or my being ravished from discourse, I retie its thread.… Are we not at this very moment in the process of deleting the exit that our whole essay is attempting to take, thus encircling our position from all sides?” (AE 262; OB 169).25
If so, the core of Levinas’s philosophical project will be the attempt to write in a way that interrupts the “said,” while knowing that the “said” must have the final word.26 Two questions must be asked: (1) How does Levinas interrupt his own “said”? (2) What is the status of the final word of his “said”? To the two already mentioned levels on which ethics may have the power to shatter ontology—the relationship between human beings and the relationship between a reader and her book—we must add a third: the relationship between a writer and his writing. We may therefore wonder whether Levinas’s effort to interrupt his own “said” is congruent with ethical practice in general. More exactly, we wonder whether ethics as philosophy (what Levinas does in his written works) and ethics as meeting the other (what people do when they encounter another human being) are the same. To explain this point, I will focus on three commentaries of Levinas’s distinction between the “said” and “saying”—those of Derrida, Nancy, and Ricœur.
In “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” Derrida asks how Levinas “manage[s] to inscribe or let the wholly other be inscribed within the language of being, of the present, of essence, of the same, of economy etc., within its syntax and lexicon, under its law” (ECM 166; AVM 150). He answers that the solution need not involve going beyond language. Indeed, Levinas’s writing is open to the other, “in such a way that it is less a matter of exceeding that language than of treating it otherwise with its own possibilities.” In a close reading of Otherwise than Being, Derrida shows how Levinas uses repetitions that dis-locate discourse both spatially and temporally. These spatial and temporal moves create a series of tears (déchirures), knots, and hiatuses, which Derrida calls a seriasure (series and erasure) (ECM 182; AVM 167). In such a process, each philosopheme is “disarticulated, made inadequate and anterior to itself, absolutely anachronic to whatever it said about it” (ECM 185; AVM 170).
Derrida’s reading of Levinas’s literary style echoes his own description of différance: “Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element that is said to be ‘present,’ appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself but retains the mark of a past element and already lets itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to a future element.”27 For Derrida, Levinas’s literary style is a kind of hyperbolic différance. It is thus no surprise that he calls it a “performative without present” (ECM 187; AVM 173), which echoes Derrida’s own “performative to come,” also called “the messianic.”28 By this, Derrida refers to the creative part of writing, namely, what “overflows” language and generates the displacement of meaning.29 If so, Levinas’s writing not only describes the openness of the subject to the other but exhibits it in its own form.
In “L’intrigue littéraire de Levinas,” which prefaces the third volume of the recently published Œuvres, Nancy reiterates Derrida’s understanding of Levinas’s style as made of tears. Nancy calls this style an “intrigue,” pointing not only to the intricacy of hiatuses and knots between the same and the other but also to the use of literary schemes in Levinas’s writing.30 Nancy stresses that Levinas’s first works, unpublished until recently, were pieces of poetry and fiction. In other words, Levinas’s rejection of literature (in texts such as “Reality and Its Shadow”) should be seen against the backdrop of the fact that Levinas had previously sought to express “the truth” in novels.31 The young Levinas, Nancy says, had a “disposition” or even a “drive” toward literature, which was from the beginning intimately tied in with his philosophical project.32 He “saw in literature the place that would perhaps be most suited to presenting the intrigue of the other and relationships, approach and contact.”33 Later on, Levinas changed his mind, or at least he abandoned his efforts in fiction, and aimed instead to reflect the “intrigue of the other” through literary “twists, manners or behaviors” in his theoretical style.34
In Autrement: Lecture d’Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas, Ricœur comments on the correlation between “saying” and “said” in Otherwise than Being.35 He shows that this correlation is described in a declarative tone reinforced by an insistent use of hyperbole. By contrast with Derrida, who focuses on Levinas’s repetitions and erasures, and Nancy, who underlines Levinas’s use of literary strategies, Ricœur insists on Levinas’s use of “extremes” and his “increment of pathic in pathetic and pathologic.”36 The “excessive” gesture culminates in Levinas’s “substitution,” or sacrifice for the other, which is so extreme that it cannot be expressed in words and is only approximated in a “crescendo: persecution, outrage, expiation.” Ricœur suggests: “Is this not the admission that ethics disconnected from ontology has no language that would be direct, proper, appropriate?”37 The notion of a “saying” that will never become a “said” leads to a hyperbolic argumentation that constitutes “verbal terrorism.”38
However, says Ricœur, it is this verbal terrorism that generates the necessity of the “said” expressed by what Levinas calls the “entrance of the third party” (AE 245, OB 257; PP 345, PP’ 168). The “entrance of the third party” is not an event but the fact that “in the proximity of the other, all the others than the other obsess me” (AE 246; OB 158). The ego never faces one single “other” but many; there are always multiple people to take into account at the same time. Therefore, on the substitution of the ego to the other is superimposed the question of the possible substitution to other others, called by Levinas “the third party.” The ego compares the third with the other and weighs its responsibility in light of the needs of these different others. The question and comparison implied by the expression “the third” (or “the entrance of the third”) constitute a reenactment of the “said,” which is ineluctable.
For Ricœur, these processes mean that Levinas, a philosopher who writes philosophical books, speaks from the position of the third—the position that introduces questioning and comparing.39 A philosopher, says Ricœur, cannot be satisfied with statements about ethical responsibility. He or she must question ethical responsibility. If so, the “said” is an interruption of “saying” no less than the opposite. That is, in Levinas’s writing, “saying” interrupts the “said” but the “said” also interrupts “saying.” However, the latter is not a simple “return” to ontology that would destroy the ethical “saying.” The disturbance of ethics by the “said,” claims Ricœur, is a special case of ontology interrupted by ethical responsibility. Ricœur calls this “a post-ethical quasi-ontology.”40 In other words, for Ricœur Levinas describes three distinct situations: (1) pure ontology (or idolatry), namely, the mechanism of presence and sameness; (2) pure ethics, namely, the rupture of presence induced by responsibility for the other; and (3) post-ethical quasi-ontology, which comes with “the entrance of the third party.”
No doubt, Levinas’s formulations lead to much confusion. At first sight, it seems that ethics comes to interrupt ontology: the other is a “stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez-soi]” (TI 28; TI’ 39). If such is the case, ontology precedes ethics. However, Levinas makes very clear that ethics precedes ontology. It is to emphasize this point that he formulates “the entrance of the third party” in a theatrical way, as if the third were entering a scene where the ego and the other are already present: “The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction” (AE 245; OB 157). However, this chronology is broken as soon as it is announced because, as recalled, the third appears in the face of the other. It is impossible to establish a chronology in which ontology and then ethics, or ethics and then ontology, combine into what Ricœur calls a “quasi-ontology.” I argue that there is only
