'Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasised – a theory of catastrophe', says Scholem. In disastrous times – when the stars that crowded the sky of Western civilisation fall one by one – the Messiah would arrive in the midst of the disaster as the redeemer, the most just of the just: is this how we should understand Blanchot's reflections on the Messianic idea? Only if we remember that this arrival will not occur once and for all - at the end of history, say, at the wrap up; it promises neither a stable utopia nor a restoration of a lost order.
The Messiah comes, if he does so, without having a part in duration. It is certainly possible to wonder whether anything happened. Whether it did, for Blanchot, can be decided only if we abandon that variety of narrative which raises the representation of the past over against the lived past, albeit a living or being-lived that is very close to what he will call dying. We will have to learn to speak of ourselves in another way; a task for which Jewish monotheism – as rethought by Blanchot in dialogue with his friend Levinas – is peculiarly fitted.
The Messianic Now
Towards the end of The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot retells the familiar story of the Messiah who waits in hiding with the beggars and lepers at the gates of Rome. He is recognised and asked, 'When will you come?' Blanchot comments: 'His being there is, then, not the coming'. The Messiah is, on one sense, present – he is there with the others, a beggar among beggars, a leper among lepers; he is one to whom questions can be asked. But, for Blanchot, 'His presence is no guarantee'; 'With the Messiah, who is there, the call must always resound: "Come, come"'.
When will you come? The Messiah, as Scholem comments, is often understood in the Rabbinical literature to be already amongst us. He is present, but occulted; and here, Blanchot highlights that this occultation occurs even in the Messiah's ostensible presence. It is as though the Messiah were here and not yet here, present and not yet present, still to come.
This, to be sure, is also in keeping with the literature on the Messiah. The Jewish idea of the Messiah is not eschatological, as it is in Christianity. The Messiah does not arrive at the end of a linear course of time, but interrupts it, redeeming it. Is it for this redemption that the questioner of the Messiah, on Blanchot's account, is asking? 'Today', the Messiah replies to his questioner (traditionally the Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, although Blanchot does not name him).
On its usual recounting, the Rabbi doesn't believe him, and complains to Elijah, suspecting he is being lied to. Elijah explains that what is meant is 'Today, if you will hear his voice'. In The Writing of the Disaster, this explanation is put into the mouth of the Messiah. To the unnamed questioner's 'When will you come?' we find the answer, 'Now, if only you heed me, or if you are willing to heed my voice'.
When will the Messiah come? The Messianic literature sometimes suggests a causal link between the morality of human beings and the Messiah's coming. The Messiah will come only if specific conditions are met. Is this why the Rabbi is unable to truly hear his voice? Certainly, the Messiah is, for him, a man among men, a human being as ordinary as you or I. But in another sense, he is not there yet; he is still to come. Then to hear the Messiah means a condition must have been met. One would have to have been able to receive the Messiah's speech, to have earned it.
Still commenting on the Messianic literature as it passes through the readings of Levinas and Scholem, Blanchot notes that the Jewish Messiah is not necessarily divine. Certainly he is a comforter, even 'the most just of the just', as is his traditional apothegm, 'but it is not even sure that he is a person – that he is someone in particular'. As Scholem comments, the figure of the Messiah is always vague in the literature. 'Features of the varying historical and psychological origins are gathered into this medium of fulfilment and coexist within it so that they do not furnish a clear picture of the man'.
But Blanchot sees in this vagueness something other than underdetermination. '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'. Anyone might be the Messiah: this is truly surprising. For Scholem, the Messiah is occulted, waiting in hiding; perhaps there are conditions set for his arrival. But now Blanchot suggests that the Messiah is hidden in each of us, inseparable from us and that we each of us might be in some way the 'comforter' and 'the most just of the just'. But how so? What licenses this interpretation?
Speech
Blanchot is indebted, of course, to Rosenzweig and Levinas who, as Martin Kavka has shown us, seek to embed religious notions into the deepest categories of human existence. Both place emphasis on the uniqueness of the uniqueness of the interhuman relation, whose terms are claimed to belong to no genus, and to the importance of love as a commandment, as a summons to take responsibility for the Other.
For both thinkers, redemption occurs through the task of loving. But for Rosenzweig, the revelation of God does not take place solely in tems of the interhuman relation. It still bears a relationship to a revelation whose source is extraworldy. Levinas's adherence to phenomenology, however, demands he search for the source of religious notions in what is concretely given. God, for him, is revealed exclusively through the relation to the Other. But what does this mean?
As is well known, Levinas focuses in Totality and Infinity on a particular kind of relation, the relation to the human Other, Autrui, which he claims obtains in a particular act of language, as speech. He characterises this relation as asymmetrical, insofar as one of its terms, the Other, is said to be higher than the other, the ego, and unilateral, insofar as the Other is said to face the ego and to call it to its responsibility.
For Levinas, this moment of facing, of expression grants the ego a stable and enduring ipseity, a selfhood. Prior to this moment, we have what can be called a proto-self, separate and selfish, concerned only to secure its nourishment in an uncertain environment. At the moment of expression, the self comes together in its response to the Other, which Levinas thinks as the linguistic act in question. Speech opens in the response of the ego to the Other's silent expression. It is in discourse, language, that I can come to myself as an ego.
What does this mean? I become a self only at the moment when I can say 'I' (or imply the first person position in my response to another) in response to the face of the Other. As such, I owe my egoity, my ipseity to the alterity of the Other which, with respect to the meditation which occurs, for Levinas, at a practical and conceptual level by the ego (he calls it the same), can be called immediate.
Whereas philosophers have, according to Levinas, traditionally privileged the mediating activity of consciousness, this activity is predicated upon a linguistic act of acknowledgement and hospitality that is upstream of anything the ego might want or not want to do. Consciousness cannot help but be affected by the Other such that its constitutive activity fails. That is to say, consciousness does not measure the form of the relation to the Other in advance, which is why Levinas says the Other reaches me as the immediate.
Here, speech is very different from the ideality that consciousness introduces in the form of language. As we have seen, language, to the extent that it depends upon universals, passes over the singularity of the immediately given. But for Levinas, speech, understood as the address to the Other, acknowledges this immediacy (that is, it responds to the singularity of the relation to the Other) by suspending the constitutive work of consciousness.
Speech, accordingly, is not voluntary, since it does not stem from the will (which is governed by the same autonomous demand that governs consciousness), though nor can it be called involuntary either, since consciousness is not present to speech such that it might struggle against it. Speech simply happens as the acknowledgement of the Other as it suspends the form of relation that Levinas calls the same. This is why Levinas uses formulations such a 'relation without relation' when writing about speech: what he wants to emphasise is the suspension of the constitutive work that makes reality seem to be the result of linguistic representation.
For Levinas, God is not revealed with the Other, a face behind the face, as a kind of divine supplement, but is present only in my spoken answer to the Other. When I speak to the Other, God likewise speaks. It is not that there is anything specific about the Other outside of my relation to him, that commands this response. A kind of commandment is already present in what I say to the Other ('the command is stated by the mouth of him it commands'). In speech, in what Levinas calls witnessing, there is produced something in me that is not of me ('the-other-in-the-same'); the infinite, conceived by analogy with Descartes' idea of the infinite in the third Meditation – breaks into the closed order of my finitude.
But how is the infinite actually experienced? Levinas coins the word illeity in order to indicate the way in which God is transcendent. This word is formed from il or ille, indicating the passing of the infinite, that is, the way in which the infinite reveals itself without yielding to the meaning-giving powers of intentionality. The word illeity, he-ness or it-ness, is meant to express the way in which God is given to be experienced.
Why does Levinas refuse to speak in the manner of Buber of God in the second person, as a you-ity? Why does illeity remain in the third person? In speaking, in witnessing, the 'il' of illeity is a word for the impersonality of the relation to the Other. It thus expresses the enigma of this relation insofar as it holds God apart from me, from my finitude, even as it interrupts that finitude (the-other-in-the-same that is Levinas's notion of the subject). Illeity, in its impersonality appears in the particular personality of the Other.
But this bestows the possibility of another reading, where the impersonality of illeity is understood as a name for a feature of speech. In order to explore this fully, I would have to take a long detour, showing how Blanchot is suspicious of a certain Platonic tendency in Levinas's account of speech, elevating speech above writing, before following an important recent reading of Totality and Infinity that places emphasis upon fraternity as a model for understanding the relation to the Other. I would have to show how it is in terms of the relation to the child that one might understand the structure of what Levinas later calls the-other-in-the-same.
Here, it will suffice to say that for Blanchot, the 'il' of 'illeity' can be understood to refer to another sense of the-other-in-the-same, and another kind of witnessing, and that the relation to the Other must be understood in terms of speech, and not the way the Other attends speech, accompanying and validating it as ethical by its silence presence.
What is crucial to the relation to the Other for Blanchot is that it commands and reawakens a new source of speech: a upsurge of creativity in the responding 'I' analogous, perhaps, to that which he claims to occur in literary creation in the response to the work. I can speak, addressing the Other, because I am claimed by a 'merciful surplus of strength' that might be understood as a kind of virtuosity (I am thinking of Virno's use of this word) not because of my eloquence but because of a kind of stammering or stuttering that is the condition of everything I say.
That is, I speak in two times, one which can be understood in terms of what I say – the contents of speech, its message – and the other as the continual surprise that I can say it, that I am drawn to speak by the-other-in-the-same. Here, this diachrony of speech depends on a doubling of the speaker – there is the one who can speak, who can make speech personal and the other who cannot help but speak as the 'il', the placeholder or dummy subject who gives issue to impersonal speech.
What sense, in this context, can God have for Blanchot? Why is this non-Jewish athetist able to reaffirm Jewish monotheism in The Infinite Conversation? Following Levinas, God never names an entity that was 'there' or present, considered in relation to the temporal order as it is conceived in terms of a synthesis of past moments. As such, God is never encountered as a unitary One, and Jewish monotheism must be understood to refer to a difference and a pluralism, to a diachrony that cannot be closed up into the linear order of time.
Blanchot's Messiah
Blanchot's 'God' – what he calls God - can be known only through the act of speaking. We must say the same of Blanchot's Messiah, who is revealed only in the performative of my saying as a response to the Other, that is, in the diachrony which sees the occurrence of one instant in two times.
As such, the Messiah is always occulted, since the performative in question is not experienced by a conscious 'I'. Anyone might be the Messiah, but no one need know anything about it, since the Messiah lives only in a particular speech act, in and through the dispersal of the ego that occurs when the 'il' is called forward by the relation to the Other.
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