LEVINAS ON LISTENING

Hagi Kenaan

What can an attentive ear hear, listening at the doorway of language, which by the significations of which it is made clos­es on its own apertures? Is it perhaps reasonable to respect the decency of this closed door. This door thus both opened and closed is the extra-ordinary duplicity o f the Enigma.

—Emmanuel Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon” 1

Levinas’s philosophy of alterity is touched by an irresolvable tension, one that exists between the radical otherness, or strong transcendence, of the Other and the Other’s concrete manifes­tation in everyday life. The other person speaks to me. She is pre­sent in the things she says; but, her unique presence in language “is an event irreducible to evidence.”2 Her “presence [is] more direct than visible manifestation, and at the same time, [it is] a remote presence,” that remains fundamentally foreign to the phenomenal and conceptual horizons of my consciousness as a listener. “It is pre-eminently the presence of exteriority.”3

For Levinas, the Other is the mark of a non-negotiable outside. The “privileged manifestation of the Other” stems from the uniqueness of her presence, “a living presence,” that cannot be framed as the content of our intentional consciousness. The Oth­er’s presence transcends the very structure of appearance; it “consists in undoing the form” through which the possibility of appearance coiild open up in the first place.4 The Other’s speak­ing “precedes the hearing of any order;” It is the “pure testimo­ny” of “the Infinite which is not accessible to the unity of apper­ception, a non-appearing [which is] disproportionate to the pres­

82/K enaan

ent.”5 But, can Levinas’s insistence on the Other’s non-phenome- nal character ever be compatible with his language of “presence” and “manifestation”? Can Levinas’s language make sense inde­pendently of the realm of the phenomenal?

Levinas makes no effort to resolve or mitigate this apparent contradiction. On the contrary: his explicit refusal to admit the Other’s Saying into any kind of actual contact with ordinary ex­perience typically goes hand in hand with an opposed emphasis on the concreteness of the Other’s presence in language. Levinas writes as follows:

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcom e his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity o f the I, which means exactly: to have the idea o f infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcom ed this conversation is a teaching . . . it com es from the exterior and brings m e m ore than I contain.6

Should we understand Levinas’s Other as a “non-appearing, disproportionate to the present” or alternatively as embodying a unique kind of presence the relation to which “is primordially enacted as conversation”?7 Levinas is clearly aware of this tension; but whereas in Totality and Infinity he does not explicitly reflect on its significance or implications, in his later writings, he directly addresses this tension in which he sees the sign of an acute meth­odological problem.8

T he Saving and the Said

As he introduces the philosophical agenda of Otherwise than Be­ing, for example, Levinas presents the problem that preoccupies him in terms of the distinction between the Saying (le dire) and the Said {le dit). Whereas language consists in a saying of things, its Saying cannot be reduced to the things that are Said. Beyond the Said, the Saying is that movement of alterity without which lan­guage cannot open on to meaning. The Said, in contrast, is taken by Levinas to consist of an opposite kind of movement whose telos is closure. The Said is the closure of sense via the framing, the determination, of shared linguistic contents. Hence, whereas the Said marks a domain of linguistic possibilities that are accessible to everyone but belong to no one in particular, the roots of the Saying develop from an actual rapport with the presence of the singular

Levinas on Listening/83

person—the Other—who speaks to us. The saying grows out of the resonance of alterity, of the unbridgeable distance which, for Levinas, grounds the happening of genuine proximity.

The distinction between the Saying and the Said is necessary for Levinas in order to point to a residue of alterity that cannot be subsumed under the shared cognitive structure of language. Yet, in pondering the character of the relationship between these two dimensions of language, it becomes clear to him that lan­guage’s trace of transcendence cannot show itself independently of the common structure of linguistic intelligibility. For Levinas, this seems to imply that the philosophical gesture of opening up a place for language’s dimension of alterity ultimately covers up that possibility. This is because the philosophical articulation of alterity is necessarily dependent on the language of conceptual content in which it cannot resonate. Typically understood as a uniform, self-identical and self-sufficient form of meaning, con­tent seems necessarily indifferent to the claims of an individual’s otherness and radical singularity. Content remains completely unaffected by the singular tongue, the breath, the voice that speaks. And thus, according to Levinas, “the Saying,” becomes, “the discretion of an unheard-of proposition, an insinuation, im­mediately reduced to nothing.”9

For Levinas, the question of the possibility of the Saying’s man­ifestation vis-a-vis the domineering structure of the Said, the pos­sibility of hearing the Saying becomes a central methodological problem with which, in fact, he never stops grappling. Levinas writes,

We have been seeking the otherwise than being from the be­ginning, and as soon as it is conveyed before us it is betrayed in the said that dominates the saying which states it. A meth­odological problem arises here, whether the pre-original ele­ment of saying . . . can be led to betray itself by showing itself in a theme . .. and whether this betrayal can be reduced; whether one can at the same time know and free the known of the marks which thematization leaves on it by subordinat­ing it to ontology. Everything shows itself in the price of this betrayal, even the unsayable. In this betrayal the indiscretion in regard to the unsayable, which is probably the very task of philosophy, becomes possible. 10

Since the Said is the essential structure of language, it neces­sarily dominates all instances of the Saying. And this means that in order to be able to show itself, the Saying must “betray itself.”

84/K enaan

Language and B etrayal

The Saying betrays itself because it can only show itself in the form of that which it is not, i.e., a theme. Structurally, this is not a new philosophical problem. Philosophy is not unfamiliar with the sort of moments in which its own language seems to become a limitation, moments in which the structure of philosophical language seems unable to reflect the philosopher’s vision of tran­scendence. What is nevertheless unique in Levinas’s discussion is his insistence on articulating the problem of transcendence inde- pendendy of the horizons of ontological discourse altogether. For Levinas, the language of ontology is a language whose move­ment is regulated by its attunement to Being. As such, it is a lan­guage constituted by a concept of sameness that continues to dominate philosophy also at those relatively rare moments in which philosophy gestures at the transcendent. In other words, for Levinas, the language of essence and sameness is not only the sign of positivistic philosophy: it is, in his view, just as dominant in philosophies of transcendence in which the concept of Being continues to echo through its negative reproductions.

This leads Levinas to an understanding that the question of transcendence must be articulated “otherwise than being from the beginning.” That is, its articulation must be part of a radical attempt to set down the topography of a new question zone, a new discursive space, that will not permit the “otherwise” and the “beyond” to slide back, as they traditionally do, into the realm of the thinkable. In Levinas’s writing, this new topography is made possible by a displacement of Being as the paradigmatic origin, the principle and center, of the meaningful. In place of the philo­sophical setting in which Being thematically discloses itself to Man, Levinas points to an unexpected point of exteriority that lurks in the enigma of the other person. The other person is the source of a “pre-original element of saying” that disrupts the or­der of the ontological by fracturing the hegemony of the same. In other words, Levinas envisions a responsive form of listening through which the space of thinking breaks open to a dimension of exteriority. The transcendent which calls for my listening is “a saying prior to language . . . without which no language . . . would be possible.” Remaining transcendent, the source of the meaningful has nothing to do with the representability of the ontological order. It is located, rather, in a mode of proximity by which the language of the other person can, in the first place, say something to us. As suggested, however, the very attempt to turn

Levinas on Listening/85

the notion of the Saying into the Archimedean point of his think­ing obliges Levinas to take issue with a methodological problem from which he cannot easily escape.

Levinas thus recognizes that the question of the relationship between the Said and the Saying and the question of how to pre­sent the saying in a thematic language, i.e., in the language of the said, are intertwined. He recognizes, in other words, that his philosophical understanding of language not only bears directly on his own use of philosophical language, but that, more specifi­cally, it calls into question the validity, the effectiveness, the truth of his own language. This problem is specifically accentuated in the context of Levinas’s claim that the Saying can never appear in its own unique form, that the Said is its inner structure of man­ifestation. He writes:

This pre-original saying does move into a language in which saying and said are correlative of one another. But the cor­relation of the saying and the said, that is, the subordination of the saying to the said, to the linguistic system and to ontol­ogy, is the price that manifestation demands. In language qua said everything is conveyed before us, be it at the price of a betrayal. 11

Speaking of the Saying cannot be done, Levinas knows, without paying a price. The question is, of course, how big the price is, and whether paying the price would, in the last resort, leave Levinas’s philosophy bankrupt. “Would not the bankruptcy of transcendence,” Levinas asks, “be but that of a theology that the- matizes the transcending in the logos, assigns a term to the pass­ing of transcendence”? But, isn’t Levinas’s language always al­ready captivated by the thematic rule of the said? Is there a way in which Levinas’s philosophical language could allow this “pre­original saying” to show itself without betraying itself? Or, is the language of philosophy, by its very nature, a language of betray­al? Levinas asks: “How is the saying, in its primordial enigma, said?” “How can transcendence withdraw from esse while being signaled in it?”

Levinas’s Language

There are different ways of answering these questions. One kind of answer is given by Levinas himself in the very act of writ­ing Otherwise than Being, namely, in experimenting with a style of writing that deliberately challenges the hegemony of the Said.

8 6 /K enaan

Hence, according to Simon Critchley, for example, “in Otherwise than Being, Levinas’s thinking and, more specifically his style of writing, become increasingly sensitive to the problem of how the ethical saying is to be conceptualized—and necessarily betrayed —-within the ontological said.”12 This is what Critchley calls “Le­vinas’s deconstructive turn,” i.e., Levinas’s “persistent decon­struction of the limits of ontology and its claim to conceptual mastery, while also recognizing the unavoidability of the said.” In a corollary manner, Critchley suggests that we read Otherwise than Being as “a performative disruption of the language of ontology.” For him, “Otherwise than Being is the performative enactment of an ethical writing which endlessly runs up against the limits of language.”13 But, even if it is a “performative enactment of an eth­ical writing” that Levinas is ultimately after, and I think it is, the question still persists: how can the Saying be Said?

Since Levinas is clearly preoccupied with the possibility of re­sisting, subverting, overcoming, the reign conceptual content, the performative dimension of language suggests itself as a nat­ural candidate for locating the event of the Saying. Indeed, when explaining Levinas’s treatment of the Saying, the scholarship on Levinas quite often returns to the performative as a mode of lan­guage that could help us open a dimension of meaning that tran­scends the horizons of the cognitive. But, isn’t this solution too easy? If we could really get hold of the ethical dimension of lan­guage by splitting up the phenomenon of language according to, say, an Austinian distinction between constatives and performa­tives, wouldn’t that completely deflate the seriousness of Le­vinas’s methodological problem? If the Saying can be understood in terms of the fact that language has, in addition to its proposi­tional core, a performative or emotive side, then it remains un­clear why this fact cannot be expressed in the language of ontol­ogy and, from a different perspective, why we should take Le­vinas’s position to be as radical as it claims to-be.

Another way to put this is to say that when we explain the dis­tinction between the Said and the Saying in terms of the para­digmatic analysis of speech acts, we are inevitably buying into a predominant metaphysical picture of language that, in principle, cannot make room for the possibility of a transcendent alterity. Moreover, in adverting to a given, albeit predominant, conceptu­alization of speech (such as, for example, a pragmatic picture of speech acts), we are unavoidably suppressing a question that we must ourselves open up and tackle: what exactly is the relation­ship between the Said and the Saying? This question cannot be

Levinas on Listening/87

opened up in a genuine way as long as we internalize a binary pic­ture of language that is based on the traditional oppositions be­tween what language communicates and how it communicates, between the content and the act of speech.

How t o A nswer the Q uestion

Given that the saying is cancelled out by its very appearance, the question remains: is it possible to encounter in language the alterity of the Other? Is alterity or Otherness something that could show itself in language? As a first step toward an answer, we need to recognize that the questions we are trying to answer typ­ically involve a certain conceptual pitfall, one that is hard to resist and into which, I believe, Levinas himself occasionally stumbles. In asking about the possibility of the Saying’s manifestation in language, we seem to be weighing the plausibility of a possibility whose realization is apparently impossible. That is, we take it upon ourselves to think of the possibility of the Saying from with­in the horizons of a logical space which, in being what it is, i.e., logical, cannot accommodate that possibility, cannot make room for that which is antagonistic to conceptual structure. Hence, if we reply to this question of possibility in its narrow sense, then our answer must indeed be negative. At the same time, we need to notice that this negativity which the question forces on us is one that reveals nothing new or interesting, nothing beyond the fact that the space of logical possibilities cannot contain that which, by definition, it cannot contain. In other words, even if it is, in a certain sense, correct, the negative answer to the question of the Saying’s possibility cannot bring us any closer to an under­standing of the Saying; and what it does, rather, is to close off any insight we might have into the character of its concrete presence. To put this simply: if we find it impossible to encounter the Other’s Saying, this is because his or her Saying has already met us. The Saying of the other person is always already there; its pres­ence is concrete and conspicuous and does not depend on any form of logical assessment. In other words, Levinas’s starting point is not a concept or an idea, but an actual experience, the experience of being affected by the touch of alterity that always reverberates in the language of the other person. Levinas is ac­quainted with the Saying in a manner that is immediate and indu­bitable but not necessarily demonstrable conceptually. More ac­curately, the presence of the Saying is precisely what the philoso­pher cannot deduce or construe in a logical way. He cannot

88/KENAAN

“bring” (as it were) the Saying to us, but he can help us in becom­ing responsive to its evasive presence. Here, the measure of a phi­losopher’s pride or modesty is put to a test: a proud failure or a modest success.

The question of whether the saying could or could not be heard in language is not a theoretical question, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. This is not a question about the struc­ture or qualities of an independent object, but one that is inti­mately tied to our position as listeners. In this sense, the first thing to remember is that the Saying is not a given. The Saying is a real dimension of language, but it never presents itself to the lis­tener in the manner a bowl of soup, for example, shows itself to the person dining. In other words, the Saying is present, but its presence never takes the form of, and can never be framed as, a given fact which is simply what it is.

The Saying is not a given. Yet, we should not understand its ab­sence from the factual order as indicative of its non-phenomenal character. The Saying hides itself from a thematic language of facts; yet, again, we should not jump to the global conclusion, one which is occasionally suggested by Levinas himself, that the language of reflection is, in principle, totally incapable of echo­ing the Saying. The Saying calls for the suspension, perhaps the transcendence, of cognitive or propositional content, but we should remember that, in itself, a non-conceptual or non-cogni- tive vision of language does not necessarily bring us any closer to the Saying. In other words, as we search for the Saying, it is not enough for us to identify the delimiting effect of language’s prop­ositional structure. We must also free ourselves from the tempta­tion to totalize the effect of language’s limits and thereby turn our critique of these limits into yet another and perhaps more dire form of captivity: the idea that the structure of language is a form of captivity is often more captivating than the limiting struc­tures of language themselves. The Saying cannot be understood within the horizons of a thinking that operates with a given de­scription of what it looks for. And in particular, it cannot echo in a thinking that takes for granted the character of the relationship between the Saying and the Said. The Saying requires a mode of responsiveness to that which cannot be thought in advance. This is what listening is about. But how do we go about this philosoph­ically?

To begin with, we should acknowledge the fact that Levinas’s Saying involves a real conceptual difficulty. The unsetding effect of this difficulty is something we should not brush aside, but

Levinas on Listening/89

focus on, rather, as an important reminder: It reminds us of the need to resist the kind of explanations so common among inter­preters of Levinas that level out the irresolvable conceptual ten­sion that allows the Saying to appear in the first place. The Saying does not call for, it does not need, our conceptual, logical, or ana­lytical reaffirmation. What it awaits for, rather, is a further articu­lation of an intricate tension that marks the subliminal, mosdy silent ways in which a radical transcendence can dwell in the fi­nite structures of the language we speak. Consequently, our task is to look for ways of being responsive to, and responsible for, the resonance of this tension without stifling it. We need to reflect on language in a manner that can respond to the Saying without positing it as a given. Or in other words, we need a phenomenol­ogy-

Phenom enology and Response

Can we speak of a phenomenology in the context of Otherwise than Being? Doesn’t the language of Otherwise than Being mark Levinas’s final departure from phenomenology? In his later work, Levinas is openly ambivalent, to say the least, about the value of phenomenology. In itself, this ambivalence is not a new theme in Levinas. But, whereas in Totality and Infinity, for exam­ple, Levinas’s criticism of certain aspects of Husserlian phenom­enology goes hand in hand with an explicit acknowledgment of his debt to Husserl and, more importantly, goes together with a continual practicing of phenomenological analysis, in Otherwise than Being Levinas’s explicit attitude toward phenomenology be­comes wholly and manifestly critical. An indication of the man­ner in which the shift from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being involves a departure from phenomenology can be found in the very titles of these major works. While Totality and Infinity is a philosophical work for which the relational term “and” is cen­tral, the later work is a philosophy of an “Otherwise” and a “Beyond.” Whereas the language of Totality and Infinity emerges from and remains committed to the horizons of an “in between” that the term “and” signifies, the thinking of Otherwise than Being articulates itself within a discursive space that is no longer entangled in between oppositions. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence Levinas continues indeed the exploration of such themes as sameness and otherness, interiority and exteriority, ontology and ethics, etc., but this is done in a language that has withdrawn itself from the tensions that are constitutive to the

90/K enaan

actual relationship between these terms. The language of an “Otherwise” no longer understands itself as located in between totality and infinity. It is not a language of an in-between, but one that seeks to speak (of) transcendence beyond the burden of the finite.

In “Meaning and Sense,” Levinas criticizes phenomenology for its insistence on thinking the problem of meaning only within the domain of its ordinary unfolding, i.e., for its unwillingness to acknowledge “the separateness of the intelligible.”14 “For a Phe- nomenologisf ’ he writes, “a meaning cannot be separated from the access leading to it. The access is part of the meaning itself. The scaffolding is never taken down; the ladder never pulled up.”15 Indeed, in Otherwise than Being Levinas makes the effort to pull up the ladder and take the scaffolding down. But, in distanc­ing himself from phenomenology and its rootedness in the con­crete, Levinas also becomes less tolerant toward the unsettling presence of certain tensions that binary thought cannot resolve. In other words, his growing insistence on locating the Saying beyond anything that belongs to daily experience ultimately forces the phenomenon of the Saying into the formal constraints of a “methodological problem.” Levinas understands that if we do not wish to lose the Saying (philosophically) then we cannot radically sever it from our experience of ordinary language. And yet, since his vision of radical transcendence has no interest in embracing the inner tensions of the concrete Saying, his render­ing of the phenomenon is forced into the formal terms of a con­tradiction.

The complexity of Levinas’s relation to phenomenology calls for an independent and more comprehensive discussion. But, for our purposes, it suffices to notice that despite a rhetoric that is explicitly antagonistic to phenomenology, Otherwise than Being nevertheless hides a few crucial moments in which Levinas’s phe­nomenological sensitivity appears to be the driving force of his thinking and stands in opposition to his declared intentions. Hence, for example, as he reflects on the kind of philosophical language he should use in discussing the Saying, Levinas dismiss­es phenomenology which exemplifies, in his view, the language of ontology and totality.

What does saying signify before signifying a saying? Can we try to show the crux of a plot that is not reducible to phe­nomenology, that is, to the thematization of the said, and to the description of the saying as having its function purely

Levinas on Listening/91

correlative with the said .. . Saying signifies otherwise than as an apparitor presenting essence and entities. This is one of the central theses of the present text. 16

Levinas turns his back on phenomenology and does so in a de­clarative manner. For him, phenomenology is “the thematization of the Said,” a form of reflection that presents “essence and enti­ties” and can therefore only betray “the plot of the Saying.” Yet, as he turns, in the very next passage, to explain the relationship between the Said and the Saying, the mood and attunement of his reflection is uniquely phenomenological. Levinas writes,

The plot of the saying that is absorbed in the said is not exhausted in this manifestation. It imprints its trace on the thematization itself, which hesitates between, on the one hand, structuration, order of a configuration of entities, world and history for historiographers and, on the other hand, the order of non-nominalized apophansis of the other, in which the said remains a proposition, a proposition made to a neighbor, “a signifyingness dealt” to the other.” Being, the verb of a proposition, is, to be sure, a theme, but it makes essence resound without entire deadening the echo of the saying that bears it and brings it to light. 17

Levinas suggests that in order to recognize “the plot of the Say­ing,” we must adopt a perspective that would allow us to reveal an indeterminate field of meaning lying in between the end points of what is completely beyond language and what is completely identical to the language of the Said. The Saying appears as that which in our encounter with language typically passes unnoticed. The Saying is “absorbed in the said” and as such it seems indistin­guishable from the propositional. But, as could only be revealed by an attentiveness to the concreteness of the phenomenon, this is not the case. Indeed, in the world of facts that appears through the frame of the propositional, the Saying can only appear in the form of the Said. But, if we (re-) position ourselves in relation to the phenomenon of language and allow the event of language to show itself in a richriess and complexity that overflows the struc­ture of propositions, we shall see that Saying “is not exhausted in the manifestation” of the Said. In other words, the manner in which Levinas articulates the difference between the Saying and the Said is, at least primarily, not conceptual but rather percep­tual. If we follow Wittgenstein’s phenomenological dictum “don’t think, look!,” we may say that Levinas distinction is indeed an­

92/K enaan

chored in and grows out of a looking rather than in a thinking. The presque-rien—to use Jankelevitch—by which the Saying mani­fests itself in ordinary speech is clearly not a something that eas­ily lends itself to conceptual appropriation. The appearance of the Saying cannot be deduced in any a-priori manner, but calls for an actual attentiveness to the unfolding of speech. Without such an attentiveness it would be impossible to see that the Saying is always already woven into the Said, that “it imprints its trace on the thematization itself,” just like a touch of sadness that may sud­denly appear in a smiling face or the sound of longing that unex­pectedly resonates in an otherwise sarcastic remark.

Listening At the D oorway of Language

This is where we return to the motto of this paper:

What can an attentive ear hear, listening at the doorway of language, which by the significations of which it is made clos­es on its own apertures? Is it perhaps reasonable to respect the decency of this closed door. This door thus both opened and closed is the extra-ordinary duplicity of the Enigma. 18

Our position vis-a-vis the Other’s language is not a simple one. The Other’s saying never given to us, although it is always there between us. Indeed, the limits of language are real and may often appear to be restrictive. Yet, these limits and limitations may also be experienced as a call for creativity: the burden of these limits is a reflection of our responsibility. That is, we cannot hope to hear the Saying if we allow the predominant structure of lan­guage to exclude or separate us from the question of our free­dom and our responsibility. The Saying is not a fantasy and we should take measures that it does not become one. Listening to the Other’s idiosyncratic presence in language is not a matter of transgressing the boundaries of philosophical or everyday lan­guage. Going beyond the limits of language will not open up for us the possibility of encountering the alterity of the other person. Our task, rather, is one of “listening at the doorway of language:” respecting the “the decency of this closed door” which may hide an unexpected opening.

Facing a door that is “both opened and closed,” our situation resembles the position of the “man from the country” which Kafka describes in “Before the Law.” The man from the country seeks to be admitted to the Law, but the doorkeeper, standing

Levinas on Listening/93

before the Law, insists that he cannot grant him admittance. “The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. ‘It is possible’, says the doorkeeper ‘but not at the moment.”’19 The man from the country is, of course, not happy with what is said, but he never questions the doorkeeper’s prohibition and inter­nalizes his veto as if it were a clear and definitive manifestation of a fact: he accepts the fact that there is a given necessity, an impos­sibility. Levinas’s image of a door which is “both opened and closed” is such an impossibility; it is a possibility which, in the realm of propositional thought, registers as a contradiction. Internalizing the logical structure of the Said, Kafka’s man from the country never tries to actually enter the gate. He only asks for permission to do so. And since, he never obtains permission, he ends up spending his whole lifetime at the gate of the Law.

The man of the country, in other words, embraces the limits posed by the language of the doorkeeper without pondering the question of what freedom and responsibility may mean in the face of these limits. Moreover, in internalizing the Law’s prohibi­tion so unquestioningly, the man from the country does not rec­ognize that in addition to exercising a veto, the doorkeeper has ultimately done nothing to stop him from entering. Indeed, the gate to Law “stands open as usual” all along. The man from the country focuses on the impossibility of entrance to the Law as asserted in the language of the doorkeeper, and never actually attempts to investigate or challenge it. He never dares to explore the consequences of leaving the sphere of possibility embodied in the doorkeeper’s statements and never attempts to take a sin­gle step through the gate. In treating the limitations of his situa­tion in a manner that allegedly frees him from the burden of his freedom, the man from the country, in fact, absolves himself of any real responsibility. He hides from responsibility and his hid­ing place is the virtuality of the language of given facts, the lan­guage of ontology, the Said.

“So how does it happen,” asks the man before dying “that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged admit­tance?” The doorkeeper answers, “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you.”20 Levinas’s understanding of the question of listening is similar. As the Said never grants permission beyond itself, an encounter with the Saying appears as an impossibility. The door to the Other’s lan­guage will never open. And yet, when our responsiveness to the language of the other person is, at heart, a, responsibility, it be­comes clear that the door has always been open.

94/KENAAN

NOTES

‘Emmanuel Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon.” IN: Basic Philosophical Writ­ings, ed. by A.T. Peperzak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi, (Bloomington 1996), p. 74.“Emmanuel Levinas, Totality an d Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, (Duquesne University Press 1977), p. 66. Hereafter, 77.377, 66.*TI, 66.“Levinas, “God and Philosophy.” In: Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (Dusquesne University Press, 1981), p. 170.°77, 51.’’TI, 39.“Here, the need to respond to Derrida’s critique of his language of presence plays an important role.“Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon”, p. 74.'"Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Duquesne Uni­versity Press 1981), p. 7. Hereafter, OB."OB, 6.'“Simon Critchley, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 18. '““Introduction,” p. 19.'■'Emmanuel Levinas, “Meaning and Sense.” In: Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A.Lingis (Dusquesne University Press, 1981), p. 84.‘““Meaning and Sense,” p. 85.,sOB, 46."OB, 47.‘““Enigma and Phenomenon”, p. 74.'“Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” The Complete Stories, ed. N. Glatzer (New York: Schoken Books, 1971), p.3.

Levinas on Listening/95

Editor...........................Mark Me Vann, F.S.C., St. M ary’s Collegeo f California

Associate Editor........ Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Lewis University

Assistant Editor........ William C. Graham, College o fSt. Scholastica

-----------♦-----------

The views expressed in the articles in Listening/Journal of Religion and Culture remain those of the authors. Their publication does not constitute an endorsement, explicit or otherwise, by the editors.

-----------+-----------

Listening is published three times a year in Winter, Spring, and Fall. All correspondence (including subscriptions) should be sent to the Editor, Listening/Journal of Religion and Culture, Lewis University, Unit 1108, One University Parkway, Romeoville, IL 60446-2298. Tel: (815) 838- 0500, ext. 5477. Subscription rates (prices include postage): USA and CANADA: one year individual rate $20; two years $36. Libraries and Institutions: one year $26; two years $46. Foreign rates: one year individ­ual rate $24; two years $44; Libraries, Institutions, and all others: one year $30; two years $55. © 2008 Listening, Incorporated [Non-profit journal].

------ ♦-------

Microfilm: Complete volumes of Listening/Journal of Religion and Culture are available on microfilm. Address inquiries to: University Microfilm International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106. ISSN 0024-4414

SPRING, 2008 CONTENTS

Introduction: Emmanuel Levinas: Phenomenologist, 56Ethicist, Jew

David Ross Fryer, Guest Editor

‘H’ Before ‘L’: Husserl Before Levinas 61Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

“Not Only an Alter Ego”: Reconsidering Alterity 71with Levinas and Husserl

Michael R. Paradiso-Michau

Levinas on Listening 82Hagi Kenaan

Levinas’s Otherwise than Being. Is an Ethics of 96Substitution a Jewish Ethics?

Aryeh Botwinick

Contributors 113

Please visit our website: www. listeningjournal. org