because by definition ethics is the power of rupture (DL 408; DF 293).13 We find the same rejection of rhythm and its partner, dance, in interviews of the late 1980s—one by Christoph von Wolzogen and the other by Raoul Mortley. In the latter interview Levinas declares: “I often say, though it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks.… All the rest—all the exotic—is dance.”14 We will return at the end of this book to this “frankly racist aside,” as Critchley calls it, and to other similar comments by Levinas.15 What interests us at this point is the distinction made between situations that generate active dialogue and interpretation, and experiences in which agency is transformed into passive involvement.
It is remarkable that in the texts cited above—both the early and the late—Levinas attacks “passivity,” while in seminal texts he uses that word to celebrate the ethical attitude.16 Ethical passivity, or “radical passivity,” as Wall calls it, is the openness of the subject to otherness. In Levinas’s famous expression, it is the “substitution for the other through responsibility” (AE 181; OB 114).17 Hence, the notion of ethical passivity designates an activity of the subject on behalf of the other (AE 182; OB 115). However, there exists another passivity, which Levinas rejects as anti-ethical. This “inert passivity” (AE 181; OB 115) is that engendered by rhythm. It constitutes an anti-ethical attitude because, in it, the subject withdraws from his or her responsibility for the other.
In sum, there are two kinds of passivity and disinterestedness: the ethical kind, which is responsibility for the other, and the artistic kind, which constitutes a withdrawing from responsibility. We can now understand better Levinas’s criticism of art in “Reality and Its Shadow.” It is through rhythm that art leads to inert passivity, namely, to disengagement from responsibility. This view is found not only in Levinas’s early texts but throughout his entire body of work, up to his 1988 interview with Francoise Armengaud, published in De l’oblitération, which deals with Sosno’s sculptures. There Levinas says, “Beauty’s perfection enforces silence without taking care of the rest. It is the guardian of silence. It lets things happen [il laisse faire]. Here are the limits of the aesthetic civilization.… [Here is] what makes people indifferent to the suffering of the world and keeps them in this indifference” (DO 8). But does this imply that all art leads to anti-ethical indifference? Does art always generate inert passivity?
In De l’oblitération, Levinas answers that art can lead either to inert passivity or to “obliteration.” Obliterative art shows the incompleteness of reality (DO 18). It “denounces the easiness or light insouciance of beauty and recall[s] the damage [usures] attendant on being, the ‘repairs’ that cover it and its crossings out [ratures], visible or hidden” (DO 12). Obliterative art, like Sosno’s sculptures, shows the “secret” of being, its “drama,” namely, the fact that being is open to otherwise than being (DO 30). It can therefore be regarded as a “window” onto ethics (DO 26).18 As Levinas puts it, “Obliteration interrupts the image’s silence.” Thanks to its incompleteness, such art leads to dialogue and breaks the closure of idolatry. It transforms the synchronic arrest of time into diachrony. As a result, “obliteration leads to the other” (DO 28).
We should not be too quick to conclude that for Levinas there are two kinds of art, one that is good (because it leads to ethics) and one that is bad (because it is idolatry). In De l’oblitération, Levinas explains that obliteration is the opposite of the “magical operation” of art. But he still wonders whether obliterative art can ever have the same ethical depth as a human face (DO 20). Put differently, uncertainty remains even about obliterative art. Art of such a kind might be a window onto ethics, but Levinas is not sure that this is so. This uncertainty recalls an earlier ambivalence in the 1947 essay “The Other in Proust.” As Robbins shows, Levinas’s distinction between idolatry and art leading to ethics is conceptualized there as the contrast between poetry and prose: “Neither poetry nor prose represents for Levinas a genre of art but originary experiences, for the prose in question is nothing other than the sobriety, the gravity of ethical language.”19 In “The Other in Proust,” Levinas compares “poetic” incantations negatively to the “prose” of philosophy (NP 118; PN 100). However, Levinas seems to hesitate. When he finally calls Proust a “poet of the social” (NP 121; PN 102), he concludes that his poetry situates “the real in a relation with what forever remains other—with the other as absence and mystery. [Proust’s most profound teaching] consists … in inaugurating a dialectic that breaks definitively with Parmenides” (NP 123; PN 105).20 Therefore, poetic incantations are now regarded as ethical. While in De l’oblitération Levinas is uncertain about the ethical aspect of obliteration, in “The Other in Proust” he is uncertain about the magical aspect of poetry. From the beginning to the end of his œuvre, Levinas wonders whether works of art lead to ethics or to idolatry, and never reaches a final decision.
This indecision stems from the fact that, for Levinas, all forms of art include an idolatrous and an ethical side, or, rather, an idolatrous danger and an ethical potentiality. Indeed, “two sides” may be too strong a term. One could argue that these are not two distinct and competing aspects of the work of art but two ways of approaching the selfsame attribute: the same feature leading to two possible behaviors. In “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry,” Levinas says that the Torah is at the same moment an affirmation of “religion” and a rejection of idolatry. One could infer from this that the Bible describes ethical moments alongside unethical ones. However, Levinas immediately rejects this reading and formulates a more radical thesis: there is a risk of idolatry toward the Torah itself. The Torah that denounces idolatry can itself become an idol. Therefore, “Torah” means “the reading or study of a text that protects itself from eventual idolatry of this very text, by renewing, through continual exegesis—and exegesis of that exegesis—the immutable letters and hearing in them the breath of the living God” (AHN 71; ITN 59). Idolatry is not a defined set of events and rituals distinct from an ethical set of events and rituals but a way of approaching something that can also be approached ethically.21 As Levinas writes in another Talmudic reading, “The question of ontology will thus find its answer in the description of the way Israel receives the Torah” (QLT 90; NTR 41). There are different ways to receive the Torah, of which two are ethics and the “idolatry of the letter” (QLT 19; NTR 7).
Does this mean that the Torah and the work of art contain a similar ambivalence? It certainly does not mean that art and Torah are the same thing. Torah is the truest expression of the fight against idolatry, while art can lead to either idolatry or ethics. The Torah stands against an idolatry that menaces everything including itself, while art is a priori indifferent to its possible ethical or non-ethical effects. However, the comparison between art and Torah is fruitful in making us realize that ethics and idolatry are intertwined. Their knot constitutes the greatest challenge of Levinas’s philosophy, as he will have to avoid the risk of idolatry and ontology in his own writing.
Levinas and Writing
Avoiding the risk of idolatry means avoiding closure. In Levinas’s terminology, it means disrupting the “said.”22 By “said” (dit), Levinas means the linguistic expression of things—the manifestation of presence through discourse. Given that the other interrupts presence and, accordingly, cannot be grasped by concepts, the ethical relationship between the ego and the other is not a “said” but a “saying” (dire). “Saying” recovers both the intentionality of language toward the other and the difference between this intentionality and the ontological “said.”23 “Saying” is “dedication to the other” (AE 223; OB 143). It is a form of language that does not reduce the other to known categories and, hence, does not turn otherness into sameness.24
However, a philosophical text is, by definition, a “said.” Put differently, in his work, Levinas necessarily employs ontological language—language that creates closure. To express the distinction between “saying” and the “said,” and to emphasize the ethical
