is embodied, revealed, communicated? Can the need for a phenomenological narrative be ignored? How do my eyes look at the other when I fail to realize this answerability and remain indifferent to my responsibility? How would my eyes look at the other once they are bound by my primordial responsibility? How would the ethical relation be embodied in and as looking and seeing? These questions suggest that perhaps Levinas's objection is not to the ethical involvement of the gaze as such, but only to the way it is conceptualized in philosophical discourse, namely, as ordinary "perception." What he would be arguing, then, is that, as ordinary

"perception," the gaze of the "I" can only be a violation of the other's alterity, and that it needs to be experienced otherwise. Which means that the "I," the subject of the gaze, must itself become otherwise.

In Otherwise Than Being , Levinas touches on this problematic, but leaves it without providing any phenomenological narrative that would be instructive for the vision of the eyes. "Who is looking?" he inquires. And he replies:

the question asks that "the looker" be identified with one of the beings already known, even if the answer to the question "Who is looking?" should be stated in the monosyllabic "Me."^[56]

The question for Levinas is whether or not the looking and seeing of the gaze can be withdrawn from being: whether or not it can escape ontologizing, reifying, totalizing, the violence of ego-logical drives and self-interest. Perhaps Levinas introduces the idea of a "listening eye" to provoke philosophical thinking beyond the ordinary answers (OB 30, 37; AE 38, 48). But, in Difficult Freedom , he evokes a moment that it would certainly be wrong to read as "merely" metaphorical, i.e., "merely" figurative, rather than as an attempt to think about our looking and seeing in "straightforwardly" phenomenological terms:

when I really gaze, with a straightforwardness devoid of trickery or evasion, into unguarded, absolutely unprotected eyes . . .^[57]

Well, what will I see? And does the character of my gaze, here, live up to the eyes' "ethical" responsibility? In "On Jewish Philosophy," an interview in In the Time of Nations , Levinas declares that the face "appeals to responsibility before appearing to the eye," drawing a contrast between the appeal and the appearing that would seem to suggest that the appeal initially takes hold of us at a "preconscious" and therefore "bodily felt" level.^[58]

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas, describing the everyday situation, observes that, "The Other measures me with a gaze incomparable to the gaze by which I discover him" (TaI 86, TeI 59). In other words, it is inherent in the exposure of my visibility that I experience myself in judgment before the gaze of the other, that I see this judgment reflected in the other's eyes; but I cannot, or rather, ought not, return the judgment, for this would commit the offense of treating the other according to a principle of symmetry and equivalence. But is Levinas's sentence to be read as "merely" metaphorical or is it to be taken to heart as an attempt to articulate an eth-

ical experience with vision in the face of strong ego-logical defenses and strategies of resistance?

Reading Levinas, we often cannot decide with any confidence what the reference of his words is supposed to be. If his words are not to be taken literally, to what, then, do they refer? Isn't Levinas attempting to articulate in phenomenological terms—and that means in terms of our experience—the ethical character of a vision, a way of looking and seeing, that would be radically different from the character of vision that today is prevailing? If so, his discourse is a phenomenology describing with normative and performative force.

In Totality and Infinity , Levinas speaks of "seeing in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other [l'Autrui ] beyond all ontology" (TaI 89, TeI 61). If his use of the word "seeing," here, is not "merely" metaphorical, not a "merely rhetorical" phototropism, then it would constitute an attempt to articulate a normative ideal for our sight, our capacity to see—and also an attempt to instruct, to teach, to speak appealingly to our capacity for vision, our capacity to bring forth a different way of looking and seeing.

Levinas's writing holds us in an unsettling suspension: always suspended between "seeing" literally understood as experience and "seeing" understood as a figure of speech; between a phenomenology describing the present historical actuality and a normatively inspired phenomenology describing a radically different future; between, as we shall see, the visible face (the face-to-face) as an actual or possible ethical experience and the invisible face as trope for a certain conception of justice. When these crucial terms cross one another, they may seem to cross each other out. What is gained, what lost, in these undecidable rhetorical ambiguities, these double-crossings?