The Historiography of the Holocaust

Post-Holocaust Philosophy 483
determinate. A thought of God which destabilizes this order, which puts in
question rather than resolves the meaning of experience, would alone be worthy
of the name religion.
The religious ‘witness’ attests to a revelation that signifies in the form of its
own concealment its refusal of positive presence. This is why God’s name is
absent from the exemplary prophetic attestation, ‘Hineini’, ‘Here I am’ (‘Me
voici’). Bearing witness to God, far from being a positive experience of the
Divine ‘voice’, is simply my exposure to the Other, to the other person to whom
I am primordially and infinitely responsible prior to any assumption of such
responsibility on my own part. The Other is for Levinas that which perpetually
exceeds my grasp or comprehension, which eludes presence and so is irreducibly
strange to and distant from me. The ethical relation is in this sense a religious
one, a relation conditioned not by my subjective action but by the Other’s
command, a command which defines the very meaning of my being: to be
is in Levinasian terms ‘to-be-for-the-Other’.
Thus, to be in the ‘presence’ of God is not to stand before some entity, either
empirical or transcendent, but to find myself exposed to the ‘outside, or on the
“other side” of presence’, 23 in a space where language is reduced to saying
nothing, or ‘no thing’, other than the bare fact of address. The more positive
religion seeks to overcome this no-thing, to fill the void God introduces into
language, the more it will traduce its own truth. As Levinas puts it, ‘theological
language destroys the religious situation of transcendence. The infinite
“presents” itself anarchically, but thematization loses the anarchy which alone
can accredit it. Language about God rings false or becomes a myth’ (OB,
p. 197). There is no ‘literal’ language of God because His immediacy tolerates
no linguistic mediation. Language can avoid ‘destroying the religious situation
of transcendence’ only by abandoning the attempt to make God present, an
object of experience.
This approach in the form of withdrawal is signified in the single term which
concentrates the entirety of Levinas’s religious philosophy: ‘adieu’. The unhyphenated
word, of course, signifies a leave-taking (but also, in certain circumstances,
a greeting); by interposing a hyphen, Levinas doubles the word, restoring
its literal meaning without annulling its more conventional sense. The effect of
this paradoxical gesture is to render the approach to God (à-Dieu) indissociable
from a retreat (adieu).
Alongside Adorno, Levinas’s ‘adieu’ reads like an attempt to forge a religious
language resistant to the kind of positivity for which the former abjures religion
in its modern form. It is a language which, like Adornian art, turns religion against
itself, invoking and revoking simultaneously the divine Name. If Adorno finds
in positive religion an intoxication by a sham transcendence, 24 Levinas’s dual
movement of divine approach and withdrawal signifies the vigilant refusal
of such intoxication. In the face of its constant temptation to intoxication,