Seán Hand

The other voice: ethics and expression in Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinass Totality and Infinity (1961) is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derridas reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy already has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinass exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derridas demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noemas identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3

Francophone Jewish writers: Imagining Israel

of the war as a source on the experience of the occupied, including gender (since they were disproportionately female), a topic given little attention in this book. dr Bowd deprives himself of the riches that the departmental and national archives contain on his subject. He might also have interrogated the sources he does use. Historians of occupied Belgium during the Great War have explored the ‘war diary’ as a key kind of ego-document for those who (unlike soldiers and their families in unoccupied lands) could not write letters to each other. It would have been interesting to read dr Bowd on the diaries as a genre. For example, he uses the rich diary of Maurice delmotte, a brewer in the pas-de-Calais. But it is worth pointing out that this was written to his wife on the Channel coast from whom he was separated for the whole war, and with whom he could not communicate. the diary bears witness to the moral isolation that was the lot of the occupied. Looking at the mainly middle-class authors would also have allowed him to introduce social class into his discussion of wartime culture. How do we find out about working-class ‘culture’ under the occupation in the Lille-roubaix-tourcoing conurbation—France’s second industrial region after paris? the book is also short on historical context. dr Bowd does not pin down the extent and nature of the ‘atrocities’ committed during the invasion (though he refers to certain cases, such as Haybes). yet these shaped the hostility to the occupiers. nor do we get a clear sense of what the German withdrawal to the Siegfried Line meant in spring 1917, with its scorched earth policy and civilian deportations, or the repetition of this harsh behaviour as the Germans retreated in 1918. ‘Culture’ as an expression and distillation of experience was profoundly shaped by these realities. none of this, however, detracts from the pleasure of reading this absorbing and informative book, which is also expressed in clear and impeccable French.

Outside presence: realizing the Holocaust in contemporary French narratives

Steve Buckler’s article, ’Historical Narrative: Identity and the Holocaust’, produced in this issue, is valuable for its open discussion of what often remains silently predetermined or protected within historiography: the constitution of a discourse deemed properly historical (and the subordination of articulations deemed not to have reached that level); the social formations which this discourse confirms (and hence the pressure placed on subordinated articulation to conform to pre-established patterns of social formulation) ; and the circular (and hence exclusive) process operating between the two. What is equally remarkable about the article, given the central position it confers on consensus-based narrative, is not its ultimate lack of resolution of the tension between socially validated narrative and non-integrated voice (for its consensual argument may logically rely on our reactions for that resolution). It is rather the embarrassment and anxiety which accompanies this irresolution, and which the article attempts to quell by proposing an actantial and consensual view of identity-formation as the proper perspective for the self-confirmation of historiography. This anxiety figures negatively what is held at bay by the presentation of socially confirmed limits for professional and personal expression. What is figured is what lies outside the presence and self-presence of an ultimately normative historiographical, and indeed social, process. The tension present in the article derives (and this is for me one of

The Eros of Ethics: Posthumous Writings of Emmanuel Levinas

It is still often claimed that Levinas’s early enthusiasm for Heideggerian philosophy became transformed during the Shoah and re-emerged as a combination of phenomenological ethics of responsibility and Talmudic interpretation. Based on this narrative, some scholars criticize what appear to be the later Levinas’s residual humanism, eurocentrism, anti-feminism, and Zionism. The recent publication of previously unavailable writings by Levinas, including poems in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian, as well as draft novels he outlined during his internment in a Stalag camp, make a more complex reading of Levinas’s intellectual development necessary. This essay recontextualizes some of Levinas’s later well-known ideas by highlighting how early influences, cultural practices, religious heritage, and emerging philosophical conception were developed in literary form before becoming absorbed by a later ethical formulation. The concrete aim of this essay is to bring into focus the constitutive complexities, ambiguities and indecisions of Levinas’s attempts at creative writings, and to scrutinize their modes of making and unmaking. Literature and Philosophy The status of literature is one of the most remarkable aspects of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy. The expressive enactments he isolates in the works of Shakespeare, Proust, Celan, or Blanchot do much more than illustrate philosophical themes; they exemplify the surpassing of philosophical totality by an ethics of adherence to alterity, and thus guide and encourage that ethic’s self-conscious testing of its own modes of comprehension and description. In Levinas, literary works are often elevated to the level of Plato or Maimonides, especially as contributions to a meta-ethical critique of Western thought from Parmenides to Heidegger. However, for all its testing of categorial assumptions, the elevation of literature by philosophy can also ultimately seem to confirm a hierarchical and appropriative relationship, suggesting that literature’s expressive intuition assisted Levinas in his development of a more radicalized philosophy, in particular from the 1940s onwards. More concretely, one could argue 151 The Eros Of Ethics: Posthumous Writings Of Emmanuel Levinas that Levinas used literature to create a significantly different set of artistic visions from those utilized by the Heideggerian mythography. The 2013 posthumous appearance of Emmanuel Levinas’s own unpublished poems and novelistic extracts, in the volume Éros, littérature et philosophie: Essais romanesques et poétiques, notes philosophiques sur le thème d’éros, constitutes a major moment in Levinas studies.1 The existence of these imaginative writings and, just as significantly, the extended duration of Levinas’s conservation and revision of them, bring us beyond a mere philosophical approval of literature’s capacity to animate thought and demonstrate a more balanced and ambiguous coexistence of alternative value systems which, at a crucial moment for Levinas, typify a radical choice regarding mutually exclusive intellectual identities and destinies. This impression is reinforced by the editorial presentation of these writings in both “continuous” and “génétique” versions: the latter’s typographical depiction of Levinas’s own amendments, along with the reproduction of certain pages, graphically highlight the amount of detailed reworking, the imbrication of different genres, and even the association of different categories of existence. These creative writings were preceded by the 2009 appearance of the remarkable Carnets de captivité suivi de Écrits sur la captivité et notes philosophiques diverses, also published posthumously. This publication detailed the extent of Levinas’s serious preoccupation, during (and in the years immediately following) his wartime internment in a Stalag camp, with the possible elaboration of novels and the sometimessurprising reading that accompanied this project.2 Taken together, these collections of novelistic plans, extracts, and other preserved literary attempts show us more than just the extent of Levinas’s lifelong attachment to literature. They demonstrate quite dramatically Levinas’s enduring concern that a certain kind of philosophy might have come to an end, at least for him, and that his formulations of phenomenological identity might henceforth happen via the techniques and possibilities of fiction, poetry, and drama, rather than through the writing of recognizably philosophical works. 1 Emmanuel Levinas, Éros, littérature et philosophie: Essais romanesques et poétiques, notes philosophiques sur le thème d’éros, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy and Danielle Cohen-Levinas, (Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2013). Henceforth abbreviated to Éros, littérature et philosophie and to ELP in notes. English translations throughout are my own, unless otherwise stated. 2 Emmanuel Levinas, Carnets de captivité, suivi de Écrits sur la captivité et Notes philosophiques diverses, ed. Rodolphe Calin and Catherine Chalier (Paris: Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle, IMEC Éditeur, 2009). Henceforth abbreviated to Carnets de captivité and to CC in notes.

Secret du Secret: L'Homotextualité du Journal de Michel Leiris

Abstract The notion of secrecy occupies a key function in the different publications of Michel Leiris. On the occasion of the posthumous publication of his massive Journal 1922–1989, this idea of secrecy was used by many critics both to speak of the diary as a genre and to sensationalize the contents of Leiriss own work. In doing so, they often directly personified this secrecy in terms of heterosexual acts, affiliations, and assumptions. On one level, this was logical, given the way in which Leiris himself presented his own sexual anxieties in many of his autobiographical and ethnographic writings. However, this critical complicity had the effect of obscuring for a second time certain homosexual details of Leiriss life obscured by Leiris himself. What is interesting about these details is that, in the course of retracing them, one becomes aware of a careful and complex process of homotextuality, wherein the suppressed or superseded homosexual detail has given rise to a set of writing strategies and intertextual resonances. The article analyses this effect by focusing in particular on the presence and subsequent absentification of Marcel Jouhandeau, and argues that this particular level of activity in Leiris encourages a general reassessment of his writing and its reception.