Jeffrey T. Nealon

Department of English
The Pennsylvania State Unversity
jxn8@psuvm.psu.edu

 

 

The metaphysical desire . . . desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness — the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it . . . . [Desire] nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.

 

–Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity

 

Junk yields a basic formula of “evil” virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of “evil” is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. . . . I never had enough junk. No one ever does.

 

–William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

 

“Just say no!” Odd advice indeed. Say no to what or to whom? Say no to a threat, to something that will draw you too far outside yourself. Say no because you want to say yes. Say no because, somewhere outside yourself, you know that this “you” owes a debt to the yes, the openness to alterity that is foreclosed in the proper construction of subjectivity. Of course, “just say no” never says no solely to a person — to a dealer or an addict; rather, you “just say no” to the yes itself — a yes that is not human but is perhaps the ground of human response. The constant reminder to “just say no,” then, is always haunted by a trace of the yes. As William Burroughs asks, “In the words of total need, ‘Wouldn’t you?‘ Yes you would.”¹

 

In Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania, Avital Ronell argues that the logics of drug addiction can hardly be separated from the discourse of alterity. As she writes, in the exterior or alterior space of addiction, “You find yourself incontrovertibly obligated: something occurs prior to owing, and more fundamental still than that of which any trace of empirical guilt can give an account. This relation — to whom? to what? — is no more and no less than your liability — what you owe before you think, understand, or give; that is, what you owe from the very fact that you exist.”² Ronell is, of course, no simple apologist for a Romantic celebration of intoxication; as she writes, “it is as preposterous to be ‘for’ drugs as it is to take up a position ‘against’ drugs,”³ but it is the case that the logics of intoxication, as well as the kinds of desire that one can read in spaces of addiction, are inexorably tied up with current critical vocabularies of alterity and identity: postmodern thinkers increasingly understand alterity as a debt that can never be repaid, a difference that constitutes sameness, the incontovertiblity of a continuing obligation to someone or something “other.”

 

Of course, the leisurely space of recreational drug use most often can and does serve to produce isolated reveries that cut the subject off from alterity, but the serial iteration of episodes of intoxication — what one might clinically or etymologically call “addiction,” being delivered over to an other — brings on another set of considerations.⁴ For example, as William Burroughs characterizes the junk equation in our epigraph from Naked Lunch it necessarily begins in an economy of simple need over which the subject exercises a kind of determinative imperialism: junkies want, on the surface, to be inside, to protect and extend the privilege of the same; they want the pure, interior subjectivity of the junk stupor — with “metabolism approaching absolute ZERO” (NL, p. xvii) — to keep at bay the outside, the other.

 

But that economy of finite need and subjective imperialism quickly shows an economy of desire, an infinite economy of “total need” which breaks the interiority of mere need. In Naked Lunch Burroughs writes, in the voice of the smug, bourgeois “Opium ‘Smoker,'”

 

How low the other junkies “whereas We — WE have this tent and this lamp and this tent and this lamp and this tent and nice and warm in here nice and warm nice and IN HERE and nice and OUTSIDE ITS COLD . . . . ITS COLD OUTSIDE where the dross eaters and the needle boys won’t last two years not six months hardly won’t stumble bum around and there is no class in them . . . . But WE SIT HERE and never increase the DOSE . . . never — never increase the dose never except TONIGHT is a SPECIAL OCCASION with all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold.” (p. xlvii, Burroughs’s ellipses)

 

Here, the junkies’ increasing need for junk shows a finite economy of subjective determination turning into an infinite economy of inexorable exposure to the outside: “But WE SIT HERE and never increase the DOSE. . . never — never increase the dose never except TONIGHT.” The junkies’ need draws the junkies outside, despite themselves, from their warm tent to the place of “all the dross eaters and needle boys out there in the cold.” According to Burroughs, the junk user, as he or she necessarily increases dosage, is drawn inexorably from the warm protective interior (the fulfilled need) of use to the cold exterior of addiction — the revelation of “total need” beyond any possible satisfaction. As Burroughs writes about his addiction, “suddenly, my habit began to jump and jump. Forty, sixty grains a day. And still it was not enough” (p. xiii). Addiction, it seems, inexorably mutates from a question of fulfilling need to something else: something other, finally, than a question with an answer; something other than a need that could be serviced by an object or substance.

 

In other words, addiction takes need to the point where it is no longer thematizable as subjective lack; as need becomes addiction, the junkie is no longer within the horizon of subjective control or intention. As Burroughs writes in Junky, “You don’t decide to be an addict . . . . Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to an increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.”⁵ “Junk” opens onto an unrecoverable exteriority beyond need, an economy that we might call infinite or “metaphysical” desire, following Emmanuel Levinas’s use of the term in our epigraph.⁶ For Levinas, the desire at play in the face-to-face encounter with the other cannot be confused with a simple need; rather, it is a “sens unique,” an unrecoverable movement outward, a one-way direction: a “movement of the Same toward the Other which never returns to the Same.”⁷ And, as Burroughs’s Sailor reminds us, there may be no better description of addiction: “Junk is a one-way street. No U-turn. You can’t go back no more” (NL, p. 186). However, within Burroughs’s exterior movement, we will have to encounter an other other than the Levinasian widow, stranger or orphan — an other, finally, that is other to the human and the privileges of the human that the philosophical discourse of ethics, including Levinasian ethics, all-too-often takes for granted. An inhuman other — an other that is other even to the enigmatic alterity that one encounters in the face to face. What happens, we might ask, when one comes face to face with junk, the other of anthropos traced in Burroughs’s “the face of ‘evil’ [that] is always the face of total need”?

 

Levinas in Rehab

 

For Levinas, to be sure, drug intoxication is far from an experience of alterity. In fact, he writes that “the strange place of illusion, intoxication, [and] artificial paradises” can best be understood as an attempt to withdraw from contact with and responsibility for the other: “The relaxation in intoxication is a semblance of distance and irresponsibility. It is a suppression of fraternity, or a murder of the brother.”⁸ According to Levinas, intoxication brings only a greater intensification of the subject’s interiority, a refusal of “fraternity” as exterior substitution for the other.

 

In fact, intoxication or junk addiction brings to the subject only the disappearance of the world and the concomitant submersion in the terrifying chaos of what Levinas calls the il y a [“there is”] — a radical givenness without direction that is similar in some ways to Sartre’s experience of “nausea.”⁹ As Levinas describes the il y a “the Being which we become aware of when the world disappears is not a person or a thing, nor the sum total of persons and things; it is the fact that one is, the fact that there is.”¹⁰ For Levinas, the there is is the indeterminate, anonymous rustling of being qua being. As Adriaan Peperzak comments, the il y a is “an indeterminate, shapeless, colorless, chaotic and dangerous ‘rumbling and rustling.’ The confrontation with its anonymous forces generates neither light nor freedom but rather terror as a loss of selfhood. Immersion in the lawless chaos of ‘there is’ would be equivalent to the absorption by a depersonalized realm of pure materiality.”¹¹ A phenomenological-methodological link between his earliest and latest texts, the il y a is an unsettling fellow traveler for the entirety of Levinas’s career. Curiously, the il y a performs a kind of dual function in his texts: as Peperzak’s summary makes clear, the first function is the ruining or interruption of a self that would think itself in tune with the harmonious gift of being. In the expropriating experience of the il y a (a “depersonalized realm of pure materiality”), being is indifferent to the subject. The il y ais the anonymous murmur that precedes and outlasts any particular subject. As Levinas writes, “Being is essentially alien [étranger] and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us” (E&E, p. 23/28). So for an ethical subject to come into being at all, such a subject must not only undergo the experience of being as the il y a he or she must go a step further and escape from it. As Peperzak continues, “With regard to this being, the first task and desire [of the ethical subject] is to escape or ‘evade’ it. The source of true light, meaning, and truth can only be found in something ‘other’ than (this) Being.”¹²

 

Against the Heideggerian injunction in Being and Time to live up to the challenge of being’s gift of possibility, Levinas offers a thematization of being as radical impossibility: for Levinas, existence or being is the terrifying absurdity named by the il y a and this indolent anonymity functions to disrupt the generosity and possibility named by Heidegger’s es gibt [“there is” or “it gives”]. For Levinas, existence is a burden to be overcome rather than a fate to be resolutely carried out; the existent is “fatigued by the future” (E&E, p. 29/39) rather than invigorated by a Heideggerian “ecstacy toward the end” (E&E, p. 19/20).¹³ To be an ethical Heideggerian Dasein must live one’s life authentically in the generous light of being’s possibility, an ontological multiplicity revealed by the ownmost possibility of one’s own death.¹⁴ According to Levinas’s reading of Heidegger, at its ethical best any particular Dasein can live with or alongside other Dasein each authentically related to his or her own ownmost possibility. Ethics, if it exists at all, rests not in Dasein‘s relation to others but in the authenticity of its relation to its own death as possibility — and by synecdoche, the relation to being’s generosity. In Heidegger, then, the relation with others is necessarily inauthentic, always subordinated to Dasein‘s authentic relation with neutral, anonymous Being-as-possibility.¹⁵

 

For Levinas, on the other hand, if one is to be an ethical subject, one must escape the dark, anonymous rumbling of being; in order for there to be a subjectivity responsive to the other, there must be a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of its wallowing in the solipsistic raw materiality of the il y a. Out of the there is of anonymous being, there must rise a here I am [me voici] that nonetheless retains the trace of the hesitation and debt — what Levinas will call the “passivity” — characteristic of the il y a‘s impossibility. As he writes, hypostasis is subject-production, the introduction of space or place into the anonymous murmur of being: “to be conscious is to be torn away from the there is” (E&E, p. 60/98).

 

Subjectivity is torn away from the anonymity of the there is by a responding to the other that is not reducible to any simple rule-governed or universalizing code; the ethical subject is, in other words, a responding, site-specific performative that is irreducible to an ontological or transhistorical substantive. As Levinas writes,

 

the body is the very advent of consciousness. It is nowise a thing — not only because a soul inhabits it, but because its being belongs to the order of events and not to that of substantives. It is not posited; it is a position. It is not situated in space given beforehand; it is the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself. . . . [The body as subjectivity] does not express an event; it is itself this event. (E&E, pp. 71,72/122,124)

 

This is perhaps the most concise statement of Levinas’s understanding of a subjectivity that rises out of the il y athrough hypostasis: the subject comes about through a performative response to the call of the other, through the bodily taking up of a “position,” “the irruption in anonymous being of localization itself.” Here the subject is brought into being through a radically specific performative event or saying, but it will be a strange “being” indeed, insofar as being is generally understood to be synonymous with a generalizable, substantive said.

 

Of course, the Levinasian subject is a kind of substantive; it has to have a body — a place and a voice — in order to respond concretely to the other. It cannot merely languish in and among a network of possible responses to the other. Rather, the subject is an active, responding substantiation: “it is a pure verb. . . . The function of a verb does not consist in naming, but in producing language” (E&E, p. 82/140). He goes on to explain:

 

We are looking for the very apparition of the substantive. To designate this apparition we have taken up the term hypostasis which, in the history of philosophy, designated the event by which the act expressed by a verb became designated by a substantive. Hypostasis . . . signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is, the apparition of a private domain, of a noun [or name, nom] . . . . Consciousness, position, the present, the “I,” are not initially — although they are finally — existents. They are events by which the unnameable verb to be turns into substantives. They are hypostasis. (E&E, pp. 82-83/140-42)

 

The performative hypostasis is the birth of subjectivity, but the ethical network of substitution or signification that a subject arises from — this network of performative responses that must precede, even if it is finally inadequate to, any particular response — also necessarily makes that hypostatic subject a non-coincident one, open to alterity. The subject that arises in the hypostasis is not a simple substantive or noun, even though it necessarily becomes one through a trick of syntax. As Levinas writes, “One can then not define a subject by identity, since identity covers over the event of the identification of the subject” (E&E, p. 87/149-50). Identity, even when all is said and done, is not something that the subject has; identity is, rather, the “event of the identification” that I am, and this “originary” hypostatic “event” is (re)enacted or traced in the subject’s continuing performative responses to the call of alterity.

 

Hence, it is the pre-originary debt that any subject owes to this prior network of substitution-for-the-other that keeps subjectivity open, keeps the saying of performative ethical subjectivity irreducible to the simple said of ontology. Levinas will call this a network of “fraternity” or “responsibility, that is, of sociality, an order to which finite truth — being and consciousness — is subordinate” (OTB p. 26/33). Sociality, as substitution of potential identities in a serial network of performative subjectivity, both makes identity and response possible and at the same time makes it impossible for any identity to remain monadic, static, and unresponsive: the subject always already responds in the movement from the anonymous “one” to the hypostatic “me;” the subject responds in the very subjection of identity, the very act of speaking.

 

However, this hypostasis is not the intentional act of a subject; it is, rather, subjection in and through the face-to-face encounter with the other person. As Levinas writes, “the localization of consciousness is not subjective; it is the subjectivization of the subject” (E&E, p. 69/118). Thus, “here I am” rises out of the there is as an accusative, where I am the object rather than the subject of the statement, where I am responding to a call from the face of the other. As Jan de Greef writes, “for Levinas the movement [of subjectivity] does not go from me to the other but from the other to me . . . . Here I am (me voici) — the unconditional of the hostage — can only be said in response to an ‘appeal’ or a ‘preliminary citation.’ Convocation precedes invocation.”¹⁶ It is to-the-other that one responds in the hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the il y a the face of the other, and its call for response-as-subjection, is the only thing that can break the subject’s imprisonment in the anonymous il y a and open the space of continuing response to alterity. As Levinas sums up the project of his Existence and Existents, “it sets out to approach the idea of Being in general in its impersonality so as to then be able to analyze the notion of the present and of position, in which a being, a subject, an existent, arises in impersonal Being, through a hypostasis” (p. 19/18). As the evasion of the “impersonal being” that is the il y a hypostasis (as the concrete performative response to the face or voice of the other person) is the birth of the ethical Levinasian subject.

 

Such a subjection to the other makes or produces a subject at the same time that it unmakes any chance for that subject to remain an alienated or free monad. As Levinas writes, “The subject is inseparable from this appeal or this election, which cannot be declined” (OTB, p. 53/68), so the subject cannot be thematized in terms of alienation from some prior state of wholeness; in Levinasian subjectivity, there is an originary interpellating appeal of expropriation, not an originary loss of the ability to appropriate. Identity and alterity, rethought as performative response, are fueled by the infinity of substitution, not by the lack and desire for reappropriation that characterizes the evacuated Lacanian subject. And this Levinasian responding signification or substitution leaves the subject inexorably responsive to the founding debt of alterity: “Signification is the one-for-the-other which characterizes an identity that does not coincide with itself” (OTB, p. 70/89). There is, in other words, no subject unbound from other because the process of subject formation (the production of a subject) takes place in and through this common social network of iterable substitution. In the terms Levinas uses most insistently in Otherwise than Being, identity is a performative “saying” that is irreducible to a substantive or ontological “said”; insofar as substitution or signification literally makes and unmakes the subject in the diachronic project of saying “here I am,” such an ethical entity — both subject of and subject to alterity — is literally otherwise than being, other-wise than an ontological, synchronic, or substantive identity.¹⁷ The “saying” is beyond essence because it makes the “said” of essence possible without ever being merely reducible to it; just as infininte metaphysical desire subtends and traverses mere subjective need, the performative ethical saying is before and beyond the substantive ontological said.¹⁸

 

The Junk Con

 

If we return to Burroughs and the question of drugs, then, it seems fairly clear why, for Levinas, intoxication or addiction is not akin to ethical subjectivity: because intoxication is a wallowing in the terrifying materiality of the il y a‘s “impersonal being,” a state where the call or face of the other counts for nothing. Strictly speaking, there can be no response to alterity — no saying, substititution, or signification — from an entity immersed in anonymous being: in the il y a an ethical subject has yet to arise through a hypostasis. Perhaps we could take, as a concrete example of such anonymous immersion without ethical response, Burroughs’s narration of his last year of addiction in North Africa:¹⁹

 

I lived in one room in the native quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction . . . . I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours. I was only roused to action when the hourglass of junk ran out. If a friend came to visit — and they rarely did since who or what was left to visit — I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision — a grey screen always blanker and fainter — and not caring when he walked out of it. If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn’t you? (NL, xiii)

 

Surely this is a portrait of drug use beyond the production of pleasure or nostalgia for it; rather, this is a portrait of addiction as the horror of immersion in the il y a where the addict does “absolutely nothing,” save an interminable staring at anonymous objects, wallowing in a state of sheer materiality.²⁰

 

From a Levinasian point of view, however, more disturbing than Burroughs’s portrait of the “bare fact of presence” (E&E, p. 65/109) in the interminability of addiction is the accompanying renunciation of a relation with the other: “If a friend came to visit . . . I sat there not caring that he had entered my field of vision . . . and not caring when he walked out of it.” And even more horrific than the mere ignoring of the other is the callous disregard shown by the addict for the other’s very being: “If he died on the spot I would have sat there looking at my shoe waiting to go through his pockets. Wouldn’t you?” There is little for any ethical system to admire in these lines, and they seem particularly to bear upon Levinas’s concerns about a subjectivity for-the-other: here Burroughs’s junkie is inexorably and completely for-himself; even the death of the other would not disrupt the interiority of the same. In fact, the death of the other would have meaning only insofar as it could feed the privilege of sameness — as long as the other had some cash in his or her pockets to feed the junkie’s habit.

 

However, the approval or condemnation of such behavior is not the location of the ethical in this scene. That which calls for response here is, rather, Burroughs’s insistent and strategically placed question, “Wouldn’t you?” I would suggest that the callous disregard shown here is, on an other reading, a kind of absolute exposure — an exposure more absolute and limitless than the relations “welcoming” that it would seem one owes to the corpse or the friend. “Wouldn’t you?” calls me to non-reciprocal substitution-for-the-other, interpellates me through a saying that is irreducible to a said. Such a saying calls not for moral judgment, but for ethical response to my irreducible exposure to the other.

 

It is crucial, I think, to forestall any reading of Burroughs’s “Wouldn’t you?” that would endorse a kind of perspectival notion of alterity — where “Wouldn’t you?” would be read as asking or demanding each reasonable participant in a community to see issues through the eyes of the other.²¹ For Burroughs, that kind of subjective imperialism is not the solution but rather problem of control itself, “sending” as “one-way telepathic control” (148) projected from “I” to “you.” If “Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book” (203), perhaps it calls for a kind of hesitation before the other, a responding other-wise: “How-To extend levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall. . . . Doors that open only in Silence. . . . Naked Lunch demands Silence from The Reader. Otherwise he is taking his own pulse” (203, ellipses in original). Such a Burroughsian “Silence” is not a simple lack of response (how can one read without responding, without attention?); rather, it is the hesitation before response — an attention that does not merely project itself as the theme and center of any encounter, does not merely take its own pulse. There is, in other words, a gap or “Silence” between the other and myself, and that gap is precisely my inexorable exposure to the other — that which comes before what “I” think or “I” do.

 

Indeed, in Levinasian terms the “welcoming” of the face of the other is precisely this inexorable exposure before a decision: the yes before a no (or a known), saying before a said, the openness or “sensibility” of the body-as-face that precedes any experience of knowing. These are all what Levinas calls “my pre-originary susceptiveness” (OTB, p. 122/157).²² As he writes, “Sensibility, all the passivity of saying, cannot be reduced to an experience that a subject would have of it, even if it makes possible such an experience. An exposure to the other, it is signification, is signification itself, the one-for-the-other to the point of substitution, but a substitution in separation, that is, responsibility” (OTB, p. 54/70). According to Levinas, the openness to the other — sensibility, saying, signification — cannot finally be reduced to an “experience” of the other; that would be to suture a subjective void, to reduce the saying of the other to the said of the same, and to collapse the subjective “separation” necessary for Levinasian “responsibility.” The other, then, must be attended to not in terms of my experience but in terms of my substitution and separation — not in terms of my project but in terms of my subjection.

 

That being the case, it seems that one can frown on Burroughs’s portrait of addiction as “unethical” only by reducing it to an “experience” of addiction that leads to an utter disregard for the ethics of response. But Burroughs’s Levinasian insistence on the consequences of total need as absolute exposure would seem to oblige us to attend to this episode somewhat differently — not in terms of the obviously unacceptable ethical behavior represented by Burroughs’s junkie, but rather in terms of the condition of absolute exposure that is prior to any ethical action: the question of substitution for-the-other. In other words, the instructive Levinasian moment here is not the one in which the junkie might rummage through the dead friend’s pockets, but the moment where that relation is thematized in terms of an absolute exposure that makes such an action possible, if not inexorable: “Wouldn’t you?”

 

The desiring junkie-subject is never a “said,” never a complete or alienated synchronic monad. He or she is constantly in diachronic process; the junkie-subject “nourishes itself, one might say, with its hunger.”²³ The “I” that is the junkie is characterized by a “saying” that constantly keeps the junk-addled subject in touch with its subjection the other: if the Reagan-Bush drug slogan “Just say no!” seems to put forth a certain faith in intentionality and the choosing monadic subject (when it clearly evidences the opposite), Burroughs’s insistence on the junkie’s question, “Wouldn’t you?”, inexorably directs us outside ourselves, to that somewhere between, before or beyond the same and the other. Finally, and perhaps to the chagrin of Levinas, I’d like to suggest that the radically exterior Levinasian ethical subject is always a junkie, moving constantly outside itself in the diachronic movement of desire, a responding, substitutable hostage to and for the other.

 

Perhaps, however, this opens a certain moral question, but moralizing about junk can begin only when one reads the junkie’s inability to “just say no” as a subjective weakness. Levinas, who clearly has no interest in such a moralizing ethics, offers us a way to read Burroughs’s episode in wholly other terms. On a Levinasian reading, the problem with junk — as with the il y a so closely related to it — is not the absence or evasion of self or destiny; the problem is, rather, the absence or evasion of the other or response. As Levinas writes, the concept of “evasion” — so precious to those who would moralize about drugs sapping the subject’s will — already presupposes an unrestrained freedom of the will: “Every idea of evasion, as every idea of malediction weighing on a destiny, already presupposes the ego constituted on the basis of the self and already free” (OTB, p. 195n/142n). While the anti-drug crusader sees addiction as a fall from or evasion of will, Levinas asks us to read addiction as the continuation or logical extension of an almost pure imperialist will, an extension perhaps of the Nietzschean will-to-power that would rather will nothingness than not will at all.²⁴

 

For the “just say no” moralistic version of drug rehabilitation, the dependency of the addict needs to be exposed and broken so the subject can be free again. If there were a Levinasian rehab, it might proceed in exactly the opposite way — by exposing the dream of subjective freedom as symptom of addiction rather than a cure for it; such a “cure” might hope to produce not a sutured subject, free again to shape its own destiny, but rather “an ego awakened from its imperialist dream, its transcendental imperialism, awakened to itself, a patience as a subjection to everything” (OTB, p. 164/209). For a Levinasian ethical subject to come into being, it is clear that “the there is is needed” (OTB, p. 164/209). However, in Levinas the there is functions not as the drug counselor’s negative portrait of an unfree self, but as a kind of deliverance of the self from its dreams of subjective imperialism. Such a deliverance calls for a hypostasis that lifts the subject out of the il y a into responsibility, out of the interiority of self into the face-to-face as “the impossibility of slipping away, absolute susceptibility, gravity without any frivolity” (OTB, pp. 128/165).

 

Can I tug on your coat for a minute?

 

Finally, though, this leaves us with any number of unanswered questions and potentially unhappy resonances between Levinas’s discourse and the moralizing ethics that he denounces. First, there is the odd question of will. Levinas offers an interesting rejoinder to those who would read the junkie as will-less, but when he argues that intoxication is evasion — “slipping away” from responsibility, away from a “gravity without any frivolity” — and as such is in fact an act of will, he returns full circle to a very traditional discourse on drugs, a discourse perhaps more sinister than the discourse of subjective weakness. For Levinas, it seems that intoxication is a brand of turpitude, a willful renunciation of citizenship and responsibility — “murder of the brother.” Certainly, a thematization of the drug user as a passive dupe is inadequate, but Levinas’s portrait of the willful druggie may prove to be even more troubling. Both thematizations seem to avoid the question of desire as it is embodied in intoxicants, in something other to or other than the human subject and its will.

 

This problem of the will is related to Levinas’s insistence on “overcoming” or evading the il y a It seems that the overcoming of the il y a in ethical face-to-face subjectivity is an avoidance of the very thing that interrupts and keeps open this relation without relation. In other words, Levinas’s analysis seems to beg the question of how we can protect the face-to-face’s authentic ethical disruption (calling the subject to respond) from the il y a‘s seemingly inauthentic disruption (sinking the subject into anonymous fascination).

 

This doubling of disruptions is especially puzzling since the il y a— as unethical disruption — seems to be in a position of almost absolute proximity to the material network of ethical substitution out of which arises a specific “passive” ethical subjectification. As Levinas writes, “The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity . . . . The recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity identified in the said is constituted” (OTB, pp. 104-05/132-33). This “hither side of the presnt” [en deçà du présent] is the debt that ontology owes to the undeniable proximity or approach of the other, the inexorable upshot of something on this side of the transcendental hinter world.²⁵ This transcendent (but not transcendental)²⁶ “something” on the hither side — the legacy of phenomenology in Levinas’s thought — has various names in various Levinasian contexts: desire, the other, substitution, the face, the body, signification, sensibility, recurrence, saying, passivity, the one-for-the-other. This is not, as it would seem at first, a confusion on Levinas’s part — an inability to keep his terminology straight. It is, rather, central to his project: signification, as substitution for the other, calls for a specific substitution or response in each situation. Just as, for example, in Derrida’s work the economy of pharmakon is not the same as the problem of supplement (each is a radically specific response to a paticular textual situation), the constant shifting of terminology in Levinas is crucial to the larger “logic” of his thinking.

 

There remains, however, something of a “good cop, bad cop” scenario in Levinas’s thematization of such a pre-originary discourse.²⁷ Fraternity and responsibility are the pre-originary good cop: holding me accountable to the other and the others, they function as a debt that must be returned to time and again. The il y a on the other hand, is the pre-originary bad cop: exiling me to a solipsistic prison without visitors, it is a horror that must be overcome if I am to be an ethical subject. Certainly, either way there would have to be a hypostasis to bring the subject from the pre-originary network into a specific position in or at a particular site: whether thematized as benign or menacing, the pre-originary network of fraternity or the il y a is not itself response, even though (or more precisely because) it makes response possible. Saying in Levinas is an act, first and foremost; as Lyotard puts it in his essay on “Levinas’s Logic,” it is a doing before understanding.²⁸

 

Levinas posits a pre-originary network — a prescriptive call before denotative understanding — to keep open the (im)possibility of further or other responses. Such a network is structurally necessary in his text to account for the subject’s not coinciding with itself, but in terms other than alienation, loss or lack: Levinas’s discourse can separate itself from the existentialist or psychoanalytic thematization of the other as my enemy only if there is a pre-originary expropriation, such that there can be no simple alienation as a separation or fall from wholeness. Certainly both the revelation of the trace of “fraternity” and immersion in the il y a perform this pre-originary function of ruining and opening out the interiority of monadic subject. The question remains, however, concerning how Levinas can protect his discourse of fraternity from the il y a and what are the consequences of such a protection.

 

Levinas’s reasons for insisting on the primacy of the face-to-face are easy enough to understand: as we have seen, in an attempt to save something like Mitsein in Heidegger from the monadic interiority of Dasein‘s fascination with “anonymous” death and being as possibility, Levinas introduces the ethical as the exterior irreducibility of human contact in the face-to-face (in OTB the animated ethical “saying” that is irreducible to the neutrality of the ontological “said”). But the ethical, we should note, is thematized here strictly in humanist terms — the face and the voice.

 
Burroughs allows us to pose an essential question to Levinas: What happens when one encounters, within the world rather than in the realm of being, the “face” of the inhuman (as junk) and the “voice” that makes voice (im)possible (as an anonymous serial network of subjective substitutions)? If, as we have seen, Levinas’s problem with Heidegger is that Dasein‘s relation with being is posed in terms of possibility rather than impossibility, one has to wonder then about Levinas’ own evasion of the radical impossibility named by the il y a — about the work done in his own discourse by the face and the voice. In other words, Levinas’s posing of the other in terms of the face and the voice may surreptitiously work to evade the “experience” of the impossible that is alterity measured on other-than-human terms.

 
To unpack this question, we could perhaps turn back to Burroughs — specifically, his “Christ and the Museum of Extinct Species,” a story that, among other things, points to the ways in which extinction haunts existents. The domination of “man” has brought about the extinction of its other — animals — but this extinction haunts “man” as it experiences its closure; and “man” is constantly kept in touch with the extinction of animals — with its other — by the virus of language: “What does a virus do with enemies? It turns enemies into itself . . . . Consider the history of disease: it is as old as life. Soon as something gets alive, there is something waiting to disease it. Put yourself in the virus’s shoes, and wouldn’t you?”²⁹ Of course, “Wouldn’t you?” is the junkie’s question from Naked Lunch the question of the “inhuman” junkie posed to the human society, the question which should merely reveal the need of the junkie — who seemingly justifies him- or herself with this response — but which also reveals the structure of infinite desire which grounds all mere need. This, finally, returns us to the quotation marks around the “‘evil’ virus” in the quotation from Burroughs that serves as one of this essay’s epigraphs: junk is an “evil” to human culture — to thinking and action — because it is quite literally inhuman, that which carries the other of anthropos: “junk” brings the denial of logos, the sapping of the will, the introduction of impossibility, and the ruining of community. One must be suspicious of anyplace in Burroughs’s text where he seems to be moralizing; it seems that the liminal states that “junk” gestures toward make its ham-fisted identification as merely “evil” impossible, insofar as this liminal state quite literally names the exterior field of alterity in which any particular opposition must configure itself.

 
“Junk” forces us to confront the face of that which is wholly other — other even to the other person. And it is also here that one can call attention to Burroughs’s continuing fascination with the “virus”; as Benway introduces the concept to the Burroughs oeuvre in Naked Lunch, “‘It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life from. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, toward dead matter'” (p. 134). The virus, famously related to language in Burroughs, carries or introduces the alterity-based temporality of the postmodern subject, which “may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now it has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter”: between the individual and the “parasitic” network of iterable substitution from which it arises.

 
Insofar as Levinas teaches us that the individual is nothing other — but nothing less — than a hypostasis within the shifting categories of substitution for-the-other, his own account of subjectivity as such an iterable substitution would seem to create problems for the privileging of the category “human.” Levinas himself warns us “not to make a drama out of a tautology” (E&EM, p. 87/150), not to mistake the hypostasis of subjectivity for an originary category of supposed discovery or self-revelation. Both Levinas and Burroughs force us to acknowledge that the parasitic network of substitution, which seems merely to feed on the plenitude of human identity, in fact makes the plenitude of that identity (im)possible in the first place.³⁰ But this very logic of the iterable network of performative identity would seem to pose essential questions to Levinas’s thematization of identity and alterity by questioning his insistence on what he calls the “priority” of the “human face”³¹ and voice (and concomitant evasion of “junk” as radical material iterability). Despite Levinas’s well-taken criticisms concerning ontology’s fetishizing of “anonymous” being, it may be that the wholly other is traced in other than human beings. That (im)possibility, at least, needs to be taken into account; and the attempt to analyze such an (im)possibility in terms of Burroughs’s thematization of “junk” helps to draw Levinasian ethical desire outside the human, where it is not supposed to travel.

 
In the end, it seems to me that Levinas attempts to exile the very thing that makes his discourse so unique and compelling: the irreducibility of the confrontation with the wholly other. In his insistance that the subject must overcome the crippling hesitation of the il y a to respond to the other, Levinas offers us an important rejoinder to those ethical systems that would be content to rest in generalizations and pieties. Levinas insists instead on an ethics of response to the neighboring other in the light of justice for the others. But when Levinas argues that one is subjected solely by other humans in the face-to-face encounter, he elides any number of important ethical considerations. First is the role of inhuman systems, substances, economies, drives and practices in shaping the hypostatic response that is both the self and the other. Certainly Levinas teaches us that the subject is never a monad: it is always beholden to the other in its subjection; it is always a hostage. But if subjective response is a “saying,” the material networks of languages and practices available to the subject in and through its subjection need to be taken into account. The subject’s daily confrontation with interpellating inhuman systems is, it would seem, just as formative as his or her daily confrontation with the humans that people these systems.

 
As Levinas insists, contact with something anonymous like “work” is not of the same order as contact with coworkers. People overflow the roles they are assigned within such systems; Larry in Accounting is more than Larry in Accounting. What we do at work or have for lunch today sinks into anonymity, while in our face-to-face meetings — on break from our tasks, over cigarettes and coffee — Larry somehow isn’t simply consumed or forgotten. If we attend to his difference as difference, Larry can’t sink into anonymity. Burroughs, however, teaches us also to ask after the lunch, cigarettes and coffee, which may not disappear into anonymity quite so quickly. Neither, he might add, should the spaces in which we work and the systems that parse out such space, and therefore frame many of our daily face-to-face encounters. These “inhuman” considerations likewise call for response.

 
Certainly, Levinas recognizes this when he brings the third into the drama of the face-to-face. As he writes of social justice, “If proximity ordered to me only the other alone, there would not have been any problem.”³² But the others confront me also in the face-to-face with the other, and demand that the “self-sufficent ‘I-Thou'” relation be extended to the others in a relation of justice. Here Levinas — responding, always, to Heidegger — is careful not to pose the relation of social justice with the others as an inauthentic falling away from the authenticity of the face-to-face: “It is not that there first would be the face, and then the being that it manifests or expresses would concern himself with justice; the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity.”³³ While the face-to-face has a certain quasi-phenomneological priority in Levinas — there has to be the specificity of bodily contact and response if one is to avoid mere pious generalizations — the face to face opens more than the closed loop of my responsibility for you: insofar as “the face qua face opens humanity,” my repsonsibility for the others is inscribed in my very responsibility for you. The specific other and the social-historical realm of others cannot be separated in the revelation of the face-to-face.³⁴

 
But even in his thematization of justice, there nevertheless remains the trace of Levinas’s most pervasive ethical exclusion, an absolute privilege of the same that lives on in this discourse of the other: “justice” in Levinas — infinite response in the here and now — remains synonomous with “humanity”; justice is owed to the others who are as human as the other. The face-to-face extends my responsibility to all that possess a face; the saying of my response to the other human’s voice extends to all other humans’ voices. I must respond to — and am the “brother” of — only that which has a voice and a face. But what about the face of systems, the face of total need confronted in intoxicants, or the face of animals? As Levinas responds,

 

I cannot say at what moment you have the right to be called “face.” The human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. I don’t know if a snake has a face . . . . I do not know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being . . . . [W]ith the appearance of the human — and this is my entire philosophy — there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.³⁵

 

In thematizing response solely in terms of the human face and voice, it would seem that Levinas leaves untouched the oldest and perhaps most sinister unexamined privilege of the same: anthropos and only anthropos has logos and as such anthropos responds not to the barbarous or the dumb or the inanimate, but only to those who qualify for the privileges of “humanity,” only to those deemed to possess a face, only to those recognized to be living in the logos ³⁶Certainly, as the history of anti-colonial and feminist movements have taught us, those who we now believe unproblematically to possess a “face” and a “voice” weren’t always granted such privilege, and present struggles continue to remind us that the racist’s or homophobe’s first refuge is a distinction between humanity and its supposed others.

 

In addition, we might ask about those ethical calls of the future from “beings” that we cannot now even imagine, ethical calls that Donna Haraway categorizes under the heading of the “cyborg [which] appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.”³⁷ Certainly, the historical and theoretical similarities that Haraway draws among the discourses surrounding her title subjects, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, should force us to ask after and hold open categories that have not been yet recognized as ethically compelling.³⁸ As Judith Butler maintains in her work on performative identity, “the construction of the human is a differential operation that produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable. These excluded sites come to bound the ‘human’ as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation.”³⁹ The “human,” in other words, may name the latest — if certainly not the last — attempt to circumscribe a constitutive boundary around ethical response. Of course, the permeability of this boundary is traced in nearly all the crucial socio-ethical questions of today. From abortion to cryogenics to cybernetics, from animal research to gene therapy to cloning, we see the ethical necessity surrounding the “disruption and rearticulation” of any stable sense or site we might offer to define (human) life itself. And any strong or useful sense of ethics would seem to entail that such response is not limited from before the fact.

 
In the end, Levinas’s insistence on the “human” as sole category of ethical response further protects and extends the imperialism of western subjectivity — what Butler calls, in another context, an “imperialist humanism that works through unmarked privilege” (118). Despite the Levinasian advances toward a non-ontological ethics of response as substitution for the other, Levinas nevertheless also extends the privilege of “man,” which, as Haraway reminds us, is quite literally the “the one who is not animal, barbarian or woman.”⁴⁰ And to quote selectively from Levinas’s citation of Pascal, “That is how the usurpation of the whole world began:” with the protection of the category “human” from its others.⁴¹

 

Special thanks are due here to Sherry Brennan, Rich Doyle, Celeste Fraser Delgado, William J. Harris, John Proveti and Alan Schrift for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper.

 

Notes

 

1. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1992), p. xi. Further references will be cited in the text as NL.

 

2. Avital Ronell, Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 57.

 

3. ibid., p. 50.

 

4. Addiction is from the Latin addictus, “given over,” one awarded to another as a slave.

 

5. William Burroughs, Junky (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. xv-xvi.

 

6. While they share similar concerns, Levinas’s conception of desire and alterity remains in sharp contradistinction to Lacan’s, insofar as the Lacanian horizon of desire for the “great Other” is tied to a conception of lack. For both Lacan and Levinas, desire is animated by its object, but the Hegelian conception of desire as lack or insufficiency (failure to complete itself) remains characteristic of desire in Lacan: the upshot of the Oedipal drama is the lamentable expropriation of the self from the real into the symbolic. Though ostensibly the locus of ethics in Lacan, the Other in fact remains my enemy, the marker for that which constantly frustrates the animating ontological desire of returning to “essence,” returning to myself. As Lacan writes in book II of the Seminar, desire is “a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists” [The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, trans Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 223]. Compare Levinas, where desire is “an aspiration that is conditioned by no prior lack” (“Meaning and Sense,” p. 94). As he writes, “Responsibility for another is not an accident that happens to a subject, but precedes essence…. I exist through the other and for the other, but without this being alienation” (OTB, p. 114/145-46, my emphasis). In Levinas, being for-the-other — which he will call “substitution” — exists before essence, before the real; hence, for Levinas there can be no alienation from and or nostalgia for the return to self: “Substitution frees the subject from ennui, that is, from the enchainment to itself” (OTB, p. 124/160). For Lacan, need (as loss of the real) subtends and traverses desire. For Levinas, the opposite is the case — any conception of loss or lack is subtended by the infinite, which exists before the distinction between lack and plenitude.

 

7. Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 75-108, p. 91, italics removed.

 

8. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 192n. Originally published as Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). p. 110n. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as OTB, with the translation page number cited first, followed by the page number of the French.

 

9. For his engagement with Sartre, see Levinas’s “Reality and Its Shadow,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 129-43. Certainly more could be said on this topic, insofar as Sartre’s Nausea likewise owes a tremendous debt to Heidegger’s 1929 lecture on the nothing, “What is Metaphysics?” Suffice it to say, Levinas is interested in an other than the distinction between being and nothingness. See OTB: “Not to be otherwise, but otherwise than being. And not to not-be. . . . Being and not-being illuminate one another, and unfold a speculative dialectic which is a determination of being. Or else the negativity which attempts to repel being is immediately submerged by being. . . . The statement of being’s other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness — the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence” (p. 3/3).

 

10. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 21. Originally published as De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Fontaine, 1947), p. 26. Further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as E&E, with the translation page number cited first.

 

11. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 18.

 

12. ibid., p. 18.

 

13. The horror of the il y a is, in Levinas’s concise words, “fear of being and not [Heideggerian] fear for being” (E&E, p. 62/102, my emphases).

 

14. For more on this point, see John Llewelyn’s “The ‘Possibility’ of Heidegger’s Death,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14.2 (1983), pp. 127-38, p. 137: “The distinction between a possibility which something has and a possibility which something is compels us to take notice that Heidegger writes not only of death as a possibility of being, a Seinsmöglichkeit, but also of death as a Seinkönnen. A Können is a capacity, power or potentiality. Ontic potentialities are qualities which things have and may develop, as a child may develop its potentiality to reason. But being towards death is an ontological potentiality, a potentiality of and for being. Dasein is its death itself.”

 

15. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 308: “Dasein is authetically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.” For more on this question, consult R.J.S. Manning, Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy (Pittsburgh, Duquesne U P, 1993), pp. 38-53.

 

16. Jan de Greef, “Skepticism and Reason,” trans. Dick White, Face to Face With Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 159-80, p. 166.

 

17. Here Levinas seems to have much in common with Judith Butler’s recent work on performative identity in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). For Butler, like Levinas, to say that subjective agency is “performative” is not to say that agency doesn’t exist or that all agency is merely an ironic performance; but rather it is to say that such agency is necessarily a matter of response to already-given codes. The performative subject does not and cannot merely found its own conditions or its own identity, but at the same time this subject is not merely determined in some lock-step way; as Butler writes, “the subject is not determined by the rules through which it is generated because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition” (p. 145). Certainly, focusing on the question of gender would open up a considerable gulf between their projects (see footnote 39), but there is at least some traffic between Butler and Levinas on the question of identity and performativity.

 

18. See OTB, p. 13/16: “In its being, subjectivity undoes essence by substituting itself for another. Qua one-for-the-other, it is absorbed in signification, in saying or the verb form of the infinite. Signification precedes essence . . . . Substitution is signification. Not a reference of one term to another, as it appears thematized in the said, but substitution as the very subjectivity of a subject, interruption of the irreversible identity of the essence.”

 

19. Levinas specifically points his reader to Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure for the experience of the il y a (E&E, p. 63n/103n). See also Levinas’s Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975), esp. pp. 9-26, and his interview on the il y a in Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 45-52. For more specifically on Blanchot, Levinas and the il y a see Simon Critchley, “il y a — A Dying Stronger Than Death (Blanchot with Levinas),” Oxford Literary Review 15.1-2 (1993), pp. 81-131, esp. pp. 114-19; Joseph Libertson, Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), pp. 201-11; Edith Wyschogrod, “From the Disaster to the Other: Tracing the Name of God in Levinas,” Phenomenology and the Numinous, ed. Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), pp. 67-86; and Paul Davies, “A Fine Risk: Reading Blanchot Reading Levinas,” Re-Reading Levinas, eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 201-28.

 

20. As Levinas writes in a similar context, “One watches on when there is nothing to watch and despite the absence of any reason for remaining watchful. The bare fact of presence is oppressive; one is held by being, held to be. One is detached from any object, any content, yet there is presence, . . . the universal fact of the there is” (E&E, p. 65/109).

 

21. See, for example, Jürgen Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 296-98.

 

22. Compare Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), p. 197: “The idea of infinity, the overflowing of finite thought by its content, effectuates the relation of thought with what exceeds its capacity. . . . This is the situation we call welcome of the face.”

 

23. ibid, p. 34.

 

24. See the final lines of Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), essay III, section 28.

 

25. See Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” p. 131.

 

26. Levinas wishes to rescue a notion of transcendence as phenomenological self-overcoming, but shorn of its contological intentionality. Davies defines “transcendent” as follows: “that is to say, for Levinas, [the transcendent subject] can approach the other as other in its ‘approach,’ in ‘proximity'” (“A Fine Risk,” 201).

 

27. This may be more accruately — or at least philosophically — posed as a “good infinite, bad infinite” situation, which would bring us to a consideration of Hegel, for whom Levinas’s alterity would be precisely a kind of bad (unrecuperable) infinite. It seems clear what Hegel protects in his exiling of the bad infinite: it keeps the dialectical system safe from infinite specular regression. Here, however, I would like to fold Levinas’s skepticism concerning Hegel back onto Levinas’s own text: why the exiling of the il y a as a bad infinite, and what privilege is — however surrepticiously — protected by or in such a move? See Rodolphe Gasché, “Structural Infinity,” in his Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1994) for more on the Hegelian bad infinite.

 

28. Jean François Lyotard, “Levinas’ Logic,” trans. Ian McLeod, Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 117-58, pp. 125, 152.

 

29. William Burroughs, “Christ and the Museum of Extinct Species,” Conjunctions 13 (1989), pp. 264-73, pp. 272, 268.

 

30. Compare Jacques Derrida’s discussion of AIDS in “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” trans. Michael Israel, differences 5.1 (1993), pp. 1-24, p. 20: “The virus (which belongs neither to life nor to death) may always already have broken into any ‘intersubjective’ space . . . . [A]t the heart of that which would preserve itself as a dual intersubjectivity it inscribes the mortal and indestructible trace of the third — not the third as the condition of the symbolic and the law, but the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond.”

 

31. See the interview “The Paradox of Morality” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 168-80, p. 169.

 

32. Quoted in Peperzak, To The Other, p. 180.

 

33. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213.

 

34. This is contra Peperzak’s To the Other, which casts Levinas as a metaphysician profoundly disdainful of the social or material world: “The secret of all philosophy that considers society and history to be the supreme perspective is war and expolitation. . . . As based on the products of human activities, the judgment of history is an unjust outcome, and if the social totality is constituted by violence and corruption, there seems to be no hope for a just society unless justice can be brought into it from the outside. This is possible only if society and world history do not constitute the dimension of the ultimate. The power of nonviolence and justice lies in the dimension of speech and the face-to-face, the dimension of straightforward intersubjectivity and fundamental ethics, which opens the closed totality of anonymous productivity and historicity” (pp. 178-79).

 

35. Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality,” pp. 171-72. For more on the question of animality in Levinas, see John Llewelyn’s The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger, and Others (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 49-67. See also Simon Critchley’s treatment of this topic in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 180-82.

 

36. Compare Heidegger’s translation of this Aristotelian privilege in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 15-89, p. 73, 76: “Language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant and animal, there is also no openness of what is . . . . The primitive . . . is always futureless.”

 

37. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 152.

 

38. Certainly to have recognized women, gays and lesbians or post-colonial peoples as ethically compelling subjects has not solved their respective social and political problems; no ethical system can promise that. My point here is that the recognition of “humanity” is not — and historically has not been — a self-evident or ideology-free procedure.

 

39. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p.8.

 

40. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 156. For a critique of Levinas’s thematization of the feminine, see Luce Irigaray’s “The Fecundity of the Caress,” trans. Carolyn Burke in Face to Face with Levinas, pp. 231-256, and her “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the Divinity of Love” in Re-Reading Levinas, trans. Margaret Whitford, pp. 109-19. For an outline of the debate and something of a defense of Levinas, see Tina Chanter, “Feminism and the Other” in The Provocation of Levinas, pp. 32-56.

 

41. The third epigraph to OTB, Pensees 112, reads: “‘. . . That is my place in the sun.’ That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.”