Derrida, Levinas and the Struggle to Think Beyond Hegel

The “ethical” significance of radically supra-ontological alterity is the theme of all

Levinas’s philosophical work. His particular approach consists in maintaining that the

relation to the Other is initially without reference to either universality or utility and

that such a relation is the condition rather than foundation of justice. This ‘relation’ is

conceived by Levinas as ‘unique’ and as the primary significance of all that is

subsequently meaningful. The Other, considered here as incomparable, naked,

destitute, and emptied of all ‘social role’, immediately imposes itself upon me as my

responsibility. The primal nudity and vulnerability of the Other functions as a call

directly to me; it is an immediate appeal functioning as an absolute imperative. His

work persistently demands a fundamental reorientation of formal ethics towards the

hyperbolic imperative imposed by the Other, and for Levinas this entails an ongoing

struggle to articulate a non-ontological comprehension of the alterity of the Other

(Autrui) and an ethics which is ‘older than’ justice. His philosophical texts repeatedly

question the western philosophical tradition, a tradition that he maintains has

habitually suppressed alterity by subordinating it to the totality of self-sameness or

‘being’. For example, by interpreting the Other as a necessary moment of the Same or

as an exteriority fundamentally recoverable within the dialectic, the ontological

tradition persistently reduces the absolutely Other to being merely the other of the

Same or a constitutive moment of ‘being’. For Levinas such a reduction represents a

form of ‘violence’ towards the Other, and articulates nothing less than a certain

trajectory of ‘violence’ towards the Other dominant within western ontology.

One of the ‘violent’ trajectories within western ontology considered by Levinas is

Hegel’s speculative idealism. He argues that within Hegel’s speculative logic and its

notion of multiplicity each individual essentially remains what it is only in the

ensemble formed by the multiplicity of terms speculatively identified, i.e. this ‘a’ is

the other of ‘b’ and ‘b’ is the other of ‘a’. He characterises this as an ontology of the

One (which for Hegel is to be understood as an immanent speculative identity of

multiplicity) and as dangerously totalitarian. He understands Hegel’s speculative

idealism as moving, through the simultaneous production and reduction (through

negation) of all aspects of alterity to mere moments of immanent negative self-

relation, towards an understanding of ‘Absolute Being’. For Levinas this totalising

form of ontology necessarily functions through a violent act of reduction and

effacement, thereby obscuring the true significance of the alterity of the Other (or

what Levinas will term in his early work as the ‘infinite’ (l’infini)). Levinas’s specific

resistance to Hegel’s ontology consists of an ongoing exhortation to philosophise non-

speculatively in an effort to articulate the irreducible ethical significance of the

subject’s relation to the absolutely Other. By resisting the speculative dialectic, his

work attempts to address the question of whether the absolute alterity of the Other

(which he argues contains a sense otherwise than being) can be properly conceived at

all except by positing it in ethical terms as a positive modality of the unique and

incomparable. There is between the I and the Other (in the Hegelian phrase that

Levinas crucially attempts to critically reconfigure) an absolute difference. Ultimately

he asks whether it is the absolute difference of the Other (which in its original

difference is its being otherwise than being) that resists or forbids its inscription

within the terms of a speculative identity, but at the same time maintains the

possibility of what he terms a non-indifference (in an ethical sense) with regard to the

Other. When specifically contrasted to Hegel’s ontology this positive modality of

infinity is, he argues, actually prior to the alterity of self-relating negativity

determinately operative within Hegel’s speculative idealism. His discourse

persistently exhorts us to reconsider a modality beyond and resistant to the very

‘logos’ that founds speculative idealism, together with an ongoing refusal of its very

terminology. However, this reconsideration and resistance to Hegelianism is by no

means a stable or consistent matter within Levinas’s thought. Indeed, one can discern

the development in Levinas’s work of an increasingly complex textual strategy as part

of the ongoing effort to maintain a sustainable resistance to Hegel’s dialectic. In this

paper I will argue that an explanation for this textual evolution must emerge from a

consideration of Derrida’s engagements of Levinas’s work. I will show that in

addition to containing very precise explanations of the nature of this strategy,

Derrida’s commentaries themselves represent, to a large extent, one of the most

significant reasons as to why there was such an obligation on Levinas’s part to

develop this textual strategy,.

Of the three commentaries that Derrida has written on Levinas the first, written in

1963 and entitled ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, is easily the most well known and has

to a large extent determined the initial reception of Levinas’s philosophical thought,

particularly among English-speaking readers. All three address the difficult and often

troubled relationship between Levinas’s philosophical discourse and Hegelian

dialectics, and each accumulatively illuminate the way in which Levinas’s work

necessarily evolves with regard to challenging and displacing the sovereignty of

Hegelian philosophical discourse. The first commentary begins with an

acknowledgment that Levinas’s solicitation of the infinity of the Other (the radically

‘otherwise than being’) within his discourse should be recognised as the very essence

of his philosophical work. He insists that Levinas ‘does not seek to propose laws or

moral rules, does not seek to determine a morality, but rather the essence of the ethical

relation in general…an Ethics of Ethics’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p. 111).

For Derrida this ‘Ethics of Ethics’ is enacted as a radical and powerful form of

critique summoning us ‘to depart from the Greek site’ and to gravitate towards ‘what

is no longer a source or a site’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.82). Here ‘Greek’ signifies for

Derrida the philosophical language (i.e. the conceptuality that we inhabit and which

limits what we are capable of ‘thinking’) that Levinas is constrained to ‘speak’ even

when he would seek to summon or oblige us to depart from it through an indication of

the inspirational ‘Hebrew’ tradition of ethical thought. The non-violent and non-

allergic relationship to the infinitely Other within this tradition becomes figured

within Levinas’s texts as the only way of opening a genuine space of transcendence

and of liberating metaphysics; for Derrida it ‘makes us dream of an inconceivable

process of dismantling and dispossession’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.82). This ‘opening of

opening’ cannot be subsequently enclosed within any category and cannot be

described by any traditional philosophical concepts; for example, it represents a

destabilising negativity beyond the sobriety of the negative operative within Hegelian

dialectic. However, Derrida’s subsequent commentary upon this solicitation to think

‘original difference’ posits a number of powerful concerns associated with the nature

of the relationship between Levinas and Hegel’s philosophical discourse.

Derrida focuses upon seemingly inherent problems within Levinas’s attempts to

oppose the most significant ontological thinkers of the western philosophical tradition.

For example, Derrida argues that insurmountable problems emerge from the fact that

Levinas’s entire effort to think and solicit a non-ontological and pre-original un-

condition must necessarily be inscribed within an irreducibly ontological language.

‘Hebrew’ ethics are thus necessarily re-inscribed within the ‘Greek’ conceptual

schema. Derrida suspects that Levinas has no effective strategy for disentangling

himself from that which represents the culmination of that tradition, i.e. Hegel’s

speculative dialectic and its implicit principle of negativity, and as a result Levinas

will always struggle to sustain a legitimate or successful strategy of opposition to it.

The fundamental questions Derrida poses to Levinas’s work in his first commentary

are, he claims, in fact ‘questions put to us by Levinas.’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.84)

These questions are primarily and irreducibly ‘questions of language and the question

of language’, and as such ‘already belong to his [Levinas’s] own interior dialogue’ (J.

Derrida, (1963), p.109). Thus Derrida seeks to draw Levinas’s attention to the

intrinsic limits of the philosophical discourse he himself utilises to inscribe the

‘Hebrew’ ethics of alterity, and to recall the sense in which it is an irreducibly ‘Greek’

form of conceptuality. For Derrida there is an ‘indestructible and unforeseeable

resource of the Greek logos’ that was well understood by Hegel, namely its ‘power of

envelopment, by which he who attempts to repel it would always already be

overtaken’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.111). Despite acknowledging Levinas’s implicit

awareness of such inevitable difficulties (it would be one of the questions ‘put to us’

by Levinas) Derrida does not seem satisfied that his texts are as acutely aware as they

should be, particularly when they are so directly concerned with articulating a

fundamental displacement of Hegelian speculative idealism.

Given that Derrida claims he is as concerned as Levinas in making ‘the very difficult

passage beyond the debate, which is also a complicity, between Hegelianism and

classical anti-Hegelianism’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.111), he asserts that ‘as soon as he

speaks against Hegel, Levinas can only confirm Hegel, has confirmed him already’ (J.

Derrida, (1963), p.111). At various points throughout his first commentary he seeks to

precisely demonstrate this proximity, complicity or vulnerability to Hegel by positing

a series of problems for Levinas upon explicitly Hegelian grounds. By consciously

adopting such a strategy Derrida believes he is able to demonstrate the true extent of

the difficulty involved in disentangling philosophical discourse from Hegelianism and

to indicate, to a certain extent, Levinas’s own failure in that regard. By indicating the

precise nature of these failures he is subsequently able to argue that ‘Levinas is very

close to Hegel, much closer than he admits, and at the very moment when he is

apparently opposed to Hegel in the most radical fashion. This is a situation he must

share with all anti-Hegelian thinkers, and whose final significance calls for much

thought’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.99).

For Derrida Levinas’s philosophical texts reveal the extent of his attempt to ‘dream

the impossible dream’ of traversing a path in philosophy forever blocked, i.e. that path

beyond the very questionableness of philosophy which leads to what can neither be

nor be thought. This is the ‘dream’ of an absolutely wholly Other, (expressed as pure

infinity), a type of alterity posited as absolutely exterior to bounds of reason and one

ultimately capable of shattering them. However, if Levinas’s philosophical texts aim

to call us towards an ‘unthinkable-impossible-unutterable beyond (tradition’s) Being

and Logos’, then, Derrida claims, it can neither say nor think it: ‘The attempt to

achieve an opening toward the beyond of philosophical discourse, by means of a

philosophical discourse, which can never be shaken off completely, cannot possibly

succeed within language’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.110).

Levinas clearly affirms the role of language by effectively inscribing the ‘Hebrew’

ethics of absolute alterity within the ‘Greek’ form of philosophical discourse. The

radically heterogeneous, the Other, is necessarily inscribed within the same terms as

ontological discourse, a discourse of the Same. Derrida claims that Levinas’s

arguments regarding the ethics of absolute alterity amount to the claim that a non-

violent ethical language, ‘Hebrew’, is a type of language capable of dispensing with

the verb ‘to be’ and becoming a language without predication, ‘a language of pure

invocation, pure adoration, proffering only proper nouns in order to call to the Other

from afar. In effect, such language would be purified of all rhetoric…purified of every

verb’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.147). According to Derrida Levinas’s philosophical texts

would seem not only to posit an Ethics without determinate laws, (the Ethics of

Ethics), but also a language without actual phrases, and he simply asks the question as

to whether this type of pure language of non-violence still actually counts as a type of

language at all. Given that there is a necessary and irreducible adherence to Greek

conceptuality even within Levinas’s work, Derrida argues that ‘there is no logos

which does not suppose the interlocking of nouns and verbs’ (J. Derrida, (1963),

p.147). There cannot be any such language of pure non-violence, a language of

language, ‘which does not pass through the violence of the concept’. Levinas’s

attempt to articulate the absolutely wholly Other of the ‘Hebrew’ tradition fails to take

into account the necessary ‘violence’ implied by the irreducibility of the adherence to

the structures of traditional ‘Greek’ conceptuality. For Derrida such failures

essentially illuminate his own, now familiar, deconstructive imperative i.e. ‘the

necessity of lodging oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to deconstruct it’

(J. Derrida, (1963), p.147).

A significant part of Derrida’s overall strategy of reading Levinas in ‘Violence and

Metaphysics’ consists in bringing his actual account of the absolute Other, pure

difference and radical exteriority back into direct proximity with Hegel’s discussion

of Absolute Difference in the Science of Logic. By doing this he aims to disclose the

true extent of the difficulties and complications, unsuspected within Levinas’s

philosophical texts, of articulating a notion of the absolutely wholly Other or radical

exteriority within a necessarily constrained form of ‘violent’ philosophical

conceptualisation. The result of such a reading is relatively straightforward – i.e.

Levinas substantially underestimates the significant plasticity and force of the

Hegelian dialectic and its capacity to incorporate alterity, exteriority and difference.

By virtue of the simple fact that it proceeds as a form of philosophical discourse

Levinas’s discourse cannot ever simply be ‘beyond’, or ‘exterior to’, the dialectic

since, according to Derrida, it is the very nature of dialectic to express something that

is intrinsic to all forms of discourse. Thus, by exposing a certain lack of philosophical

vigilance on Levinas’s part Derrida is able to demonstrate how certain elements of his

discourse is necessarily and inescapably entangled within a specific moment of

Hegel’s dialectic, namely that of ‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’.

Hegel demonstrates the immanent development of an internal or dialectical relation

between ‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’ in a chapter of the Science of Logic entitled ‘The

Doctrine of Essence’. This development occurs in such a way that each category

necessarily passes into the other and thus conjoin in a principle Hegel terms

‘Contradiction’. He begins by showing how the simple category of ‘Identity’ is

immediately understood by thought as simple self-sameness and is usually considered

as being exclusive of difference. He indicates, however, that when such simple and

immediate self-relation is actually considered it becomes apparent that abstract ‘self-

identity’ is fundamentally inseparable from a notion of absolute ‘Difference’. An

opposition to and absolute negation of this notion of ‘Difference’ is recognised as

necessarily mediating the initial simple and immediate abstract self-relation. Thus,

when thought simply affirms the principle of abstract ‘Identity’, the category of

‘Identity’ necessarily negates itself and becomes its opposite – namely ‘Difference’.

Conversely, when the category of ‘Difference’ is considered as immediate, pure or

absolute (Hegel refers to this as ‘external difference’ as in an unreasoned ‘opinion’) it

is necessarily indistinguishable from the category of ‘Identity’. This is because

thought necessarily defines the category of ‘Difference’ by opposing it to its opposite,

i.e. the category of ‘Identity’. Hegel is able to show that abstract ‘Identity’ is

inherently and necessarily ‘Difference’, and also that the category of ‘Difference’, by

relating itself to its apparent opposite, is really relating to itself. Thus ‘relation to

other’ turns out to be nothing less than a form of ‘self-relation’. By affirming itself as

‘Difference’, it really negates itself and becomes its opposite – ‘Identity’. Hegel then

proceeds to show how ‘Identity’ (which is in-itself ‘Difference’) and ‘Difference’

(which is in-itself ‘Identity’) each conjoin in the notion of ‘Contradiction’, i.e. as the

subsequent immanent Identity of Identity and Difference:

‘Each has an indifferent self-subsistence of its own through the fact that it has within

itself the relation to its other moment; it is thus the whole, self-contained opposition.

As this whole, each is mediated with itself by its other and contains it. But further, it

is mediated with itself by the non-being of its other; thus it is a unity existing on its

own and it excludes the other from itself…This consists in containing within itself its

opposite determination – through which alone it is not a relation to something external

– but no less immediately in the fact that it is itself, and also excludes from itself the

determination that is negative to it. It is thus contradiction’ (GWF Hegel, (1831),

p.431).

Inasmuch as ‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’ necessarily include their opposites within

themselves, they are, Hegel argues, inherently self-contradictory. By invoking this

particular moment from Hegel’s Science of Logic and placing it in proximity with

Levinas’s philosophical texts, Derrida attempts to show how a strategy of

hypostatising Difference as absolute alterity merely risks repeating the kind of

abstraction that Hegel disparages as ‘external difference’ or opinion whereby ‘such

thinking always has before it only abstract identity, and apart from and alongside it,

difference’ (GWF Hegel, (1831), p.412), and thereby falling into the kind of inherent

self-contradiction espoused by Hegel. Levinas risks a certain kind of philosophical

naivety in the face of the Hegelian dialectic, and ultimately risks merely restating

Hegel’s own argument, i.e. the contradictory result of attempting to hypostatise in

thought, through a notion of ‘abstraction’ or ‘separation’, absolute self-identity and

absolute difference. Derrida claims that ‘Hegel’s critique of the concept of pure

Difference is for us here doubtless the most uncircumventable theme’ (J. Derrida,

(1963), footnote 91, p. 320).

Derrida proceeds with an analogous philosophical point regarding Levinas’s

reformulation of a non-negative notion of infinity. Again there is the suspicion that

Levinas naively posits a notion of positive Infinity without being aware of the degree

to which he risks merely hypostatising the concept of ‘Infinity’ and repeating (through

abstraction) an element of Hegel’s own speculative analysis of Infinity. Derrida insists

upon a structural impossibility in designating, within discourse, a purely non-negative

notion of the infinite (i.e. as Levinas claims with his notion of the infinite alterity of

the Other). For Derrida the designation of the infinite is clearly and necessarily

achieved through a negation of the finite; thus infinity cannot be conceived as Other

except in terms of the in-finite. He argues:

‘As soon as one attempts to think infinity as a positive plenitude (one pole of

Levinas’s non-negative transcendence), the other becomes unthinkable, impossible,

unutterable. Perhaps Levinas calls us toward this unthinkable-impossible-unutterable

beyond (traditions) Being and Logos. But it must not be possible either to think or

state this call.’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.114)

Hegel’s notion of the bad or spurious infinite in the Science of Logic is one defined by

its negative opposition to finitude. Such an infinite is in fact merely a limited being.

For Hegel this notion of infinity is spurious simply because it is finite and thought has

clearly not yet isolated a thought of genuine infinity. Derrida acknowledges that

Levinas would appear to agree with Hegel regarding the spurious nature of this type

of infinite (i.e. that the genuine infinity of the alterity of the Other is not to be

conceived merely through a negative relation to the finitude of the Same), however

Hegel’s subsequent notion of genuine infinity also represents a spurious type of

infinity for Levinas. Derrida suspects, however, that the Hegelian notion of the

spurious infinite inevitably haunts such gestures of denunciation in Levinas’s text

Totality and Infinity. For example, by conceiving the principle of genuine alterity as

essentially non-negative Levinas claims the Other (Autrui) is a genuine positive form

of infinity and that the Hegelian realm of the Same, by being constituted negatively, is

a false type of infinity. However, Derrida posits the Hegelian question of how it is that

the alterity of the Other here can be separated from the negativity of false infinity and

how it is that absolute Sameness can be conceived in any terms other than infinity.

Thus he asks:

‘If, as Levinas says, the Same is a violent totality, this would mean that it is a finite

totality, and therefore is abstract and more other than the other (than an other totality),

etc. The Same as finite totality would not be the Same, but still the Other. Levinas

would be speaking of the Other under the rubric of the Same, and of the Same under

the rubric of the Other, etc. If the finite totality was the Same, it could not be thought,

or posed as such, without becoming other than itself (and this is war). If it did not do

so, it could not enter into war with others (finite totalities), nor could it be violent.

Henceforth, not being violent, it would not be the same in Levinas’s sense (finite

totality). Entering into war – and war there is – it is conceived, certainly, as the

Other’s Other, that is, it gains access to the Other as an Other (self). But again, it is no

longer a totality in Levinas’s sense. In this language, which is the only language of

western philosophy, can one not repeat Hegelianism, which is only the language

coming into absolute possession of itself.’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.119)

For Derrida Levinas’s fault with regard to Hegel is not that his ethics of the Other

seeks to effect a breach of or disruption to the type of conceptual totality present

there, but rather in neglecting the implicit complexities involved in having to

necessarily lodge that breach or disruption within traditional conceptuality. With his

apparent failure to recognise the extent to which Hegelianism represents the language

of philosophy ‘coming into absolute possession of itself’, Levinas risks merely

repeating a naïve form of anti-Hegelianism. By merely repeating gestures inherent

within the Hegelian dialectic he risks becoming enveloped back within the fabric of

rational immanence. For Derrida the price of escaping Hegel is the recognition of the

irreducibility of its discourse. This has to be coupled with a necessary form of

ongoing and persistent philosophical vigilance whenever one locates oneself back

within philosophical conceptualisation in order to articulate a breach of ontology.

Such ongoing vigilance is necessary so that one can avoid the philosophically naïve

gesture of hypostatising certain notions of absolute difference, infinity, beyond and

outside. It is therefore a question of becoming far more attentive than perhaps Levinas

actually is in Totality and Infinity to the way Hegel’s dialectic precisely aligns itself

with, and brings to completion, the ability of discourse to repair tears, wounds and

breaches to its rational fabric that occur as a consequence of abstraction and

hypostatisation. For Derrida it must always be a question of an ongoing effort to effect

a breach, an incessant and recurrent effort rather than a single absolute and pure

breach or abstraction. The dialectical bond of thought cannot be purely undone, rather

it is always a matter of reconsidering dialectics against a backdrop of what Derrida

will consider certain necessary possibilities from which dialectics comes into self-

possession, but which it must also remain unable to think in order that it remain

thinking. Derrida’s own reading of Hegel, exemplified by Glas (J. Derrida, (1974),

consists of a fundamentally faithful interpretation of the Hegelian text which attempts,

through a certain ‘repetition’ of the Hegelian text, to reveal a type of ‘exterior’ or

radical margin implicit to the very bonds of dialectical thinking. This notion of

exteriority emerges through a rigorous examination of the capacity of Hegelian

dialectics to generate and incorporate into its thinking all forms of alterity. For

Derrida such capacity necessarily rests upon the formulation of an unincorporated

limit to its own bonds of thinking, a link that remains outside its own power of radical

dialectical linkage. For Derrida such a limit, operative within Hegelian dialectics, can

no longer be simply understood as its own ‘limit’, i.e. this radical limit or margin

would not be ultimately reducible to the Hegelian concept of exteriority. Rather, this

limit constitutes the very conditions of possibility and impossibility of the ‘totality’ of

Hegel’s dialectical discourse. It is in this sense that Derrida’s understanding of the

‘metaphysics’ of difference is as a type of ‘economy’, where it becomes a question of

always having to somehow read Hegel against himself, a type of ‘violence against

violence, light against light’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.117).

Derrida’s strategy of employing a Hegelian form of immanent critique in ‘Violence

and Metaphysics’ functions to indicate the extent to which Levinas’s discourse fails to

reflect sufficiently upon the necessity in which his solicitation of absolute alterity is

‘ordered to occur as logos, and to reawaken the Greek in the autistic syntax of his own

dream’ (J. Derrida, (1963), p.152). It is important to recognise that such a strategy

does not actually constitute Derrida’s adherence to Hegelianism. On the contrary

Derrida merely believes himself to be attentive to the overwhelming immanent

capacity of Hegelian discourse when confronted with external opposition, decision

and assertion within philosophical discourse. In this sense his commentary operates as

a type of supplement or corrective to Levinas’s thought. He indicates that there is an

irreducible necessity to remain self-consciously ‘Hegelian’ (or ‘violent’) – thus, in

order to pass beyond Hegel it is necessary to inhabit Hegelianism, to discover what

resists the Hegelian dialectic from within the ‘violence’ of dialectic and to lodge

oneself within ‘traditional conceptuality in order to deconstruct it’. In order to

successfully posit a fracture in the Hegelian system it is never be enough to simply

oppose the pure ‘peace’ of abstract alterity to Hegel. Eschewing Levinas’s strategy of

direct opposition, Derrida advocates an indirect strategy that seeks to indicate the

extent to which Hegel’s own discourse and self-understanding can be reinterpreted

against him, i.e. how the bellicosity of his own discourse, under the guise of an

‘irenics’, can itself be turned back upon him.

For Derrida the Hegelian text contains ‘heterogeneous statements, not contradictory

ones, but ones of a singular heterogeneity: that which relates in a text…decidable

statements to undecidable statements’ (J. Derrida, (1974), p. 209). The heterogeneity

in question is so singular because it does not have the homogeneous form of

negativity common to all the other forms of negativity within dialectics. Derrida

acknowledges that whilst there is nothing simply homogeneous about the different

forms of negativity that function as ruptures at certain junctures of Hegel’s dialectical

system, the singular heterogeneity does not simply, as these different forms had, let

itself be interned into what he terms the heterogeneous homogeneity of Hegel’s

ontological system. For Derrida this singular heterogeneity stems from an

impossibility of deciding whether the statements in question belong to the ontological

system or to an altogether different order. The radically singular statement derives its

heterogeneity from the fact that it can always go two ways; it can always be subject to

two different readings. Its radical singularity is neither simply or purely other, (in the

way that Levinas’s philosophical texts had argued), nor is it simply identical to the

decidable statements to which it necessarily relates. Derrida claims that such radically

singular statements avoid becoming enveloped within the structure of opposition

because they are determined outside the opposition of dialectics and are therefore

radically undecidable. However, Derrida acknowledges that such singular statements

are always potentially capable of decidability, of oppositional determination and

therefore of being incorporated as a moment within Hegel’s speculative dialectic.

Thus, the margin of the system must always be recognised as carrying with it the risk

of being incorporated within dialectics.

There are a number of places in Levinas’s later work where he appears to concede that

the language of Totality and Infinity was perhaps too ontologically over determined,

and tended to hypostatise the traces of enigma that signify ‘otherwise than being’.

However, in his defence Levinas argues that its language was never totally definitive.

Indeed, in an interview conducted in 1986, Levinas replies directly to a question

concerning Derrida’s commentary on his work in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’:

‘Derrida has reproached me for my critique of Hegelianism by saying that in order to

criticise Hegel, one begins to speak Hegel’s language. That is the basis of his critique.

To which I respond that for me, on the contrary, the Greek language is a language

which does not imprint itself in what it says, and consequently that there is always the

possibility of unsaying that to which you were obliged to have recourse in order to

show something.’ (E. Levinas, (1988), p.179)

In his later philosophical work Levinas recognises that all language must necessarily

interrupt itself in order to tear itself away from the fabric of dialectically rational

immanence and address the Other. He claims that language always unsays its ‘Said’ in

the attempt to ‘restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the

inevitable ceremony in which the Said delights.’ For Levinas this otherwise said is not

superfluous; the attempt to stand outside of the philosophical text (i.e. rational

immanence) and the maintenance of such an interruption, testifies to the essence of

language as a ‘Saying’ in the ‘Said’. The interruptive quality of ‘Saying’ in the ‘Said’

is not a dogmatic clutching or grasping onto naively pre-critical assumptions or a

dogmatic refusal of rational immanence; rather, it represents an ethical obligation to

what Levinas terms the ‘gleam’ of exteriority or the ‘height’ of the Other who stands

forever ‘outside’, or ‘apart from’, the interlocutory relationship. All of Levinas’s

philosophical work attempts to thematise this unthematisable pre-original relation in

order to articulate or express its unthematisability and irreducibility to immanence.

However, Levinas appears to concede in his later work that the ceremonial

constituting his main thesis, i.e. the attempt to thematise the unthematisable, will

always have failed on its own terms and needs itself to be always unsaid, or

interrupted. Simply by virtue of having failed it will have again testified to the truth of

the irreducible transcendence within immanence:

‘Saying must be accompanied immediately by an unsaying, and the unsaying must

again be unsaid in its manner, and there is no stopping, there are no definite

formulations.’ (E. Levinas, (1986) p.88)

Levinas’s later work, take up this problematic in the most explicit fashion, insofar as

there is an attempt to describe an ‘ethics of ethics’ in a language that would seek to

depart radically from an ontological language despite its seemingly irreducible

necessity. He discursively traverses that which is other than being even if such an

effort always risks falling into merely being otherwise, that is, into a mere modality of

being. Where Totality and Infinity (E. Levinas, (1961) had described a precise

phenomenology of how exactly the self comes to be put into question by the presence

of the Other, his later texts, (conducted necessarily as a radically self-interruptive

discourse), attempt to describe the self as always already traumatized and subjected to

the Other. In the later works ethics is not something that happens to the subject, i.e. as

recoverable event within dialectics or phenomenology, but is rather the most radical

form of the always already. In these works responsibility is never conceived as

emanating from the initiative of a subject, but as choosing me before I am able to

make a choice. This later work is thus marked by the evolution of a textual strategy

adequate for inscribing the trace of this always already, and the development of such

a strategy marks Levinas’s implicit acknowledgement of and response to Derrida’s

initial commentary and its questions regarding language.

In the second of Derrida’s commentaries on Levinas (J. Derrida, (1980), the focus

once again is the question of ‘how he writes his works’, or more precisely of how

Levinas writes his later works, in particular his 1974 text, Otherwise than Being or

Beyond Essence (E. Levinas, (1974). Derrida examines how this text not only

describes the interruptive encounter that Levinas now calls ‘the ethical’, but also how

a sophisticated textual strategy is now adopted for traversing the risk that this

interruption will merely become reabsorbed by dialectical discourse. Derrida

acknowledges that this textual strategy of radical and repetitive self-interruption

allows Levinas’s discourse to avoid some of the problems he had highlighted within

his first commentary. He begins by explicitly marking out the radically diachronous

difference between the ‘Saying’ and the ‘Said’ evoked by Levinas in Otherwise than

Being or Beyond Essence, and then concentrates upon a certain type of non-dialectical

textual ‘seriality’ adopted by Levinas. He immediately observes that the risk of

comprehension by the intelligibility of the Same necessarily contaminates the very

‘possibility’ of incomprehensible and unintelligible Saying adequate to the hyperbolic

excess of the ethical; but recognises it as a contamination simultaneously constitutive

of the possibility of its uncontaminated occurrence: ‘To make us (without making us)

receive otherwise, and receive otherwise the otherwise, he has been unable to do

otherwise than negotiate with the risk: in the same language, the language of the

Same, one may always ill receive what is thus otherwise said. Even before that fault,

the risk contaminates its very proposition’ (J. Derrida (1980), p.12).

Indeed, Derrida argues that the question of how Levinas is able to signify the wholly

other within the necessary economy of reductive language, (a question at the very

heart of ‘Violence and Metaphysics’), must now be reversed in the light of the textual

strategy adopted by Levinas. The real issue now becomes one of whether or not the

language of the Same is itself capable of becoming unbound and thus open to the

wholly other. For Derrida: ‘It is less a matter of exceeding that language than of

treating it otherwise with its own possibilities. Treating it otherwise, in other words to

calculate the transaction, negotiate the compromise that would leave the non-

negotiable intact, and to do this in such a way as to make the fault, which consists in

inscribing the wholly other within the empire of the same, alter the same enough to

absolve itself from itself’ (J. Derrida, (1980), p.17). Derrida proceeds to illuminate the

precise way in which Levinas’s later work adopts a sophisticated strategy of repetition

capable of enacting a powerful displacement of Hegelianism and which no longer

risks merely repeating it.

The risks run by all of Levinas’s work stems from an attempt to negotiate a

thematisation of that which uniquely forbids thematisation. However, by focusing

upon Levinas’s later understanding of the recurrence of the One, or the subject, as a

form of ‘identity without unity’, or a subject always already marked by the Other,

Derrida argues that we can begin to make sense of Levinas’s ‘negotiation’ as a

recurring serial structure in which the perpetual alternation of ethical language, as

Saying and the Said, is inextricably woven together. Within such a perpetual

interweaving Derrida claims that ‘another language comes to disturb the first one’ (J.

Derrida, (1980), p.18), and ‘haunts’ the first one. The first moment of interweaving

belongs, Derrida suggests, to dialectics, i.e. by interweaving the trace as a negative

into a homogenous systematised identity or totality of discourse. The second moment

of interweaving, he argues, makes the first possible, and by functioning to make it

possible it represents a radically diachronic moment, (what Derrida understands by

the radically singular heterogeneous statement), which infinitely overflows the

synchronous order and disrupts the tendency towards unity. The examples of singular

heterogeneous statements that Derrida pays close attention to in this commentary are

those interweaved moments where Levinas draws attention to a certain present via the

inscription of “at this moment” or “at this very moment” in Otherwise than Being or

Beyond Essence.

Derrida cites those instances in Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence where

Levinas seems most concerned with articulating a procedure for negotiating the non-

negotiable (i.e. the Saying of the Saying in the Said) and its inevitable and necessary

betrayal. He shows how this act of negotiation is elaborated within a complex process

of serial repetition that functions, through the indication of a radical ‘lapsus’, to

disrupt or interrupt dialectical immanence, which Derrida understands as being

nothing less than a certain overwhelming power of the negotiation itself:

‘It [Levinas’s work] negotiates the nonnegotiable and not just with any partner or

adversary, but with The negotiation itself, with the negotiating power that believes

itself able to negotiate everything. This negotiation (which passively and one would

almost say idly interrupts the negotiating activity, which denies it by a double

negation) should negotiate the treatment of the nonnegotiable so as to keep its chance

for it, that is to say so that it gives and does not keep itself intact like the same.’ (J.

Derrida, (1980), p.20)

Derrida attempts to identify two such distinct moments of ‘presence’ within the fabric

of Levinas’s text, the first of which he cites as follows:

‘Every contestation and interruption of this power of discourse is at once related and

invested by discourse. It thus recommences as soon as one interrupts it…This

discourse will affirm itself to be coherent and one. In relating the interruption of

discourse or my being ravished into discourse I connect its thread…Are we not at this

very moment [my italics J.D.] in the process of barring the issue that our whole essay

attempts, and of encircling our position from all sides? The exceptional words by

which the trace of the past and the extravagance of the approach are said – One, God

– become terms, re-enter into the vocabulary, and are put at the disposition of

philologists, instead of confounding philosophical language. Their very explosions are

recounted…Thus the ladder-proof equivocation that language weaves signifies.’ (E.

Levinas, (1974), p. 169, cited by J. Derrida, (1980), p. 21)

For Derrida this inscription of “at this very moment” essentially constitutes a citation

of the enveloping power of rational immanence, (the negotiation of Hegelian

dialectics), a text capable of ‘resuming without end all its tears within itself’ (J.

Derrida, (1980), p.22), (i.e. what Levinas characterises as the ‘Said’). However,

Derrida argues that the same “at this very moment”, occurring as it does two pages

later, signifies radically otherwise. Here it signifies that “at this very moment” an

interruptive fracture has always already occurred; which is certain at the very moment

that immanence pretends, as Derrida writes, to ‘reappropriate for itself the tear within

the continuum of its texture’. Levinas writes:

‘The intervals are not recuperated. Does not the discourse that suppresses the

interruptions of discourse by relating them maintain the discontinuity under the knots

with which the thread is tied again? The interruptions of the discourse found again

and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied

again, the trace of a diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses

simultaneity. And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are

stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the

discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am elaborating at

this very moment [my italics J.D.]. This reference to an interlocutor permanently

breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematising and

enveloping all things. In totalising being, discourse qua discourse thus belies the very

claim to totalize.’ (E. Levinas, (1974), p.170, cited by J. Derrida, (1980), pp.21-2)

Derrida acknowledges that both inscriptions of “at this very moment” are of course

the same remark or expression; however, from one moment to the next moment they

are no longer the same. Both are inscribed within two radically different gestures. The

first present moment is itself determined by the present of a thematisation. Hence it is

a moment whose ‘presentation…pretends to encompass within itself the Relation

which yet exceeds it, pretends to exceed it, precede it, and overflow it’ (J. Derrida,

(1980), p.21). The first moment thus returns to the Same or becomes enveloped within

the fabric of the immanent dialectic by being negatively negotiated. However, the

second inscription of the present moment is no longer, and never has been, a present

‘same’ in the manner of the first moment. Writing of the second inscription of

presence Derrida writes:

‘Its ‘same’ is (will have been) dislocated by the very same thing which will have

(probably, perhaps) been its ‘essence’, namely the Relation. It is in itself anachronic,

in itself disparate, it no longer closes in upon itself. It is not what it is, in that strange

and only probable essence, except by allowing itself beforehand to be opened up and

deported by the Relation which makes it possible. The Relation will have made it

possible – and, by the same stroke, impossible as presence, sameness, and assured

essence.’ (J. Derrida, (1980), p.24)

In this second ‘moment’ Levinas is attempting to make explicit the fact that he is

pursuing the paradoxical thematisation or negotiation of the radically unthematisable

or nonnegotiable relation that does not permit further envelopment within the fabric of

the same. Despite there being, between the two ‘moments’ (the “now” of recoverable

thematisation and the “now” of paradoxical diachrony), a chronological, logical,

rhetorical and ontological interval it is nevertheless, Derrida claims, the ‘same

moment, written and read in its difference…One belonging to dialectic and the other

different from and deferring from the first, infinitely and in advance overflowing it.

The second moment has an infinite advance on the first. And yet it is the same’ (J.

Derrida, (1980), p.24).

It is the persistent traversal between the two moments that comes to constitute what

Levinas calls ‘transcendence in immanence’. Derrida characterises this movement

with a notion he terms ‘sériature’, a process of repetition without which Levinas

would be unable to offer the probable essence of language as a relation to the Other,

or what he terms the hors série (‘out-of-the-series’). The hors série represents the fact

that the series comprises not only the ‘threads’ or the paths that interweave the mesh

of language, but the interruption of the threads or paths. ‘Saying’ persistently

interrupts the very weaving of linguistic threads only to be simultaneously rewoven

back into the torn mesh. Yet this reweaving is not, Derrida claims, a simple re-linking

of torn thread in the manner of dialectics. A new knot is not only woven from threads

but from the very interruption of threads. Thus the hors série does not weave threads

but the interruptions or the intervals of hiatus between them. For Derrida the hors

série is, strictly speaking, without a single knot simply because it links a multiplicity

of interruptions without threads. These serial interruptions are what Derrida terms

sériature, which he characterises by a notion of ‘de-stricturation absolue’, which

indicates the absence of the destination of the trace of the Other and impossibility of

return to dialectics. Derrida argues that this ‘absolute de-stricturation’, the

impossibility of stricture, has to be necessarily mediated through the stricture of

language: ‘In order that two annulments or two excesses not be equivalent, within

indetermination, the ab-solving erasure must not be absolutely absolute. I must

therefore make each atom of an utterance appear faulty and absolved’ (J. Derrida,

(1980), p.35). One must recall here that for Derrida in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’

Levinas’s fault lay in his hypostatisation of a pure and absolute difference, exteriority

and infinity. For Derrida these must be negotiated in terms of stricture and series.

However, such a contamination is not wholly ‘negative’ since it does not detract from

the trace of alterity but constitutes what he understands by the very process of tracing.

For Derrida the necessity of negotiating the trace makes one pure interruption, one

trace of alterity, insufficient for guarding the radical alterity of the Other. There must

be a persistent process of negotiation which he terms sériature.

Derrida argues that the repetitive inscription whereby ‘Saying’ is betrayed in the

‘Said’ manages to un-say the ‘Said’, and betray its betrayal of ethical ‘Saying’. By

inscribing that betrayal of ethical ‘Saying’, writing is able to articulate the serial

structure of sériature whereby the an-archic betrayal of betrayal is effaced and the

wholly Other liberated. Through the power of iteration Derrida claims that writing is

able to efface traces of ‘Saying’s’ effacement in the ‘Said’ and thus re-inscribe

‘Saying’ as the trace of the un-sayable within the ‘Said’. The present of iterative

inscription allows an unpresentable notion to exceed the present of its representative

inscription in scriptural iteration because the power of iteration peculiar to writing

always serially exceeds the presence of the present in which it presents itself. So when

Levinas seeks to tell, “at this very moment”, of that which exceeds all telling he

inevitably betrays it by inscribing it back into the very fabric of dialectical discourse.

However, what exceeds all telling is the ‘Saying’ of this telling itself, i.e. the

invocation of the One to whom it is addressed. Yet it can only ever be partially and

unsuccessfully betrayed because it remains addressed by ‘Saying’ even in the

‘Saying’ of the ‘Said’ in which it is betrayed. The coherence of the “at this very

moment” as a present of the ‘Said’ encompassing the ethical interruption of the

present, is itself realised through the in-coherence of another “at this very moment”.

This is a moment of ‘Saying’ offered to the Other that interrupts the encompassing

present in which it is incorporated without comprehension (even as it renders its own

inclusion within that present possible). For Derrida the ontological present itself is

constituted and de-constituted across an immeasurable interval of a lapse which

separates the presence of the Same as present from itself in order to bind it into the

unity of the present.

Levinas recognises that ethical signification can only be paradoxically counterpoised

to the significance he intends to convey; thus every word he writes is necessarily a

‘self-interruption’. Such a failure may be sufficiently interrupted (an interruption of

interruption) by a ‘Saying’ which ‘resounds’ or is heard otherwise within the thematic

denotative constraints of language. Thus it is one of the central claims of Derrida’s

second commentary on Levinas that it would be a grave error to interpret Levinas’s

procedures of disengaging ethics from immanent ontology, enacted through the

careful and emphatic use of the concepts of ontological discourse, as conclusively

succeeding or as stating with certainty the modality of transcendence. It should be

clear that that kind of success would be an automatic defeat of Levinas’s thought.

Clearly this defeat was one of the central concerns of Derrida’s first commentary on

Levinas’s philosophical discourse, i.e. that Hegelianism simply functions to reduce

the transcendence of ethical alterity back into the rational fabric of immanence, rather

than as signifying an irrecuperable transcendence in immanence. His texts can only

‘succeed’ in signifying a pre-original obligation toward the Other by means of a

profound enigma or epiphany, i.e. as an undoing of every undoing, as an interruption

of every thematic investiture, and as a failure in terms of what Hegelianism would

measure as a success. His work must function as a deliberate auto-interruption akin to

the persistent recurrence of the critical essence of skepticism if it is to avoid falling

prey to the type of Hegelian concerns articulated initially by Derrida. The

effectiveness of Levinas’s work lies beyond anything he is actually able to

definitively demonstrate, and our response as readers cannot ultimately be the result

of a type of persuasion garnered through arguments organised around the priority of

the dialectical logos. Levinas cannot make us respond ethically on this level precisely

because his work functions to trouble and disrupt the very connection between

persuasion and veracity. Indeed the disruption of good conscience is, for Levinas,

ethics itself. It is only within the order of being that rectification, truth, falsity and

certainty obtain a meaningful final purchase. Levinas’s ongoing philosophical task

was to persistently question that purchase and to demonstrate that the involutions of

being qua being neither exhaust nor exercise a monopoly over ethical ‘sense’.

References

J. Derrida (1963) ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ in Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes by A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) (1974), J. Derrida, Glas, translated by J.P. Leavey & R. Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986)(1980) ‘At This Very Moment In This Work Here I Am’, translated by R. Berezdivin in R Bernasconi & S Critchley (eds.), in Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11-48 (1997) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, translated by P-A Brault & M Naas (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999)

GWF Hegel (1831), Science of Logic, translated by AV Miller, foreword by JN Findlay (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1989)

E. Levinas (1961), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)(1974), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by A Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998)(1986), Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by B Bergo (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998)(1988), ‘Interview with Emmanuel Levinas’ in R. Bernasconi & D. Wood eds., The Provocation of Levinas – Rethinking the Other (London and New York: Routledge, 1988)

Dr Darren Ambrose

Department of PhilosophyUniversity of Warwick

CoventryCV4 7AL

7 July 2003