In enjoyment, Levinas explains, and as I attempted to unfold previously, the ego is produced as the result of an involution of the cosmic womb of the elements. Living from the various media or milieus of the elemental – on light, air, water and food – the ego is able to maintain itself over time, although it is always exposed to the uncertainty implicit in its dependency on what lies outside of it. The fruit may wither on the vine, the river dry up – the ego can never be sure of its future. Fortunately, there opens the phenomenon that Levinas calls dwelling – through the setting up of an ‘extraterritoriality’ set back from the immediacy of elemental life. The ego continues to join what it receives from the element, but is now able to deepen a movement of interiorisation, consolidating its independent identity. Such a movement comes together, in dwelling, with a movement of labour and acquisition, Levinas argues; dwelling is the node wherein the ego sets itself back from the world in a home, even as it maintains an opening to the element. But dwelling cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of the possession of a home – it expresses, rather, that position which allows the capacity to possess. A capacity that, Levinas argues in some obscure and troubling pages, is dependent on an act of welcoming.
The ego can come to dwell in the home because it is made welcome there, says Levinas, by a feminine other – to ‘the gentleness or the warmth of intimacy’. Like the goddess Hestia, who remains in the hearth, the feminine extends an invitation to the ego into the privacy of dwelling, in the interior space that will become a home and permit of inhabitation. Compared to the ‘timeless and carefree’ paradise of enjoyment (although always menaced by the ‘concern for the morrow’), we find instead ‘a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering’. Levinas argues the ‘very dimension of time’ opens in dwelling, through that act of welcoming that separates the ego from the immediacy of the element. The welcome of the feminine permits a collection and consolidation of egoic existence. The dimension of labour, which in turn allows the ego to possess the items it brings into the home, is dependent upon the initial invitation the femininely coded space of intimacy extends to the ego.
Levinas tells us such intimacy is not to be confused with the actual physical presence of a woman. Femininity would simply provide an appropriate metaphor for a private space. Nevertheless, this is not an innocent metaphor, but confirms a whole history of thought wherein the feminine is made to stand for a ground that absents itself in order to allow the existence of a self which is always coded as masculine. Levinas, to be sure, wants to break with ideas of a nourishing, maternal sense of the earth, of the primordial matrix at the source of the world in pagan cosmogonies. The cosmic womb of the element that Levinas seems to reference in his account of enjoyment can easily become opaque and unnourishing matter. Levinas’s feminine is, by contrast, discreet, belonging to a hidden fold in the earth – but this merely perpetuates the cliche of a benign and self-abnegating maternal presence, enabling others without wanting anything for itself.
But what does it enable? The welcome of intimacy grants the possibility of having time – of a deferral of the ‘concern for the morrow’ which threatened the hedonism of enjoyment. It permits labour to transform the element, letting the hand (for Levinas, the organ of work) grope towards what it can then apprehend as things. I am able to begin what he calls the ‘Odyssean journey … where the adventure pursued in the world is but an accident of a return’: what matters is the movement that consolidates the identity of the ego.
The pages on dwelling, dense and troubling are difficult enough. But no sooner than he has articulated its structure, Levinas imposes another on top of it. The ego, he argues, is exposed to the alterity of the Other [Autrui] – to that relation that is experience as the good, as responsibility at the same moment it has come to dwell. I will not rehearse Levinas’s well known account of the opening of the ethical here. But this opening – a welcoming of the Other – occurs simultaneously with the welcome that feminine intimacy bestows. From the first, the dwelling is not securely possessed by the ego, but turned towards the Other to whom the ego is engaged in responsibility. This is why Levinas can write, ‘The chosen home is the very opposite of a root. It indicates a disengagement, a wandering [errance] which has made it possible, which is not a less with respect to installation, but the surplus of the relationship with the Other, metaphysics’.
The home, then, is not the basis of subjective identity – the root it sends down into the earth – even though feminine intimacy is said to grant the possibility of an increased independence from the element. For that independence is, seemingly simultaneously, turned over to the Other who, it must be understood, cannot be identified with the intimacy with the feminine. The Other is not encountered in the home, but as coming from outside of it – the alterity of the Other is in no way the indefiniteness of the element, but the infinity of a relation that contests any attempt on the part of the ego to close itself up. Dwelling, says Levinas, is the node that joins the movement of interiorisation to the movement of labour and possession; I am able to commence an Odyssean journey. But this journey is subject to a detour from the first – I am never allowed, it seems, to journey back to myself, since the Other before me – anyone at all – disengages me from my identity and deracinates my home (I wander from my home in my home, the interior having been unfolded and exposed to the outside. In it and outside of it, the home, now, is entirely exposed, entirely open …)
‘No human or interhuman relationship can be enacted outside of an economy; no face can be approached with empty hands and closed home’. The circulation which seems to be permitted by a domestic space (Levinas calls this economy) is broken by the relation to the Other. The space into which I am welcomed becomes immediately a space of hospitality. Note that hospitality bears upon what my dwelling has allowed me to make into a possession – it is a giving of what I have wrested from the element. Hospitality has a material content. As Blanchot writes in another context, reflecting, no doubt, upon his reading of Levinas:
Materialism: ‘my own’ would perhaps be of little account, since it is appropriation or egoism; but the materialism of others – their hunger, their thirst, their desire – is the truth of materialism, its importance.
I am never allowed to tend complacently to my own hunger, my own thirst; my desires are, from this point no longer my own, since they come from without. Although I may indeed decide to follow only those desires I take to be mine, this is a movement of reaction. Appropriation and egoism have already been challenged; the hunger of the Other – his thirst, his desire – has already laid claim to me in dwelling.
Great is hungering – this phrase, which Blanchot quotes from Levinas, and which I quoted in a previous post finds another significance: great is the hungering of the Other …
Blanchot again:
If I cannot welcome the Other by answering the summons which his approach exerts to the point of exhausting me utterly, it is surely through awkward weakness alone (through the wretched ‘after all, despite everything’, and through my portion of derision and folly) that I am called upon to enter into this separate, this other relation. I am called to enter it with my selfhood gangrened and eaten away, altogether alienated (thus it is among lepers and beggars beneath the Roman ramparts that the Jews of the first centuries expected to discover the Messiah.)
The relation to the Other implicates me as I exposed in a new sense – not, now, to the uncertainty of the element, but to the infinity of a relation that separates me from the root that my home might otherwise become. It is not that my home is open to the Messiah for Blanchot (explaining Levinas), as though it were sufficient to leave a place within my dwelling for him that he might come. I myself am the Messiah who would welcome the Other in my home. I myself – and only as my egoity, my selfhood is eaten away to nearly nothing. Must I become hungry in order to feed the Other in turn? But hunger, now has a new significance. My hunger is no longer mine, it is not my first concern …
When one commentator says, The Messiah is perhaps I, he is not exalting himself. Anyone might be the Messiah – must be he, is not he. For it would be wrong to speak of the Messiah in Hegelian language – ‘the absolute intimacy of absolute exteriority’ – all the more so because the coming of the Messiah does not yet signify the end of history, the suspension of time.
It announces a time more future, as the following mysterious text conveys, than any prophesy could ever foretell: "All prophets – there is no exception – have prophesised only for the messianic time [l’epokhe?]. As for future time, what eye has seen it except Yours, Lord, who will act for him who is faithful to you and keeps waiting". (Levinas and Scholem)
The coming of the Messiah – the opening of my dwelling to the Other – belongs to the time prophesised by the prophets, Blanchot suggests (following Levinas, following Scholem): what matters is not the time I have, but that which I can now give to the Other. But this formulation gets things the wrong way round: it is the Other who brings the gift of time as it arrives from outside the closed economy of the ego. Or rather, it is the Other who gives sense to the time that dwelling has allowed me, orienting it in a particular direction.
With the Other, Levinas explains comes the condition of language, of reason – of the ability to grasp cognitively what the hand only groped towards (I do not have the space to discuss these topics here). Labour, says Levinas, is only able to shape the indefiniteness of matter, it is not able to make it renounce its anonymity. But my address to the Other, acknowledging his identity (the Other is a he, for Levinas), opens the dimension of language that allows for such a grasping. I no longer feel my way into the future, groping uncertainly; to think is to change the quality of the time that I have. But of course, my time is no longer mine; it belongs, Levinas says, to the Other – just as it must be judged according to another relation that opens in the relation to the Other.
He points here to the relation to other Others – to those alongside to the Other to whom we open our home. From the exclusivity of the ethical relation, we pass to the domain of politics, of judgement: we must now measure up carefully what we are to do and to whom we should give our time (even as, according to Levinas, time is given to us by the Other). The Messiah gives way in us to the judge who lives in a world of competing claims. I must decide what to do with the time that has been given me. And the moment I am brought before this decision – which is to say immediately, all at once – I am no longer the Messiah – or the Messiah is not the only one I am. Who am I to feed – this Other? this person standing before me? But what about the other Others – what about the ones who are genuinely starving? How am I to weigh up their demands upon me?
Great is the hungering of others in the world around me! Great is the whole burden of human suffering as it implicates me!
The demand of justice for always greater justice: in me, outside of me and in justice itself, thus also in the knowledge and exercise of justice. All of which presupposes what may be called the tragic imbroglio of the other and others; whence the intervention of the social and the political, under guarantee of the law, in the service of all that is far (first of all) and of all that is near – whence perhaps the repetition of the word peace, that this last word may be enriched by this echoing of itself in an incomparable repetition.
The long road of justice is a hard one. Like the journeying of Abraham, who departed alone, travelling towards all – from particularity to universality – under threat from the night and with all the hopes of the day.
I quote from a newly translated essay by Blanchot, ‘Peace, peace to the far and to the near’, without justifying here why his words can stand in for those of Levinas. The Messiah (who Blanchot evoked in a previous paragraph) gives way to the wanderer Abraham, perpetually en route from the ethical to the social and the political – from the particularity of the relation to the Other to the universality of the relation to the other Others. The latter, since there will always be hunger, and I can never do enough, belongs to a tragic imbroglio – a word that belongs to the other people Blanchot mentions in this essay – to the Greeks who have passed down to us ‘the logos, philosophy, beauty, and a certain idea of democracy’. Tragic because there are all too many … but hopeful, too, since there is always a surplus over the universal, over our inheritance from the Greeks: a particularity that, says Levinas, says Blanchot, lays claim to us as the ethical.
Lars Iyer's Blog 