THE ORIGINALITY OF LEVINAS: PRE-ORIGINALLY CATEGORIZING THE EGO D.G.

Leahy

The curve on the hither side of consciousness is a concave without a convex: the cuspidal infinity of interiority turned absolutely inside outside the other within: an interiority without walls, infinitely exposed. Then straight is the highway between the cusps of this absolutely inverted consciousness -- better than consciousness -- transcending the original curvature of consciousness and self-consciousness. This one-way straightaway is the immemorial contact of self and other. The indispensability of the flesh to this turning of the self to the Other signifies the excellence whereby the human transcends the angelic. Whatever the suffering involved in this breathless proximity, it is better than the angelic, and all too natural, tranquillity of spirits without body. The turning to the Other -- being turned inside out -- beyond being and nothing and the spatially organized framework of consciousness -- is the superiority and excellence of the otherwise than being. The most mysterious secret is the secret of this intimacy without genesis: completely unmotivated non-indifference to the Other. What finally is fear for the other is, fear for the death of the Other, is this pure concavity, consciousness absolutely inverted, responsibility, unsolicited, before all initiative, to do for the Other, pure turning to the Other immemorially the inside-outside of consciousness, better than consciousness. Fear for the Other is not to be confused with the Heideggerian relation of Dasein with death, where, in the solitude of being -- not being beyond being -- not otherwise than being -- the ultimate emotion is anxiety, the fear of the self for the self. Fear for the Other, non-erotic love for the Other, precludes anxiety. The fear for the Other not (fear for) the self is such, before all conception of relation, as the priority -- to all notions of synthesis, actual or potential -- of the non-indifference of the self to the other, the proximity which is the a priori of any coming-upon, hither any considering, before any Dasein, before any presence to Being or to self -- before any

presence or present.

Levinas repudiates Heideggers form of non-objectifying thought,

specifically, the notion that sees solitude in the midst of a prior relationship with the other. Solitude is not subsequent to presence or beginning. Levinas understands that the requirement in Heidegger of deriving the meaning of the word God from the understanding of being in which the sacred and the divine announce themselves, continues to agree with the main tendency of traditional philosophy, which is theoretical. The non-objectifying thought of Heidegger is still the thinking of traditional philosophy: thinking-less-God is still thinking being and nothing, still thinking for which thinking otherwise than being would not be thinking. For Levinas, the Husserlian pure I, the subject of the transcendental consciousness in which the world is constituted, is itself outside the subject: self without reflection--uniqueness identifying itself as incessant awakening. Indeed, this self outside the subject, occupying the exceptional status of a transcendent I in the very immanence of intentionality, the pure ego of transcendental Husserlian phenomenology, is precisely the starting point, the secret of thought whose ultimacy as such is called into question by Levinas without its being-exposed-to-Nothing. For him, as for Husserl, the pure ego is not conditioned by the world. This means that self outside the subject is beyond Being and Nothing, and -- since nowhere does he transgress the modern notion that the latter are related as genus and species, whether the non-being of what-is nihilates Being (Hegel) or the Being of what-is nihilates Nothing (Heidegger) -- that it is therefore beyond the logic of genus and species, and is neither a universal nor an individuality. The I is unconditioned in any logical-worldly or worldly sense, but is, nevertheless, and although unconditioned by the world, found, and finds itself, starting from its being in the world and in the midst of the world. If the Ego is to be conditioned other than by the world, then it must be conditioned before its relation to the world, conditioned before intentionality, whether that intentionality be inverted (Heidegger) or uninverted (Husserl). If the ultimate root of the absolute self-consciousness of modernity -- in its pure or impure (uninverted or inverted) phenomenological modes -- from the

otherwise incredible doubt of the worlds existence in Descartes to its profoundest ultimacy in Hegels understanding of logic as the mind of God before the creation -- is the beginning of thought qua result of the Incarnation, the moment of thought the result of the redemption of the world, the formation of the original secret of thought its absolute dependence on God -- then Levinas means to uncover the secret of this secret beginning of thought, to uncover the preoriginal diremption of the self, to uncover the dis-redemption, to expose the beginningless and endless fissure, the taking apart infinitely before any redemption: the accusation of the self immemorially before guilt and redemption. In Levinas thought retrospectively non-anticipates its own retrospective anticipation of the past, i.e., thinks more than it can think. Levinas thinking-less-being is thinking God beyond presence (and absence), God beyond thing (and nothing), beyond object (and subject): thinking the subject outside the subject, the object outside the object: the Other the object within and without the world. God therefore would not in any way be objectified. God remains the One who is without being present or absent -- without being graspable -- who can not be meant, who can not be signified, but who can nevertheless mean or signify with a meaning or signification which irreducibly contests itself as the Saying of the said, as the meaning of the meant, as the signified of the sign. The thought of Levinas is the pluralizing, the de-divinizing of the spirit which inexhaustibly rises above the creation in Hegel, that same spirit -- spirit of the Same -- which, in the work of Husserl, was purified, in the very depths of its originality, of the naive distinction of God and world. In one respect Levinas stands with Nietzsche over against both Sartre and Kierkegaard: he stands on the side of Life, that is, life before all presence, older than all consciousness, life as, in effect, sheer result, altogether before any beginning, before synchronicity, life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. The diachrony which fissures without destroying the monadic self in Levinas is the analogue of the insistence in Nietzsche that there is no unity, that there is unity neither as sensorium nor as spirit, that while there is totality, the totality, eternally recurring, lacks all unity. But for Levinas, while diachrony is a certain lack of unity,

the eternal recurrence in Nietzsche runs too far too quickly ahead. It would supplant, qua totality, the unity. For Levinas the totality, which is the unity of being, is ruptured precisely by the thought that there is a unity of self undiminished by its immemorial responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality (whether the totality displacing unity, as in Nietzsche, or totality de-totalized, as in Sartre), neither the unreal nor the unrealizable ideal, respectively, of the two atheists, but in fact a real ideal whose formal materialization -- perfect or imperfect -possible or impossible -- itself points to a yet older categorizing of matter than that undertaken in onto-theological thinking. Nietzsches denial of the possibility of the judgment of the totality -as far as it goes consistent with the absolute self-enclosedness of the Hegelian Spirit -- is denied by Levinas. Contrary to the shared understanding of both Hegel and Nietzsche, beings have an identity before totality and before eternity, in an infinity outside both, but reflected within both. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the ground of the vivere as opposed to that of the sterile esse. But not with Nietzsche on the ground of the latters full green vivere, the vivere that would and does exhaust qua totality the whole of the real, the vivere that would and does displace and replace the cogito, as it does explicitly in Nietzsches succinct summation: vivo ergo cogito. Under Levinas feet the ground gives way: life is not the full green ground: it does not offer the final support for the cogito. The limitation in Nietzsches radical rejection of all thinking not

anchored in life is precisely that there is a method in his madness! But it is precisely method that the madness of Levinas lacks! Unlike the madness of Nietzsche and Hamlet, the madness of Levinas -- otherwise than being -- is beyond to be or not to be: the madness in Levinas is the infinite a priori of the question, to be or not to be, indeed, the infinite a priori of the to be or not to be of the question to be or not to be! This madness without (before) method may be understood in its most fundamental sense, in Levinas, as the Ego categorized before all categories. The Ego categorized before all thinking. The Ego qua category, before the cogito. Levinas, following the indications in Husserl,

ultimately, therefore, in Kant, back-treks, tracklessly, to where the Ego recurs to itself in its

transcendence of the cogitare of the cogito, to the Ego in its priority to the cogitare. Levinas thinks neither the formal structure of the Self, nor the material structure of the Self, but precisely thinks the structure of the Self before thoughts distinction of form and matter: the Ego bears the weight of an accusation before being the I of the I-think, before the security of its own transcendence to the categories of the thought, that is, before its participation in the formal unification of all the accusations to be made against matter. It finds itself like matter, but before the matter subject to the forms of its own doing as the unity of thought, subject to an accusation or categorization, before it has had the chance to think. This is the form of the self qua creature. This is the form of bearing the burden of the Other through no fault whatsoever of ones own. In Levinas, the non-methodological madness is beyond essence the non-methodological lack of freedom of choice: the non-methodological lack of being beyond freedom of choice: the nonmethodological lack of being beyond the lack of being: non-methodologically beyond being the lack of the lack of being. For Levinas, straightaway, non-methodologically, the Other is she hurts, and I am responsible. Before all I-thou relations, before all reciprocity, in the face of the Other: he is dying, and I am responsible. Before all seeing the self in the other, with an infinite immediacy the other in the self: the self stuffed with the other for whom I am responsible, unaccountably, immemorially, so. Instead of the self going beyond itself, the inversion of the self-stuffed-with-itself to the self-stuffed-with-the-other! the having-the-other-in-one's-skin, the other in the same without alienating the same. But then non-methodological madness is unaccountably rational non-madness: the overflowing of the capacity of the self is not insane in the light of the rationality of obedience to revelation: the imperative of ethics is suffered by the categorical self before all universality and self-complacent rationality. Indeed, for Levinas spirituality is the responsibility for the Other demanded in the face of the Other, and is, therefore, as such, probably the foundation of sociality and of love without eros. On the side of the vivere, with Nietzsche against the angelisms of Kierkegaard and Sartre, Levinas understands that spirituality is ineluctably incarnate. Otherwise than nothingness:

beyond the nothingness bounding and bounded by being in Sartre; beyond the nothingness of the particular outside the universal in Kierkegaard: otherwise than nothingness the fullness of the punctual: the infinite cuspidal uniqueness of the Same: pure phenomenological intentionality absolutely inverted. The self as creature -- before all theology and ontology -- recurs to itself beyond the point of its own beginning. It overshoots itself within itself, and in this passivity more passive than the passivity of matter, in this radically immeasurable finitude before all infinite and finite measures, it is thereby exposed within itself to the Other, opened up to the outside of itself within itself as the a priori of its own origination, opened to the infinity it contains within the recess of its inextendedness before all openness in or to the world. This is the anarchic recurrence which is the contraction or incarnation in which the fullness of the punctual is identity broken up, fissured, split open before the openness of nothingness: the secret opening of the secret: the cuspidal pointillism of the absolute inversion of all consciousness and selfconsciousness into the One. It is at once the monadology of suffering in which the exposedness of Self to Other is hidden in the dark light of an infinite Goodness, which cannot appear, but, qua trace of infinity, shows itself enigmatically, like a blinking light in a space like night which is not a nothingness. This exposedness is a pluralism in subjectivity, which, nevertheless, is not a multiplicity, and does not destroy the unity of the self. Precisely because the self is beyond being, subject to a Goodness before all Good and Evil, to a Goodness beyond all measure, distinct from the One that a subject is, the self bears within the unity of itself, beyond unity and multiplicity, beyond the unity of being, the entire weight of the others without being divided from itself, indeed, in being defined by this infinite accusative -- absolutely categorized -- it is just so confirmed in its irreplaceable unicity and particularity beyond comparison. In this unicity the self is denucleated, fissured, cored-out, by a movement coming from outside, but a rupture which, paradoxically, would not alienate [its] rational self-sufficiency. The pure I, qua self, otherwise than absolute Elastizitt, incarnate and inspirited: indeed, the self tight in its own skin, subject to the unlimited accusative of persecution. The open secret in Hegel is spirit as

absolute subjectivity of substance, spirit as soul or form, essence or concept, absolute subjectivity whose nature it is, in order to be spirit, to determine itself and to traverse the forms of finitude. For Hegel, Only when this content has traversed these determinations is it spirit. Spirit is essence--but only insofar as it has returned to itself from out of itself, only insofar as it is that actual being which returns and is at home with itself, that being which posits itself from itself as at home with itself. The open secret in Hegel is the , i.e., the rational, the speculative or absolute idea. But the secret of the open secret in Levinas is precisely that subjectivity is spirit as non-absolute! indeed, as deformed, demented, qua creature, qua very living -- questionable! The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet occurred to thought,* but what does occur is the altersubstantiation of the I: [t]he psyche is not grafted on to a substance, but alters the substantiality of this substance which supports all things. It alters it with an alteration in which identity is brought out. This altersubstantiation is the inversion of the essence of subjectivity and the ultimate secret of the incarnation of the subject. The revealed secret of interiority is the contraction of the otherwise absolute elasticity of the Hegelian (modern) self to a point anterior to its own beginning -- the result produced without (before) beginning: fission of the self without dividing the self from itself -- without diremption and redemption of the One: the explosion of the self wrapped tightly about itself containing more than itself in the form of itself not-for-itself, but for-the-Other, exceeding its-own-capacity, burning in its skin without being consumed, witnessing the lack of the lack of its-own-being, like the bush in Exodus. The self witnesses its own being and nothingness utterly pre-empted by the Other. The self, not internally self-differentiated, not a self-differentiated monad, yet not, on that account, an undifferentiated monad, but rather, the self internally other-differentiated, a nonnarcissistic interiority uniquely responsible for the Other, and only as such an hypostasis (an existent bound to its own existence), only as such an incarnate soul, and, as such, not only a soul

Cf. D.G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself (Albany, 1996) and D.G. Leahy, Novitas Mundi:

Perception of the History of Being (reprint, Albany; 1994).

but the soul of the universe. For Levinas himself the way in which man signifies a new image of the Infinite, the way in which man is the likeness of the divine, is the way in which as creature he images the Creator, viz., in the preoriginary freedom by which, like the hidden Good, he shows the Other mercy. The purest, indeed, non-appearing, image of the creative power of the Infinite is nonphenomenological humanity, which, before all nothingness, like the night, is the immemorial disturbing proximity or contact of the Other in the Same -- more immediate than immediacy, more determinate than determinacy -- the altersubstantiation of the very substance of self, demanding, without justification, peace, and soliciting, without introduction, mercy, and, just so, capable of realizing the reign of the Messiah over the world, even if the world resists.