A few more notes on the ‘other’ exteriority. Considering to Pasternak’s question, ‘What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?’ Blanchot responds:
I believe that among all the responses there is one in three parts that we cannot avoid choosing, and it is this: it exists so the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimating movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by authority of this experience, we might learn to speak.
What does it mean to step outside? Simply to cross a border – to move from one space into another? Blanchot: ‘the Hebrew Abraham invites us not only to pass from one shore to the other, but also to carry ourselves to wherever there is a passage to be made, maintaining this between two shores that is the truth of passage’. To pass, passage: to ‘affirm the world as passage’ as exodus and exile sets the Jew apart from the Christian for whom the here below is scorned and from the Greek who allows this world to be measured by the transcendence of light (‘truth as light, light as measure’). It is by passing beyond the horizon of light that the Jew relates ‘to what is beyond his reach’: to that of which God is a figure.
Abraham takes his family from Sumeria. Where do they pass? Into the desert that is between spaces, between sedentary states. Nomadism, migration brings those who pass in relation with what Blanchot calls ‘the Unknown that one can know only by way of distance’; when Jacob wrestles with the one he will later call an angel, he is said to become the ‘partner’ of ‘the inaccessible outside’. Jacob is renamed Israel, the one who struggles with God. And the word Israel, too, will name his progeny.
Israel remains outside. The Jew is the one who maintains a relation to what is unknown, to the foreign even as this prevents the foundation of a state, which is to say, an interiority like any other. This is why Blanchot can affirm what Neher writes: ‘How can one be in Exile and in the Kingdom, at the same time vagabond and established? It is precisely this contradiction that makes the Jewish man a Jew’. The desert is not a dwelling place but the world become passage.
But what is called speech? ‘To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognise him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with his difference’. To speak is to acknowledge the Other as someone who breaks the horizon of Greek thought, who breaks with the measure of light. What does this mean?
Greek, says Levinas, ‘is the term I use to designate, above and beyond the vocabulary, grammar and wisdom with which it originated in Hellas, the manner in which the universality of the West is expressed, or tries to express itself – rising above the local particularism of the quaint, traditional, poetic, or religious’. It would thus include philosophical terms and concepts such as morphe (form) or ousia (substance) which constitute ‘a specifically Greek lexicon of intelligibility’.
Perhaps the most essential distinguishing feature of the language of Greek philosophy was its equation of truth with an intelligibility of presence. By this I mean an intelligibility that considers truth to be that which is present or copresent, that which can be gathered or synchronised into a totality that we would call the world or cosmos.
Blanchot will often draw a contrast between the cosmos and the disaster, naming with the latter a continuous discourse without the interruption which speech implies. What he calls Jewish thought would expose the desire for continuity it attempts to render everything intelligible and illuminable. Such a desire is predicated upon a model of intelligibility as the attempt to render everything present, to represent everything that has occurred here and now. Truth and presence and conjoined such that its terms can be presented as simultaneous and commensurable.
The acknowledgement of the Other that is called speech cannot be thought in these terms. Blanchot will draw on Levinas’s vocabulary of height and of the dissymmetrical relation whereby the Other is not measured by what I take myself to be (a subject, a citizen, an ego). The relation to the Other is a relation to the unknown, to the outside. Speech affirms the dissymmetry of this relation and hence the elevation of the Other.
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