Levinas - The Levinas Reader (ed Hand)

6 IntroductionPhilosophical saying is no longer devoted to knowledge and the process ofthematization culminating in self-presence. Speech is put in question sinceit is the locus of a face-to-face relation in which the Infinite reveals itself inits absolute difference. The primacy of the other's edict means that languageis not simply enacted within a consciousness, as Levinas believes itultimately remains in both Husserl and Heidegger, where it is still bound tothe process of comprehension. For Levinas, it is language which conditionsrational thought, and the primordial face to face of language constitutesreason itself. Reason lives in language, since the first signification is theinfinity of the intelligence which expresses itself in the face. For Levinas,society and sigrtification precede the impersonal structures of knowledgeand reason. This makes Levinas particularly open to artistic expression (seechapters 7 to 10) and to the entire nature of philosophical discourse (seechapter 11).This attention to language, and the meontological subjectivity which itcarries is most strongly experienced in Otherwise than Being or BeyondEssence. Levinas's earlier descriptions of eros now become the basic languageof the responsibility for the other, as 'having-the-other-in-one's skin'(see p. 104 below). In the way in which this vocabulary contests 'intellectualism',it bears witness to an ethical relationship with alterity. For Levinassees the act of saying, and the exposure ,it entails, as the mark, and thevery possibility, of ethical sincerity. Whereas ontology ultimately mustreduce saying to the totalizing closure of the said, saying is a state ofopenness to the other. It is for that reason that Levinas has to speak of astate that is otherwise than Being, or being's other, since the ontologicalterms of philosophy in Husserl and Heidegger dissimulate and subordinatethe primordial subjectivity structured as responsibility in which one findsoneself as soon as one enters language, prior to any assumption of that role.Saying is 'the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the verysignifyingness of signification,6 prior to being a communication in which atruth is manifested. Saying therefore breaks through the noema involved inintentionality, stripping me in extreme passivity of every identical quiddity.Subjectivity is the dis-interested vulnerability of saying.This offering of oneself is not a role that is assumed, but is a goodnessthat occurs despite oneself. The Biblical 'Here I am!' (I Samuel, 3: 4) whichis offered as a responsibility for the other prior to commitment does notinvolve the reduction of subjectivity to consciousness. Instead it is subjectum,subjectivity as substitution and expiation for the other. The philosophicallanguage of the book, and the book's philosophical view of language,enact a discourse in terms of 'otherwise than being' that freessubjectivity from the ontic or ontological programme.The responsibility for the other represented by 'Here I am!' is therefore a