The Recurrence of Acoustics in Levinas

The Recurrence of Acoustics in Levinas Roberto Wu Levinas Studies, Volume 10, 2015, pp. 115-136 (Article) Published by Philosophy Documentation Center DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lev.2016.0005 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/638980 Access provided by UFSC-Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (30 Oct 2018 17:31 GMT) The Recurrence of Acoustics in Levinas Roberto Wu D espite Levinas’s emphasis on the oral dimension of the encounter with the other, notions such as hearing and listening are far from receiving univocal accounts in his reflections. Yet, Jacques Derrida seems to find clear evidence of their relevance, affirming that “Levinas places sound above light,”1 which is interpreted as the affirmation of “the transcendence of hearing (l’entendre) in relation to seeing (voir).”2 Nevertheless, the second movement of this interpretation inevitably evokes some confusion, for the priority of the sound over light/seeing does not necessarily imply the priority of hearing. Levinas’s accounts of hearing (entendre/audition),3 listening, and/or hearkening (écouter) fluctuate throughout his philosophical production, and, despite some occasional discussion, they remain secondary compared with speech (parole), as in Totality and Infinity,4 on which Derrida bases most of his analysis.5 It is only in Otherwise than Being that they will be more systematically employed, which does not imply, however, a weakening of the priority of speech. Without contesting the primordiality of speech over hearing, listening, and audition, we aim, however, to investigate the purview of these last concepts by linking Levinas’s early account of 115 116 Lev ina s St u d i e s 1 0 acoustics with the description available in Otherwise than Being. This involves: (1) examining how hearing, listening, and audition relate to sound (and silence) in his discussion of the there is (il y a), and (2) discussing the integration between these concepts with the acoustic account of Otherwise than Being, in which terms like resonance and echo are decisive. By means of this, we make visible some important moments related to acoustics: (1) the resonance of essence, (2) the echo of the otherwise, (3) the resonance of the “mute murmuring” of the il y a, and (4) the “forgotten voices” of a tradition apart from ontology. C REATION OF S ILENCE AND THE O VERFLOWING S OUND In the little essay, “The Transcendence of Words: On Michel Leiris’s Biffures,” published in 1949 and thus contemporaneous to Existence and Existents (1947), “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), and “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951), Levinas takes Leiris’s work as the motif upon which the themes of hearing and living-world are developed. The reference to these other texts is not arbitrary and scrutinizes that which Gerald L. Bruns calls “aesthetics of materiality.”6 Leiris’s surrealism seems to evoke a kinship with Levinas’s analysis of the there is (il y a) in Existence and Existents. In opposition to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s versions of phenomenology, which conceive of being from the angle of givenness (Sinngebung), Levinas insists that the materiality of being remains impenetrable despite the attempts of rendering meaning by means of understanding. Therefore, the il y a expressly counteracts the intelligibility provided by understanding, which articulates meaning, horizon, and light: “Behind the luminosity of forms, by which beings already relate to our ‘inside,’ matter [matière] is the very fact of the there is. . . .” (EE 57; ellipsis in original, translation modified / DEE 92). Refractory to the advances of light, the il y a bespeaks the anonymity that depersonalizes and makes indeterminate human existence, as, for example, in the experience of insomnia: “Wakefulness is anonymous. It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 117 it is the night itself that watches. It watches. In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being all the thoughts which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing” (66/111). The night adumbrates the impersonality of the il y a, the fact that there is “an absolutely unavoidable presence” (58/94), which is not an object, but a verb that renders an event in its impersonal form (“It watches” — Ça veille). Then, Levinas introduces a description that is important not just for the economy of Existence and Existents, but also for his ulterior philosophy, for it anticipates fundamental characteristics of Otherwise than Being: “There is no discourse [discours]. Nothing responds to us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is heard [entendue] and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of ” (58; translation modified/95). It is precisely the voice of the silence that comes from this presence of absence that Levinas refers to, although implicitly, in his essay on Michel Leiris. First of all, there is a form of art based on the primacy of vision, in which a being appears as world, and which “makes beauty in nature, calming it, appeasing it” (OS 147 / LTM 1093). Nevertheless, Levinas warns, “All the arts, even the sonorous ones, create silence,” and silence can be, “at times of the bad conscience, oppressive or frightening” (147/1093). This description can hardly be dissociated from the above quotation of Existence and Existents,7 but Levinas also proposes the necessity of relating with this silence, a “need for critique,” that is, the kind of relation that perceives the uneasiness that underlies the “peace of the beautiful” (147/1093) and is aware of the fact that silence is not mere absence, but the announcement of the il y a.8 The silence that even sonorous arts create anticipates the subject matter of the “resonance of silence” in Otherwise than Being. Particularly significant is that Levinas extends the scope of silence to all forms of art, for all of them are capable of reflecting the primordial experience that insomnia and horror inflict. Next, Levinas shifts from the discussion of silence to a consideration of the sound as such, through the perspective of its disjunction 118 Lev ina s St u d i e s 1 0 with vision, by means of a correlation between sound and excess. He writes, “There is in fact in sound — and in consciousness understood as hearing [audition] — a shattering of the always complete world of vision and art. Sound is all repercussion, outburst, scandal. While in vision a form espouses a content and soothes it, sound is like the sensible quality overflowing [débordement] its limits, the incapacity of form to hold its content — a true rent in the fabric of the world — that by which the world that is here prolongs a dimension inconvertible into vision” (OS 147–48/ LTM 1093). Likewise, a few years after this essay, Levinas will warn us of the limitations of vision and light, as in “Is Ontology Fundamental?” and, with a more detailed account, in Totality and Infinity, by taking them as the key components of the dynamic of sameness. Nevertheless, even in this article of 1949 it is already possible to see how the horizon of vision is “shattered,” whether in its character of containment and limitation or in its feature of calming and making nature peaceful, because sound “overflows” and exceeds a “form,” being therefore “repercussion, outburst, scandal.” Levinas describes the surpassing feature of sound in terms of symbol: “the sound is symbol par excellence — a reaching beyond the given” (OS 148/LTM 1093). In “Meaning and Sense,” Levinas explains that “A symbol is not the abridgement of a real presence that would preexist it; it would give more than any receptivity for the world could ever receive” (CPP 83/SS 133). A symbol entails an insurmountable gap between orders separated by an excess; therefore, it does not belong to the economy of collateral relations that encompasses the given. Music incarnates the essential feature that underlies every form of art, namely, the movement of going beyond what is given. Levinas performs in “Reality and Its Shadow” the recurrent gesture of identifying understanding and knowledge with the given, a horizon that art attempts to surpass and disrupt: “Does not the function of art lie in not understanding? . . . Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow” (CPP 3/RO 773). Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 119 At least in one important aspect, the analysis of art in “Reality and Its Shadow” has more affinity with Existence and Existents than with “The Transcendence of Words”: the former presents the impersonality that art, but especially music, sets forth, while the latter explicitly attaches music with the word (mot) and the verb (verbe). In “Reality and Its Shadow,” the concept of image appears from the outset as opposed to “concept,” because conceptuality, to Levinas, implies grasping, understanding, and power over the object. Thenceforth, he conducts his interpretation of art based on a reversal, in choosing image over concept, passivity over power: “An image marks a hold over us rather than our initiative, a fundamental passivity” (CPP 3/RO 774). Taking into consideration the above analysis of sound, it is not surprising thus that he affirms that “an image is musical” (3/774), whereas neither image is strictly conceived as optics, as far as Levinas dismantles and reverses what this implies, nor are music and sound restricted to usual theories of acoustics. Assuredly this statement anticipates much of the “listening eye,” which will appear more than 30 years later in Otherwise than Being. While deepening the passivity implicated by the experience of art, Levinas asserts the uniqueness of the rhythm. He refuses its definition as “an inner law of the poetic order,” stating rather that experiencing it implies some kind of mutual participation: “our consenting to them is inverted into a participation. Their entry into us is one with our entry into them” (CPP 4/RO 774). By means of the analysis of rhythm, Levinas takes up again in another domain the issue of the depersonalization of the subject that he has undertaken in Existence and Existents. In his analysis of insomnia, Levinas portrays the il y a as the unavoidable presence of absence, in the face of which no one is sure if one is the watcher or the one who is watched, and vigilance turns out to be an impersonal event without subject. Something similar occurs with rhythm, for “consent, assumption, initiative or freedom” are terms that reveal themselves to be inadequate to a situation in which someone is “caught up and carried away by it” (4/775). The subject is thus depersonalized: “It is so not even despite itself, for in rhythm 120 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity” (4/775). In this anonymity, consciousness and unconsciousness compose a phantasmagorical landscape, as in a “waking dream,” even if it is more adequate to characterize it as “a sphere situated outside of the conscious and the unconscious” (4/775).9 Levinas concludes this moment of his argument by underscoring the uniqueness of his conceptions of rhythm and music, as well as anticipating the theme of the resonance that will play a key role in Otherwise than Being: Then we must detach them from the arts of sound where they are ordinarily envisioned exclusively, and draw them out into a general aesthetic category. Rhythm certainly does have its privileged locus in music, for the musician’s element realizes the pure deconceptualization of reality. Sound is the quality most detached from an object. Its relation with the substance from which it emanates is not inscribed in its quality. It resounds impersonally. [Il résonne impersonnellement] Even its timbre, a trace of its belonging to an object, is submerged in its quality, and does not retain the structure of a relation. Hence in listening [en écoutant] we do not apprehend a “something,” but are without concepts: musicality belongs to sound naturally. (CPP 4–5/RO 776) Deconceptualization refers to the capacity of sound to engender a disruption of subjectivity. Levinas suggests that its overflowing capacity precludes it from being integrated within the horizon of conceptual meaning articulated by vision and understanding. The excess that belongs to the sound finds a parallel with the surplus of non-sense over sense that the il y a delivers; in this sense, to listen means to be “exposed” to that which resounds impersonally. This conception of sound returns in Levinas’s later works, as in Otherwise than Being, although with some important modifications that cannot be easily harmonized with the account we have just presented. Conversely, in “The Transcendence of Words,” the indeterminateness that is characteristic of his descriptions of the il y a, and related to the impersonal and to anonymity, is put aside in favor of the verbal Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 121 sound: “If, however, sound can appear as a phenomenon, as here, it is because its function of transcendence only asserts itself in the verbal sound. The sounds and noises of nature are words [mots] that disappoint us. To really hear [entendre] a sound is to hear a word [mot]. Pure sound is verb [verbe]” (OS 148; translation modified / LTM 1093). This passage is categorical: verb is the grounding of sound; even noises are conceived in terms of words. According to Levinas, there is a decay of speaking in contemporary philosophy and sociology, in which occurs “a disdain for the word” (148/1093). In face of this, he emphasizes how important is the speaking word and gives us the example of Robinson Crusoe’s meeting with Man Friday, which is more expressive than his other ties with civilization, such as his artificial utensils or the preservation of “his morality” (148/1093). Levinas describes this event as that “in which a man who speaks replaces the ineffable sadness of echoes [la tristesse inexprimable de l’écho]” (148/1093). This observation makes room for his claim that “social relation — the real presence of the other [l’autre] — matters” (148/1093–94), a presence that “is fulfilled in hearing [l’audition]” inasmuch as the word uttered by the other plays a “transcendent role” in which “verb refuses to become flesh” (148/1094). The “privilege of the living word [mot vivant], destined to be heard [l’audition]” (149/1094), opposes to the conception of language based on signs, for the latter fails to give an account of speaking as an event; rather, language as a system of signs privileges the writing as being its substance, which, according to Levinas, produces “disfigured words, ‘frozen words’” (149/1094). In contrast to frozen words of documents and vestiges (vestiges), Levinas conceives the speaking from the perspective of an encounter with the other, in the sense of an interruption: “To speak is to interrupt my existence as a subject, a master, but to interrupt it without offering myself as spectacle, leaving me simultaneously object and subject. My voice brings the element in which that dialectical situation is accomplished concretely” (149/1094). 122 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 T HE E CHO OF S AYING The ubiquity of themes related to acoustics in Otherwise than Being suggests some sort of retrieval of matters that we have just addressed, especially the overflowing character of sound, the link between image and sound, silence, and the il y a. Unlike Totality and Infinity, Other­ wise than Being is deliberately expressed through acoustic concepts: resonance, echo, voice, inaudible, listening eye, hearing, silence, and so on. The priority of speaking over hearing, already enacted in Totality and Infinity, is maintained in Otherwise than Being, but the latter unfolds the discussion on language stressing the distinction between saying and said. This priority appears in Otherwise than Being on different occasions, as, for example, in the formulation “obedience precedes any listening [écoute] to the command” (OB 148; translation modified/ AQE 232), which instead of subordinating obedience to listening, or even establishing an equivalence between them, affirms the primacy and independence of the former from the latter. As in Totality and Infinity, in which the speech of the other determines a command to which I must respond, Levinas maintains in Otherwise than Being the dignity and the absolute priority of this speech from any acoustical apprehension. This can be developed at least into two directions. First, Levinas explains this priority by means of the theme of creation, in which the creature has already received a command even before he or she begins to understand: “But in creation, what is called to being answers to a call that could not have reached it since, brought out of nothingness, it obeyed before hearing [d’entendre] the order” (113/179), for in a sense being is already a response to creation. Second, this priority corresponds to the constitutive anachronism of the fractured encounter with the other: “‘Before they call, I will answer,’ the formula is to be understood literally. In approaching the other I am always late for the meeting” (150/235). These statements express the idiosyncrasy of Levinas’s ethics, in which obedience precedes understanding, as Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 123 responsibility comes before commitment — a gesture that he calls “the passing itself of the Infinite” (150/235). This idea also appears in the following assertion: “The neighbor strikes me before striking me, as though [comme si] I had heard [entendu] before he spoke” (88/141). The expression “comme si” should not be overlooked, for it indicates an analogical treatment of the term entendre that prevents a contradiction with the above formulation of the pre-original anachronism. The obedience to the command precedes any uttering of sounds and consequently any hearing in this sense. The anachronism between obedience and hearing elicits the theme of the immemorial past, which comes to us not as presence, but as trace and echo. With regard to the issue of the neighbor, Levinas writes, “In proximity is heard [s’entend] a command come as though from an immemorial past [comme d’un passé immémorial ], which was never present, began in no freedom. This way of the neighbor is a face” (88/141). To hear a command, as is asserted here, does not represent an inconsistency with the thesis of the anachronism above presented, for Levinas is not advocating in this last sentence a dependency of the command on hearing, but rather remarking that if and when one hears the command, one attends something that cannot be described as a presence, for the pre-original whence of this command refers to an immemorial past, and, because of this, this particular hearing is described in the mode of as though.10 As with the proximity of the neighbor, also the relation with the third party, the illeity (illéité) consists in an order that has already addressed me before any hearing, “It is the coming of the order to which I am subjected before hearing it [l’entendre], or which I hear [j’entends] in my own saying” (150/234–35). This sentence thus presents the very core of the idea of “the other in the same” (105/167), which means, on the one hand, that “the saying that comes to me is my own word” (150/235), and, on the other hand, that one’s subjectivity is based on “an anarchic plot” (105/167). In the dynamic of substitution I am the one who is responsible for the other, but obeying this command differs from responding to orders given in the present; rather, it means 124 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 that this saying is anarchically inscribed in me: “It is the pure trace of a ‘wandering cause,’ inscribed in me” (150/235).11 A whole acoustic terminology stems from the pre-original anachronism. Inasmuch as saying refuses contemporaneity with the said, the unheard (inouï) indicates the priority of the command situated on the level of saying, to which one has been already addressed, and the impossibility of coincidence between the ethical and the ontological: “Then, the trace of saying, which has never been present, obliges me; the responsibility for the other, never assumed, binds me; a command never heard [jamais entendu] is obeyed” (OB 168/AQE 261). The expression “ambiguity of inspiration” designates the anarchic obedience for-the-other (pour­l’autre) and simultaneously the authorship of having receiving and assumed this command inscribed in me, “this unheard-of obligation [inouïe obligation]” (148–49/232). Anachronism and ambiguity are not to be suppressed in this case, for they attest “a diachronic ambivalence which ethics makes possible” (149/232). In refusing a primordial role to any apprehension, the unheard reveals the very heart of the Levinasian account of ethics, inasmuch as it radicalizes the disjunction between ethics and ontology. “The unheard-of saying [le dire inouï] is enigmatically in the anarchic response, in my responsibility for the other” (149/232). Far from indicating that concepts such as hearing and listening are excluded from the internal logic of Otherwise than Being, the anachronism itself ascribes distinctive roles to them, for what is at stake here is not the perception of some present sound, but the retention of the echo of a saying that resounds in one’s ears. The said receives, therefore, a more robust account in this book; instead of being merely a negative demarcation of the apophantic discourse, the said also evokes the saying that resonates in it. “The said, contesting the abdication of the saying that everywhere occurs in this said, thus maintains the diachrony in which, holding its breath, the spirit hears the echo [entend l’écho] of the otherwise” (OB 44/AQE 76). The “unsayable saying [le Dire indicible]” exceeds the said and is irreducible to predicative relations, Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 125 although in a manner in which it “lends itself to the said” (44/76) without being absorbed for or diluted in the latter, whereas “the saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the said.” (44/75). While keeping itself in face of the said and simultaneously in the said, the unsayable saying lets itself be reduced,12 a reduction that is energized by “the ethical interruption of essence,” and which exceeds mere presence or manifestation, for “the breathless spirit retains a fading echo [écho]” in “the ambiguity or the enigma of the transcendent” (44/76). In and through the said, essence encompasses two different possibilities: either it assumes the verbal character resounding in the said, or it becomes petrified in the noun: “in the said, the essence that resounds [résonne] is on the verge of becoming a noun” (OB 41/AQE 71). Essence, in the verbal sense, “resounds [résonne] in the prose of predicative propositions” (41/71). To say that essence resounds in the said is to say that it vibrates within the said or temporalizes. Conversely, there is the latent risk of apophansis itself muffling the resonance, and consequently forcing the verb to become mere noun: “This resonance [Résonance] is always ready to congeal into nouns, where being will be congealed into a copula and the Sachverhalt ‘nominalized’” (47/79). The resonance of the verb “is collected into an entity by the noun,” and, accordingly, “to be thenceforth designates instead of resounding” (42/73). More accurately, the double direction of the essence engenders an internal amphibology in which predicative propositions transition from one extreme possibility to another; therefore, an “amphibology of the logos” (amphibologie du logos), which corresponds to an “amphibology of being and entities” (de l’être et de l’étant) (43/74), takes place. “The said as a verb is essence or temporalization. Or, more exactly, the logos enters into the amphibology in which being and entities can be understood and identified, in which a noun can resound as a verb and a verb of an apophansis can be nominalized” (42/72). At first sight, this amphibology leads us to an identification of the essence with the appearance and manifestation of the said, but, more than “making being understood,” temporalization 126 Lev ina s St u d i e s 1 0 likewise makes “its essence vibrate [vibrer]” (35/61); in so doing, the saying places itself on the hither side of being (l’en deçà de l’être), as the possibility of ethical interruption of the essence. The term echo reveals itself as being fitted perfectly to Levinas’s purposes. On the one hand, it refers to the anarchic saying that is always prior to understanding and hearing, and, on the other hand, it bespeaks the passivity of being accused: “The metaphor of a sound that would be audible only in its echo meant to approach this way of presenting one’s passivity as an underside without a right side” (OB 106/AQE 167). Only from the perspective of “a passivity more passive than all passivity” (15/30), that is, from the ethical standpoint of vulnerability and exposure, in which one is addressed in the accusative, may a comparison with echo in terms of recurrence of one’s responsibility for others become intelligible. The recurrence of persecution is “prior to all reflection, prior to every positing, an indebtedness before any loan, not assumed, anarchical, subjectivity of a bottomless passivity, made out of assignation, like the echo of a sound [l’écho d’un son] that would precede the resonance [résonance] of this sound” (111/175). The immemorial past implies a surplus that refuses its identification as a theme in the said, which does not only imply the impossibility of the saying to be completely absorbed by the said, but also demands a redirection of one’s attention toward the echo of an anarchic bygone. When referring to the amphibology of being and entities, Levinas points out the disjunction between the possibility of “assembling the dispersion of duration into nouns and propositions,” which consequently “lets being and entities be heard [laisse entendre]” through the resonance of essence, and the possibility of surprising “the echo [l’écho] of the saying [in the said], whose signification cannot be assembled” (27/48). The impact of the diachrony of transcendence into synchronic time resembles the movement of breathing, which is conceived as “transcendence in the form of opening up [dé­claustration]” to the other (OB 181/AQE 278). The diachrony of breathing, Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 127 “a diachrony without synthesis” that resembles the very dynamic of the “truth” (183/281), refers to the “movement from here to yonder” (180/276), an “exile in oneself ” (182/279) that encompasses an inspiration that is “without a stopping point” and an expiration that is “without return” (182/279). Levinas goes on to say, “In human breathing, in its everyday equality, perhaps we have to already hear [entendre] the breathlessness of an inspiration that paralyzes essence, that transpierces it with an inspiration by the other, an inspiration that is already expiration, that ‘rends the soul’! It is the longest breath there is, spirit” (181–82/278). Levinas tarries alongside the subject matter of “restlessness of respiration” (182/279) to draw attention to the instant that separates inspiration and expiration, in which the spirit holds its breath and by so doing hears the echo of the otherwise. What is then heard in this contraction of the natural movement of breathing? Levinas explicitly affirms the ethical relevance of this hearing for the diachrony of the-one-for-the-other (l’un­pour­l’autre elle­même), a hearing of the resonance of silence.13 The temporalization of the said in which essence vibrates “lets the pre-original saying be heard [laisse entendre], answers to transcendence, to a dia-chrony, to the irreducible divergency that opens here between the non-present and every representable divergency, which in its own way . . . makes a sign to the responsible one” (10–11/24–25). I L Y A AND THE R ESONANCE OF S ILENCE Levinas’s description of the “rustling” of the il y a as being a necessary condition for the possibility of substitution has never been so clear as in this passage of Otherwise than Being: “To support [emphasis in French edition] without compensation, the excessive or disheartening hubbub [l’écoeurant remue­ménage] and encumberment [encombre­ ment] of the there is [il y a] is needed” (OB 164/AQE 255), whereas it awakens the ego “from its imperialist dream” (164/256). Nonetheless, this necessary condition is plainly insufficient to perform by 128 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 itself the entire movement toward the beyond being, for it is only the encounter with the other that evidences the complete powerlessness of one’s self-assurance within the scope of the same.14 Levinas has already conceived art as that which creates silence, and stressed the oppressive and frightening character of this silence, in “The Transcendence of Words.” One learns from Existence and Existents that silence refers to the il y a, to the voice of silence that impersonally accompanies every instant of one’s existence, as the silence of the infinite spaces described by Pascal. Some important displacements, however, are to be considered, regarding the relation between the il y a and silence in Otherwise than Being. In this later work, silence refers most of the time to the resonance of essence. The “resonance of silence,” of which the “listening eye” is aware, cannot be identified anymore with the silence of the il y a of Existence and Existents, although there are some undeniable affinities. In Otherwise than Being, it corresponds to the amphibology of being and entities and therefore to the amphibology of language in its double reference to verbs and nouns: “Here language does not double up the being of entities, but exposes the silent resonance of the essence” (OB 40/AQE 70). In “The Question of Subjectivity,” among other texts, Levinas addresses the sense in which the resonance of silence connects with Heidegger: “In its reign of being, being is language — and it is a silent language or the voice of silence, Läute der Stille. (In this way, without realizing it, Heidegger would have ‘Judaized’ the Greeks!) This voice of silence is that which is heard by the poet, who transposes it into human language” (GDT 151/DMT 173).15 Levinas clarifies that the expression “resonance of silence” refers to Heidegger’s Läute/ Geläut der Stille.16 To employ Levinas’s terminology, this expression means the precedence of the said over communication, a said that can be brought to manifestation and intelligibility by the hearing of the poet. Nevertheless, Levinas warns, in so doing it also excludes any possibility of diachrony that resonates in this silence. In what sense could this emphasis on the “voice”17 of silence have “Judaized” the Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 129 Greeks, as Levinas claims? The contrast that Martin Jay offers between these two traditions is helpful: “If the Jews could begin their most heartfelt prayer, ‘Hear, O Israel,’ the Greek philosophers were in effect urging, ‘See, O Hellas.’”18 In Otherwise than Being, the resonance of silence does not refer anymore, in an exclusive way, to the presence of absence in the middle of the night that oppresses the insomniac, but to the fact that essence vibrates in the said. The “eye that listens” (oeil qui écoute) does not capture an object in the light; instead, this expression adumbrates the exposure of the eye to the unbearable silence that resounds, to the “saying that does not say a word” (OB 151/AQE 236). Time and the essence it unfolds by manifesting entities, identified in the themes of statements or narratives, resound as a silence [résonnent comme un silence] without becoming themes themselves. They can, to be sure, be named in a theme, but this naming does not reduce to definitive silence the mute resonance [la résonance sourde], the murmur of silence [le bourdonnement du silence], in which essence is identified as an entity. Once again for the “listening eye” a silence resounds [un silence résonne] about what had been muffled, the silence of the parceling out of being, by which entities in their identities are illuminated and show themselves (OB 38/AQE 67). Brian Schroeder interprets the listening eye as follows: “For Levinas, the metaphor of the listening eye indicates the approach to move beyond the hegemonic image, paradoxically dehierarchizing the relation between the terms visual/aural, sight/sound, seeing/hearing, while maintaining the ethical superiority of the Other.”19 In a sense, this procedure of “dehierarchizing” extends itself to other concepts of Levinas’s philosophy in order to compose a language of the transcendence. This procedure is necessary to disrupt the system of references that we are familiar with, while twisting meanings in order to free new possibilities of addressing alterity. Therefore, the primary role of presenting the awkward expression “eye that listens” has less to do with vision or audition than with our expectations of these concepts; 130 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 in other words, Levinas is undoubtedly less concerned with a theory of vision or audition than with a displacing of these terms in order to achieve a space of transcendence, because to him it is not a matter of how a subject can apprehend words and sounds, but rather of how a radical displacement of one’s existence is implicated by the encounter with the other. This can be explored in at least two ways. Firstly, the “eye that listens” has paradoxically the same function as Plato’s judge presented in the Gorgias, the one “divested ‘of eyes and ears’ ” (OB 190/AQE 250),20 for both criticize the limitation of the sameness provided by the senses in ethical demands. Secondly, seeing and hearing/listening are disconnected from their usual role in theories of perception to deliver instead a function similar to that of the caress, for the latter, as a fulfillment of proximity, opposes the perceiving mode of touch. When Levinas states, “In every vision contact is announced: sight and hearing caress the visible and the audible. Contact is not an openness upon being, but an exposure of being” (80/128), he is enabling the possibility of thinking the listening eye as performing something entirely different from the traditional functions ascribed to seeing and hearing in ontology. In which way does the listening eye expose itself if not in the sense of allowing one to be stroked by the echo of the saying? As well as caress, the listening eye engenders proximity as proximity,21 as exposedness to the other, in which “grasping” becomes “being grasped” (75/121). If the resonance of silence is thus attached to the vibration of the essence within the said, how is the il y a described in Otherwise than Being? Although there is some coherence with his previous works, where Levinas has engaged it as rustling ( frôlement) or as “the muffled rustling of the nothingness” (le sourd bruissement du néant) (TI 146/ TeI 156),22 the il y a is rather addressed in Otherwise than Being as a modification of the essence, insofar as the “imperturbable essence” turns “as in insomnia, from this neutrality and equality into monotony, anonymity, insignificance, into an incessant buzzing [bourdonne­ Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 131 ment] that nothing can now stop and which absorbs all signification” (OB 163/AQE 253–54). “Essence stretching on indefinitely (. . .) is the horrifying there is,” affirms Levinas, punctuating simultaneously the detachment or “subtraction” of the subject from the essence (163/254): “It is the incessant buzzing [l’incessant bourdonnement] that fills each silence, where the subject detaches itself from essence and posits itself as a subject in face of its objectivity” (163/254). This “incessant buzzing,” or “intolerable rumble” (bourdonnement intolé­ rable) (163/254), fills the silence that resounds in the essence with a “surplus of non-sense over sense” (164/255): “The rumbling of the there is [bourdonnement de l’il y a] is the nonsense in which essence turns, and in which thus turns the justice issued out of signification” (163/254). Thenceforth, “to find itself again in essence” (163/254) requires from the subject something other than a reversal of nonsense into sense again, whereas every sense is continually dissolved into nullity for the il y a — only the diachronic substitution for the other completely achieves that which il y a partially performs: in the diachrony, the subject awakened to passivity fulfills the radical passivity of the for-the-other. These elements should also be considered in Levinas’s account of art. He underscores the borderline position of art as follows: “Through art essence and temporality begin to resound with poetry or song. And the search for new forms, from which all art lives, keeps awake everywhere the verbs that are on the verge of lapsing into substantives” (OB 40/ AQE 70). Art resounds in a way that prevents verbs from becoming nouns, by keeping them awake. It is thus the resonance of silence that resounds in art, the silence that art itself creates, which involves two ideas that can be conjoined: in Existence and Existents, silence is linked to the very experience of depersonalization, and in “The Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas explains how one is impelled toward anonymity and impersonality by means of art.23 In a sense, art keeps awake the verb in creating the conditions by which one may experience impersonality, 132 Lev ina s St u d i e s 1 0 and this always means to bring silence to the fore: “As an impersonal going on, an incessant splashing [incessant clapotis], a mute murmuring [sourd bruissement], as there is, does not essence swallow up the signification that will give light to it? Is not the insistence of this impersonal noise [bruit impersonnel] the threat of an end of the world felt in our days?” (140/219). The silence does not draw attention to itself unless something befalls, as when one is overwhelmed by insomnia, or when the work of art ostensively imposes the “mute murmuring” upon the spectator or listener. It is appropriate to speak of this silence, then, in terms of deafness, as inattentiveness to the resonance of essence: “But it does so in isolation: every work of art is in this sense exotic, without a world, essence in dissemination. To fail to recognize the said properly so­called (relative as it may be) in the predicative propositions which every artwork — plastic, sonorous or poetic — awakens and makes resound [résonner] in the form of exegesis is to show oneself to be as profoundly deaf [surdité aussi profonde] as in the deafness of hearing [n’entendre] only nouns in language” (41/71). This deafness may likewise be described as the incapability of hearing the resonance of silence, or the lack of awareness of the amphibology that leads to the pure identification of the saying with nouns. Nevertheless, Levinas also refers to another dimension of deafness, which concerns other traditions besides ontology,24 as when he criticizes the ontological approach “if one is deaf [sourd] to the petition that sounds [résonne] in questioning and even under the apparent silence of the thought that questions itself, everything in a question will be oriented to truth, and will come from the essence of being” (OB 26/AQE 48). Levinas evokes the voices that do not coincide with those of ontology, “inflexions of forgotten voices [inflexions de voix oubliées]” (26/48) that resound in the essence. He asks if “there is not heard a voice [ne s’entend pas une voix] coming from horizons at least as vast as those in which ontology is situated” in the “mute murmuring” of the il y a (140/219). Finally, the moments of “forgot- Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 133 ten voices” and the “voice of silence” conjoin with the “voice of the infinite,” as in this passage where Levinas relates the infinite with “the beginninglessness of an anarchy and . . . the endlessness of obligation,” which allows him to conclude, “In the absolute assignation of the subject the Infinite is enigmatically heard [s’entend]: before and beyond. The extent and accent of the voice in which the Infinite is thus heard [la portée et l’accent de la voix où l’Infini ainsi s’entend] will have to be made clear” (140/219). F INAL R EMARKS Although some of the acoustic motifs that appear in Otherwise than Being had been employed in previous works, it is noteworthy that only when Levinas brings to the fore subjects such as the amphibology of saying and said, the immemorial past, and the diachrony of the interruption, among others, are they able to play a more relevant role in his philosophy. Levinas gives new directions to concepts that have appeared before, such as the silence that, besides its well-known connection with the arousal of the il y a, is also systematically employed to designate the amphibology of being and entities. On the other hand, there is an expansion of the subjects of his thought by means of acoustics, and terms like hearing and listening are not just occasionally mentioned, as often happened in previous writings, but become crucial to the argumentation. This is unmistakable in the presentation of the main themes: the eye that listens to the resonance of essence, and the hearing that is aware of the echo of the otherwise, the breathlessness of an inspiration, the pre-original saying, the forgotten voices, the infinite, and so on. In this sense, the ubiquity of acoustic terms does not only express a radicalization of his critique of the visible, but takes on and expands his early insight on the capacity of sound and audition to overflow the limits of the sensible and the given, as sketched in his aesthetics of materiality. 134 Lev ina s St u d i e s 1 0 Notes Funding for this research was provided by CAPES-Brazil as a scholarship for postdoctoral studies. The author thanks Chiara Pavan and Stephanie Rumpza for their probing and helpful comments. In addition to the abbreviations at the front of this volume, the following are also used: Emmanuel Levinas, “La realité et son ombre” (RO), Les temps modernes 38 (1948): 769–89; Emmanuel Levinas, “La signification et le sens” (SS), Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 69, no. 2 (1964): 125–56; Emmanuel Levinas, “La transcendance des mots: À propos des Biffures de Michel Leiris” (LTM), Les temps modernes 44 (1949): 1090–95. 1. Derrida writes, “Respect, beyond grasp and contact, beyond touch, smell and taste, can be only as desire, and metaphysical desire does not seek to consume, as do Hegelian desire or need. This is why Levinas places sound above light.” Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2005), 123–24. 2. Ibid., 124. 3. According to the circumstances, entendre may be translated as hearing or understanding. Unless stated otherwise, the passages discussed here are always related to hearing. 4. For the sake of brevity, we skip the analysis of entendre, écouter, and audi­ tion in Totality and Infinity, since it involves an entirely different approach. We will indicate, however, some related aspects throughout this article. 5. In this sense, Ricoeur’s interpretation of Levinas in Oneself as Another can also give rise to misunderstandings: “the ‘appearing’ of the Other in the face of the Other eludes vision, seeing forms, and even eludes listening voices [l’écoute des voix]. In truth, the face does not appear; it is not a phenomenon; it is an epiphany” Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 189, translation modified; original at Paul Ricoeur, Soi­même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), 221. It is true that the face-to-face eludes listening to the voice of the other, inasmuch as the obedience of command is prior to listening/hearing. Nevertheless, Levinas also places relevance in “the voice in which the Infinite is thus heard” (OB 140), or in the “eye that listens” (30) to the voice and the resonance of silence, or in the hearing of “forgotten voices” (26), as we will develop further. 6. Gerard L. Bruns, “The Concepts of Art and Poetry in Emmanuel Levinas’s Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 207. 7. Or from this other passage of Existence and Existents: “For the insecurity does not come from the things of the day world which the night conceals; it is due just to the fact that nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace” (EE 59/DEE 96). 8. Similarly, horror also denotes a sonorous account: “The rustling [frôlement] of the there is . . . is horror” (EE 60; emphasis and ellipses in original/DEE 98). Ro b e r to Wu Th e Re c urre n ce of Acousti c s 135 9. “The particular automatic character of a walk or a dance to music is a mode of being where nothing is unconscious, but where consciousness, paralyzed in its freedom, plays, totally absorbed in this playing” (CPP 4/RO 775). 10. By the same token, in “The Proximity of the Other” one finds again the “as though/as if ” relating listening and obedience: “The for­the­other arises in the I like a commandment heard by him, as if obedience were a state of listening for the prescription” (IR 213). 11. The accusative form is prior to the appearance in the said, insofar as passivity exposes the fact that oneself is not the cause of oneself, but a creature. “The hypostasis is exposed as oneself in the accusative form, before appearing in the said proper to knowing as the bearer of a name” (OB 106/AQE 167). Moreover, according to Levinas, “The oneself cannot form itself; it is already formed with absolute passivity” (104/165). These passages enable the interpretation of the idea that “The ego is in itself like a sound that would resound in its own echo [comme un son qui résonnerait dans son propre écho], the node of a wave which is not once again consciousness” (103/162). Once again, it is important to underline the word “like” (comme), because the vocabulary of resonance and echo does not fit with the perspective of the consciousness that Levinas rejects in these passages. The analogy that would result in a dismissal of the unity of consciousness in this last passage will be strongly reiterated some lines afterwards: “Nothing here resembles self-consciousness” (103/163). Of interest to us here is that Levinas rejects subjectivity as consciousness and enacts it as passivity; in so doing, he posits the subject as the one who echoes a pre-original inscription within him/her as the one assigned with responsibility: “The response which is responsibility, responsibility for the neighbor that is incumbent, resounds in this passivity, this disinterestedness of subjectivity, this sensibility” (14–15/30–31). 12. Reduction has the precise meaning of “going back to the hither side of being” or “to the hither side of the said” (OB 45/AQE 76). 13. Levinas writes, “Transcendence owes it to itself to interrupt its own demonstration. Its voice has to be silent as soon as one listens for its message” (OB 152/AQE 238). 14. The encounter with the other involves a double character: on the one hand, the other is the one whom I can wish to kill, but any attempt to carry out this task is unfruitful — the face eludes and shows the limits of my powers; on the other hand, it is the other who interrupts the unceasing cycle of having my enterprises undone by the il y a, whereas he or she offers an alternative that remains outside the dynamic of power that underlies the contending with the il y a. Levinas writes, “Everything that claims to come from elsewhere, even the marvels of which essence [emphasis in French edition] itself is capable, even the surprising possibilities of renewal by technology and magic, even the perfections of gods peopling the heights of this world, and their immortality and the immortality they promise mortals — all this does not deaden the heartrending bustling of the there is recommencing behind every negation. There is not a break in the business carried on by essence, not a distraction. Only the meaning of the other is irrecusable, and forbids the reclusion 136 Le v ina s St u d i e s 1 0 and reentry into the shell of the self. A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the saying of the already said” (OB 182–83/280). 15. A similar explanation is found in Otherwise than Being: “The said can indeed be understood to be prior to communication and the intersubjective representation of being. Being would have a signification, that is, would manifest itself as already invoked in silent and nonhuman language, by the voices of silence [voix du silence], in the Geläut der Stille, the language that speaks before men and harbors the esse ipsum, the language which poetry puts into human words” (OB 135/AQE 211). 16. It is not possible to discuss here what this expression means to Heidegger and in which sense Levinas’s reading is appropriate or not. See Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). 17. Geläut der Stille is translated as “the peal of stillness” by Albert Hofstadter. Although Heidegger refers to command (Geheiß ) and call (Ruf ) in this text, the term “voice” that Levinas frequently employs does not appear in “Language.” 18. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth­Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 33. The difference between Christian and Jewish tradition is also relevant: “The word made flesh in the Christian tradition was thus a falling away from the Jewish stress on the voice and the ear” (556). 19. Brian Schroeder, “The Listening Eye: Nietzsche and Levinas,” in Emma­ nuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 2, ed. Claire Katz and Lisa Trout (London: Routledge, 2005), 279. 20. See Plato, Gorgias 523c–d. 21. “In this caress proximity signifies as proximity, and not as an experience of proximity” (OB 80/AQE 128). 22. Sourd bruissement is also translated as “mute murmuring” in Otherwise than Being, as we will see afterwards. 23. The silence of resonance presented in Otherwise than Being does not coincide with Levinas’s early account of silence in Existence and Existents. Among the many discordances, it is noteworthy that the “voice of silence” with which one is confronted while facing the il y a appears as “frightening” and “oppressive,” as an unbearable silence that reproaches every attempt of the subject to render meaning only by himself/herself. Conversely, this expression is defined in Otherwise than Being as the very temporalization and vibration of the essence. 24. “Behind being and its monstration, there is now already heard the resonance [s’entend la résonance] of other significations forgotten in ontology, which now solicit our inquiry” (OB 38/AQE 67).