Levinas - The Levinas Reader (ed Hand)

30 Prom existence to ethicsthe work: Richard A. Cohen in Man and World, 12 (1979), 521-6; and C.R. Vaseyin The Thomist, 44 (1980), no. 3, 466-73.S.H.Let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness.One cannot put this return to nothingness outside of all events. But what ofthis nothingness itself? Something would happen, if only night and thesilence of nothingness. The indeterminateness of this 'something is happening'is not the indeterminateness of a subject and does not refer to asubstantive. Like the third person pronoun in the impersonal form of averb, it designates not the uncertainly known author of the action, but thecharacteristic of this action itself which somehow has no author. Thisimpersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable 'consummation' of being,which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by theterm there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is 'being ingeneral'We have not derived this notion from exterior things or the inner world -from any 'being' whatever. For there is transcends inwardness as well asexteriority; it does not even make it possible to distinguish these. Theanonymous current of being invades, submerges every subject, person orthing. The subject-object distinction by which we approach existents is notthe starting point for a meditation which broaches being in general.We could say that the night is the very experience of the there is, if theterm experience were not inapplicable to a situation which involves the totalexclusion of light.When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of thenight, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like apresence. In the night, where we are riven to it, we are not dealing withanything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness. There is nolonger this o'r that; there is not 'something' But this universal absence is inits turn a presence, an absolutely unavoidable presence. It is not thedialectical counterpart of absence, and we do not grasp it through athought. It is immediately there. There is no discourse. Nothing respondsto us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightenslike the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of. There is, in general,without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantiveto this term. There is is an impersonal form , like in it rains, or it iswarm. Its anonymity is essential. The mind does not find itself faced with