10 Countering the Empirical Evidence:
From Immigrant Cosmopolitanism to a Cosmopolitanism of the Disregarded

10.1 Abstracting from natural transcendentals

If Eastern and Central European literary theorists of the twenties and thirties applied the “politics of estrangement” (Tihanov 2005) to the national idea of literature prevalent in their post-imperially reconfigured homelands, the immigrant generation of French literary theorists of the sixties reapplied the same politics to the universalist idea of literature commanding their new domicile. Instead of literary nationalism, they targeted literary universalism. Having broken from the Eastern European countries located at the “national” margins of Europe right into its “supranational” heart, immigrants such as the Romanian-Jewish Goldmann, the Lithuanian-born Greimas, and the Bulgarian-born Todorov and Kristeva (Tihanov 2004: 419) raised modern literary theory through their critical questioning to a significantly higher level of abstraction in a very short time. Except for their direct revolutionary inspiration, the generation of Russian Formalists, nothing can stand comparison with the enormous developmental speed of this generation. Up to the sixties French literary theory was practically non-existent (Compagnon 2004:1–2). The only literary theorist to hold an academic post in the first half of the twentieth century was the French writer Paul Valéry, who held the chair of Poetics at the Collège de France from 1937 to 1945 (Rabaté 2002:79). But then, owing to the immigration of these Eastern European exiles and dissidents in the sixties, out of the blue a new French Republic of Letters loomed large on the horizon.

Contrary to the first French Republic of Letters, an international assembly of scholars who opposed religious intolerance in the name of universal human principles, this second “French Republic of Letters” attacked the restrictive foundations of this universalism in its very own home. Whereas the free human individual was the foundation of French universalism in the political domain, the author epitomized it in the literary domain. The so-called Parisian avant-garde, questioning this agency in the revolutionary atmosphere of the sixties, established a kind of elective affinity with the Russian avant-garde (Rabaté 2002:82–83), which subverted the agency of the Volksgeist in the analogous October atmosphere. Thus both the October and Parisian revolutions dispossessed the central agencies of their time in the name of those whom these agencies have bereft of the agency status. Turning Paris into an “East Central European cultural center” and an exemplary meeting point of two avant-gardes through their immigration during the first half of the twentieth century (Neubauer 2009: 76), innumerous prominent East Central European émigrés and expatriates testify to the extent of this political depravation. Although their discrimination started in the homeland, the chosen hostland did not eliminate it. Relegated after immigration in the political zones of indeterminacy, émigrés were sentenced to a doubly estranged life. Two socially, linguistically and culturally remote environments, equally strange and all but smoothly translatable into one another, acted in their consciousness in an incessantly contrapuntal fashion (Said 2000:149). The avant-garde artistic and theoretical movements were induced by a socially and politically traumatic constellation.

To undo the bastion of the literary author, the East Central European/Parisian avant-garde targeted the thesis that the author, behind his/her figures’ illusions, provides to his/her reader firm empirical evidence of the delineated reality. The counterthesis read that, precisely by being empirical, such evidence encapsulates the author and his/her reader within the domestic horizon falsely taken to be universal. To become truly universal, from the point of view of the homeless immigrants divided between two horizons, our horizon must achieve abstract qualities detached from all the restricted empirical terms. In the final account, immigrant cosmopolitans employed abstract transcendentalism to dethrone the empirical transcendentalism of French universalists who took the “native” horizon to be universal.

The counter-empirical offensive was first set in motion by the “internal émigré” Roland Barthes, who, as early as 1953, discovered the “writing degree zero” apparently stripped of all empirical traits. His concept referred to the strategically impersonalized literary mode that revolutionizes its addressees by catapulting them out of the entrenched techniques of literary understanding. What confuses the “domestic” reader in this mode, exemplified for Barthes in the work of the “French Algerian” Albert Camus, is that its authorial subject, becoming an anonymous assemblage of sensations, escapes the reader’s empirical identification techniques. The formerly sovereign author, as if haunted by guilty consciousness, becomes a destination of the myriad of unconscious forces, which invade and structure his/her actions. Such a revolutionary erasure of his/her sovereignty reduces the literary work to an inarticulate assemblage of anonymous writing (écriture) with bewildering effects upon the reader.

Composing his pioneering essay, Barthes may have drawn on the idea of “the neuter” (le neutre) proposed in Maurice Blanchot’s The Work of Fire (1949). In the atmosphere of the postwar and postcolonial guilt of French intellectuals, Blanchot introduced the remorseful self-elimination of the author’s agency subsequently elaborated upon in his concepts of unworking (désœuvrement) and writing (écriture). All these concepts point to the self-evacuation of the central agency of the literary work, undertaken as if out of repentance for the exclusions committed. According to Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (1952), published a year before Barthes’s essay, Mallarmé was the first writer to dethrone the sovereign literary work by setting loose the energy of écriture “always going beyond what it seems to contain and affirming nothing but its own outside” (1993: 259). This remorseful orientation of an established agency toward its castrated enabler spawns a conclusion that modern literature, passionately adhering to what it cannot but repeatedly exclude, “contests itself as power” (Blanchot 1997:67). “Literature denies the substance of what it represents. This is its law and its truth.” (Blanchot 1995:310) In such a way, the author’s agency placed at the empirical level of the reader’s perception undergoes unworking and rearticulation within a larger and much more abstract field, i.e. writing that makes its transcendental condition. How to conceptualize this new cosmopolitan field of forces?

Blanchot, for his part, interpreted literary écriture not as a derivative but rather as a primal structure “that is beyond the reach of the one who says it as much as of the one who hears it” (1993: 212). Both are bereft of their firm identity sites by a prior intervention of this constitutively “neutral,” “third person” structure remaining forever beyond the reach of interlocutors. Being all encompassing in its “neutrality,” Blanchot’s écriture is in fact beyond the reach of any of its “users”; it simply belongs to the “other scene” in the way as Bakhtin’s Supreme Judge does. However, according to the early Barthes’s structuralist understanding, the ultimate terms of literary interaction set by this anonymous “writing” remain inaccessible merely to the author and reader, i.e. its immediate “users,” but not the theorist him/herself. Given the necessary distance and competence, s/he must be able to identify this contractual frame analytically.

As the legitimate inheritors of the Russian Formalists’ revolutionary doctrine, French structuralists insist on the theoretical reconstruction of the condition of the possibility of literariness. While disengaging the empirical agency of the author they engage the transcendental agency of the theorist, completely in the spirit of their revolutionary inspirers. Dispossessing an empirically restricted institution, they empower an abstract cosmopolitan instance. Following a long tradition, revolutions do not eliminate the rulers but rather replace them. As Agamben has argued in The Time ThatRemains (2005b: 88–112), the messianic tradition inherent in Blanchot’s concept of désœuvrement makes disempowerment and empowerment strongly reliant on one another. This is why Luther translated St Paul’s katargein, referring to both the disempowering and empowering effect of the Sabbath on working days, by an equally double-edged aufheben, later enthusiastically adopted by Hegel’s dialectics. Inaugurating structuralist revolution, Barthes remains loyal to this ambiguous tradition. Evacuation of the agency at the lower level of the work spawns its reestablishment at the higher level of the writing. The deactivated empirical restriction returns in the form of a contractual transcendental.

This fundamental equivocation of the structuralist operation of abstraction finds one of its paradigmatic expressions in the reimplementation of the suspended concept of discourse. Benveniste introduced the latter by re-describing Austin’s concept of the performative (Benveniste 1966: 266–276). Whereas Austin insisted on the conventional character of the performative, Benveniste derives discourse from the singular situation of its enunciation associated with the specific intention (vouloir-dire (Felman 1983: 6–12)). This makes its meaning heavily contextually dependent. This dependency can be suspended only through the elimination of deictic constituents, i.e. the translation of the discours into the impersonal histoire seemingly universal in its meaning (Benveniste 1966: 241). However, since all revolutionary dethronements turn out to be replacements, histoire, rather than being truly universal, again appears to be restricted to an empirical semantic horizon.

To point out this hideously restricted character of histoire, Gérard Genette (1969) reintroduced the particularity of the discours into the hi/story’s seeming universality. He proposed to understand story and discourse as two necessary aspects rather than different modes of narrative. If the discursive operation remains indiscernible in histoire, this is because it is deactivated rather than eliminated. There is no hi/story without the inbuilt structure of meaning instructions, the latter being the more efficient the more unperceivable it is. In such a way, Genette retranslated the concept of discourse (previously translated by Benveniste from Austin’s conventional performative into a singular event) from the contingent personal address back into the impersonal structure of manipulation. It lost situational singularity in becoming conventional.

As this abstract structure now operated as the transcendental condition of hi/story’s meaning, the task of the theorist was to lay it bare in order to disengage the manipulation effectuated by it in the process of reading. What the reader empirically perceives as being real is from the theoretical point of view but an “effect of the real,” which is operated by the discourse. In lieu of the author, structuralists take the discourse to be guiding reader’s understanding of the story. It navigates him/her through the process of reading, “hideously” codifying his or her insight into the world represented. The discursively commanded communication becomes the condition of the possibility of representation. Following this replacement of one agency by another, narratologists describe the process of narrative communication as a systematic extension of the reader’s representation of the world presented. As the elements of the lower levels underlie a continuous semantic re-description by the elements of the higher ones, the process of the reader’s integration of narrative units progresses. Instead of simply advancing toward the resolution of the story, the reader is guided to extend his or her understanding of the story from an ever-higher point of view.

What the narratologically redefined discourse finally amounts to, is the systematic disappropriation of the lower by the higher narrative agencies (Rimmon-Kenan 1983: 91). While higher agencies disempower the lower ones, the empowerment works the other way around (Gibson 1996:214–215). As soon as an “ordinary reader” identifies with any one of the figures, s/he falls into the trap of the discourse and affirms its agency. This is why the narratologist avoids such identifications. If the reading is proper, it results in the deactivation of lower agencies in favor of the more abstract ones. The empirical identifications with make way for an abstract identification of. Nonetheless, a great majority of “ordinary readers” firmly adhere to “lower” agencies, neglecting “higher” levels of their redescription. Gripped with infantile curiosity, they passionately follow the unfolding of hi/story disregarding the knowledge to be gained from the unveiling of its discursive structure. The narratologists systematically disqualify such a manipulated consumption of narratives, which in its blind sensuous affection inadmissibly confuses the representation of reality with reality itself. If such a blind empirical reading is to be replaced by the true theoretical knowledge, the sensuous entrapment within the story has to be overcome by the rational insight into the discourse as the transcendental condition of hi/story’s possibility.

Albeit widely disseminated among “ordinary readers,” the mimetic attitude to literary agencies disregards the fact that modern literature strategically dismissed such comfortable habits of its “benighted” consumers. In one of the manifestos of French narratology, published in 1966, Genette explicitly states that narratives orientated toward representation vanish from the horizon of contemporary literature, making way for those focused on their own discourse (1969: 62, 68–69). Just a year thereafter, in the famous essay “The Discourse of History,” Barthes declared that the traditional storytelling historiography belonged to the past; the new historiography focused on the structure of its intelligibility instead of reality (1984: 177). In such a “revolutionary fever” typical of French narratology, “mimetic attitude” was dismissed as belonging to the antiquated literary taste. The age of representation was relinquished and whoever was entrapped in its delusions was labeled as a narrow-minded dillettante. Such a disqualification did not merely pertain to the ordinary readers who used to empathically communicate with lower narrative agencies without being capable of recognizing the higher agencies that guide the latter’s action and behavior; it was also relevant to the hermeneutic attitudes similarly entrapped in the representational mechanisms. The hermeneutic insight into the story was also accused of being involved in the discourse, which means that interpreters, at the moment they realize the “plot of resolution,” are unknowingly commanded by the “plot of revelation.”91

The narratologists proclaim that an uninvolved analysis must substitute for the involved and therefore empirically restricted interpretation. By drawing attention to the discursive plotting of the narrative, which surreptitiously manipulates all its interpretations, they not only point to the imperial extension of narrative manipulation via various kinds of its empirical consumption. They simultaneously exempt the impartial “cosmopolitan” perspective of literary theory from such inadmissible identifications devalued as the “ideologically projective” literary critique. By letting the all-embracing discourse dispossess the agencies of the author, reader and finally critic, they eventually raise the claim to be in the sovereign possession of this all-dispossessing agency. Raising it to the status of the supreme agency, they turn out to be its exclusive proprietor. Nobody else can take the discourse into possession. This is how the empirical restriction reenters the putative transcendental. Let us closer inspect this crucial point.

In his famous essay on the way ideology captures its victims – a sort of death knell to the French structuralism – Althusser (1982: 111–114) proposed an analogy with the scene of the sudden street interpellation “Hey you there!” This indirect address, performed by an anonymous voice from the other side of the street (the “other scene” or “shore”), connects ideology with the way fictional narrative addresses its readers. This explains its enthusiastic adoption by so-called performative narrative theory (Currie 1998:38). Who of the hundreds of accidental passers-by (i.e readers) is actually meant by this anonymous interpellation located outside the field of visibility and therefore addressed to “whomever it might concern?” So as to find this out, those reached by the call turn their eyes toward the source of the voice. Yet why would somebody turn his or her eyes toward the bearer of the voice if they felt uninvolved or found this call of no concern whatsoever? To illustrate this equivocal point, Althusser (1982: 112) draws an analogy with the ringer of our doorbell who, addressed with our question “Who’s there?,” laconically replies “Me!” Would we ever open the door without having recognized the bearer of this voice? In the same way, before turning ourselves toward the bearer of the street call “Hey you there!” we must have recognized its authorization by a legal institution. Our visualization of the Voice of the Law is just an external check of its previous internal resonance in the “voice of our consciousness” (Butler 1997:107). We feel the need to identify the bearer of the discourse because of our involvement with him or her in a pre-discursive plot that obliges us toward him or her. Althusser’s point would therefore be that the addressee, at the moment of his or her “recognition” of the caller, is necessarily already “recognized” by the caller’s discourse. The “pinning down” follows from this involvement, which is why it must be projective.

To put it differently, the addressee’s response does not merely identify but invents the caller, contributing by this invention to its power and constituting its ultimate authority. This moment is essential in the articulation of Althusser’s thesis (Žižek 1999:260). He insists on the mutual constitution of the agency and its enabler through the interpellation because, strictly speaking, neither the caller nor its addressees exist in their distinctive property before the call (Althusser 1982:123). As Borch-Jacobsen (1988: 231) spells out in his analysis of the “Freudian subject,” the subject’s identity does not precede this interpellation but is an after-effect of it. The process of this constitution cannot be preordained in advance, which means that the manner by which the addressee identifies herself/himself depends on the way s/he identifies the caller. One can identify the voice of the street call “Hey you there!” as belonging either to the policeman, police, law, state, homeland, humankind or divine providence, which makes him or her the participant of a completely different plot and raises him or her to a completely different kind of subject. None of these substantially different identifications follows from the deliberate choice of a given addressee but emerges from his/her respective disposition.

Transposed in narrative terms, the same holds for the attribution of the narrative voice to the hero, narrator, implied author, genre, writing or discourse. Each of these agencies is in the final analysis “empowered” by the reader’s response who in this way “empowers” himself/herself. However, if every identification of the ultimate narrative agency simultaneously empowers the reader’s self, does not the establishment of the principal difference between the empirical and theoretical (self-) identification amount to the establishment of a power-difference? If the theoretical identification is raised to the universal status as opposed to the reader’s empirical one, then it is authorized to exert pressure upon the latter to follow its putatively universal law. Once officially instituted by its inventors, the discourse displays more validity than the author does, in the same way the call of Providence does if compared to the call of the police. This is why, in introducing this agency to deactivate the reader’s empirical identification with the author, narratologists aimed at a self-empowering superior to the others.

10.2 Dis/empowering the cosmopolitan police

Since the structuralist attempt to interrogate the sovereign agency of the author as the epitome of the French universalist idea of literature resulted in the establishment of an equally sovereign agency of the discourse, the revolutionary politics of the immigrant cosmopolitanism turned into police. One empirical evidence was replaced by another that was equally restricted but more powerfully supported and widely disseminated. Because of such an unexpected empirical perversion of the transcendentalist argument, the idea that the empirical evidence needed to be dismantled in order for universal reality to come through lost its credibility. This “universal reality” turned out to be the result of the imposition of the new transcendental.

The resistance to such theoretical policing corresponded with the resistance to the French politicalpolicing, as the former was experienced to be an echo of the latter. Even if Todorov, Greimas and Kristeva were immigrants, they disseminated their ideas in the French language and through French institutions, which, ironically, colored the reception of their theory. Despite its initial directedness against French universalism, it gradually acquired the latter’s traits. As opposed to the culturally and intellectually more homogeneous structuralist generation of Eastern European immigrants, the prominent figures of the poststructuralist generation such as Althusser, Bourdieu, Derrida, Lyotard, Cixous, or Rancière,92 generated their resistance to the structuralist theoretical evidence out of their various heterotopias within French culture.93 Although their cosmopolitanism was once again induced “from below,” the global extension of colonization implied the resistance of its scattered “disregarded” that was more diverse than the Eastern European immigrant cosmopolitans’ resistance.

A number of consequences follow from this difference between structuralist immigrant cosmopolitanism and poststructuralist cosmopolitanism of the disregarded. First, rather than deactivating the central universalist truth of the literature of their new domicile in the manner of their structuralist forerunners, the poststructuralists disengaged the truths established by the policing theoretical discourse from their dispersed (ethnic, class-, race-, gender- and/or culture-related) “zones of indeterminacy” in an incomparably larger “radiation field.” Second, because the structuralist “cosmopolitan policing” enjoyed such a global dissemination, no discourse, including the discourse of literary theory, was spared its infiltration. And third, as the unity of this theoretical policing covered the huge diversity of its subordinate constituencies, the sites of its subversion from below were scattered and heterogeneous in nature. Having been compelled to use, in one way or another, the all-pervading policing discourse, the poststructuralist “complicitous” theorists replaced the structuralist “neutral” analytical discourse with the systematically deferred speech. Rather than authoritatively publicizing, they were clandestinely indicating their cosmopolitanism. Modern theory thus entered the postmodern age of a ventriloquist theoretical discourse, a perpetually masked performance that, as if haunted by the traumatic “repetition compulsion,” distanced any evidence established by the distancing. This was perceived as the only way to prevent the empirical identification of the theoretical truth.

As the theoretical subject now wore the same actor’s mask as did any literary agency as the object of its analysis, the theorist’s commanding post was abandoned and the “bondsman’s” subversive miming of literature substituted the “lord’s” sovereign representation.94 As Robert Young put it, Hegel’s parable of the lord and the bondsman “mimics at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West” (Young 1990: 3). The inference is unavoidable that the European structuralist theorist, pressing the non-European others into his imperial transcendental, “builds an Empire of the Same, and installs at its center a tyrannical dictator” (Fuss 1995: 145). The others are forced to obey this transcendental in order not to be excluded, scorned or punished. Their vast diversity is expected to be ultimately translated into the all-embracing unity and the unabsorbed remainder, the “rest of the West” is to be dropped and discarded as a mere quantité négligeable. Once “the part that has no part” is expelled from the field of intelligibility and deprived of any access to identity, the path is wide opened for this identity’s huge symbolic capitalization. Relying on previous chapters, we can identify the structuralist approach with the Roman assimilating type of cosmopolitanism.

From the enabler’s point of view, as testified by Fanon’s postcolonial rewriting of Hegel’s “master narrative,” instead of representing the other in one’s own triumphant terms, the theoretical self enacts the other in his/her own terms in order to undo the effects of his/her violent appropriation in foreign terms. To translate this into the terms of the poststructuralist critique, precisely because structuralist theory assimilates literature into its own terms, it turns out to be its inventor rather than neutral identifier. Uncovering this obliterated self-empowering of theory through the empowerment of literature, the poststructuralist critique dismantles literary agencies established through structuralist theory, searching after literature’s own terms. Yet what are literature’s own terms? As Fanon has spelled out in his rewriting of the agency-enabler relationship from the enabler’s point of view, this permanent self-exemption from the agency’s delusions amounts to pathogenic consequences, turning my self into an object of constant obsession and self-reproach (Fanon 1986: 210–217). As if repenting the establishment of literature through a theory that sacrifices everything not conforming to it, the poststructuralist critic relentlessly dismantles theoretical projections as devastating empirical delusions about literature. Inasmuch as his/her counter-empirical crusade is now redirected from his/her object toward his/her deluded subject, it proceeds on the model of self-exempting cosmopolitanism that follows the interminable logic “I am what I am not.” This crusade, not a bit less determined than its structuralist antagonist, acts in the name of the radical Other disregarded by any imposed identification.

10.3 At the empowering service of a powerless victim: Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract and general as it is, considering the heterogeneity of poststructuralism, this argument needs elaboration and specification. An especially systematic negation of an (empirical) someone other (l'autrui) by the (transcendental) universal Other (l'autre) was undertaken by the Lithuanian-Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. His insistent hypertrophy of the Other calls for an analogy with the aforementioned Fanon’s re-description of the lord-bondsman relationship “despite the ostensible dissimilarities that separate the one from the other” (Hanssen 2000:201). If the repressed European colonialist legacy experienced its boomerang effect in the Nazi genocide (Césaire 2000: 36), then this analogy between the remorseful theorist of the postcolonial and the self-accusing philosopher of the Holocaust trauma loses its initially bewildering character. From different angles, both thinkers subscribe to a cosmopolitanism of the disregarded. Translated into theoretical terms, the poststructuralist discourse places itself at the service of various pariahs of the structuralist transcendental agency.

Starkly opposing the imperial Hegelian self, which subjugates all others to its commanding specular gaze, Levinas undertakes a meticulously elaborated nonreciprocal rewriting of the lord-bondsman relationship. His aim is to counter the politically conquering assimilation of alterity by an ethically responsible “substitution for another” (Levinas 1974: 99–105). Defying Western metaphysical tradition, Levinas re-conceptualizes the idea of the face from the safeguard of the Self’s identity into an epiphany of the Other’s difference, defining it as a “way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” (1969: 50 [emphasis mine]). He thus makes the face the locus of alterity, which resists all attempts at empirical identification. Instead of being a tranquil object of someone’s gaze, it becomes its disquieting subject “which prohibits me with the original language of its defenseless eyes” (Levinas 1996:12). “The eyes break through the mask – the language of the eyes, impossible to dissemble” (Levinas 1969: 66). “Regarder ce qui […] vous vise: c'est regarder le visage” (Levinas 1976: 6). Considering this etiology of the word visage, one might interpret it, next to meaning a face, as a noun derived from the verb viser (to point to, aim at, target), which would better explain not only its stubborn withdrawal into a targeting position, but also the uprightness (droiture), the directness of its interpellation (Eskin 2001: 48). The face pertains to me in an immediate, preconscious way using no linguistic roundabouts but only proximate contact that touches the nudity of my skin (Levinas 1987c: 118). “This is the original language, the foundation of the other one” (116). “This relationship of proximity, this contact inconvertible into a noetico-noematic structure, in which every transmission of messages, whatever be those messages, is already established, is the original language, a language without words or propositions, pure communication.” (119, [emphasis mine]) What is at stake with the face, therefore, is “the ethical event of communication which is presupposed by every transmission of messages” (125).

Following these introductory clarifications we are better equipped to understand what Levinas aims at when claiming that (theoretical) “consciousness is always late for the rendez-vous with the neighbor” (119). It cannot resist “the obsessive proximity of the neighbor” (119) which “breaks up the equality […] of consciousness, its equality with the object it understands intentionally” (120). This neighbor (prochain, as distinct from voisin) engraves its trace in my skin besetting my corporeality. Because I cannot take cognizance of an instance haunting and obsessing me in such a traumatizing way, I lose the Other as a comfortable, confirming mirror of my (representational) identity. “The place of the one who speaks to me,” clarifies Lyotard (1985: 39), “is never available to me to occupy.” That is why “[t]he relationship with the other puts me into question, empties me of myself” (Levinas 1986b: 350). Resisting the implementation of representational practices of my empirical perception, the other disturbs my self-sufficiency, eliminates the very substance of my Ego. This breakthrough of the face “consists in undoing the form in which every entity […] is already dissimulated.” The other appears as a “surplus over the inevitable paralysis of manifestation” (351–352). “His presence consists in coming towards us, making an entry.” (351) Instead of participating with me in a communion relying on a common footing, he befalls upon me out of a radical exteriority in the form of unexpected events. “[T]he encounter with a face that at once gives and conceals the Other, is the situation in which an event happens to a subject who does not assume it, who is utterly unable in its regard…” (Levinas 1985: 45)

Levinas renders this disruptive signification of the face alternatively as expression, trace or command. The distinctive feature of all three terms is that they ultimately turn whole signification into self-reference. “We have called face the auto-signifyingness par excellence.” (Levinas 1987c: 120) This signifiance of the face means that it always signifies more than we are able to attribute to it. The face is a “movement that already carries away the signification it brought […] It enters in so subtle a way that unless we retain it, it has already withdrawn. It […] withdraws before entering” (Levinas 1987a: 66), it “has left before having come” (68). These paradoxes mark the constitutively anachronistic structure of interpellation that interrupts my present from an irretrievable, immemorial past impossible to recollect or re-present (65, 1986b: 345). “To be qua leaving a trace is to pass, to depart, to absolve oneself.” (1986b: 357) In a word, the Other inhabits “the other scene,” a “beyond” in every possible sense of the word (preconscious, pre-linguistic, pre-present, pre-representative, pre-signifying etc.); it reaches my empirical self out of a space of radical exteriority.

However, because of its unfathomable character, Levinas’s radically transcendental face appears to be significantly ambiguous, simultaneously degraded and privileged, completely bereft of power and terribly violent. It is on the one hand urging me out of an “eternal exile,” which deprives it of any effective power. Levinas frequently describes it in Totality and Infinity as a naked, destitute, hungry, and/or helpless stranger, orphan, widow and/or proletarian. But it also has a violent aspect. The way it raises its powerless claim is a non-repressive mode of mauvaise conscience (Levinas 1989: 81), which demands a “responsibility that goes beyond what I may have done to the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed” (83). Beyond any particular action, it challenges my very “place in the sun” for having unintentionally usurped someone else’s place by way of excluding, stripping or starving him (82). “The other’s man death calls me into question, as if, by my possible indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed…” (83) “It poses the question of my right to be which is already my responsibility for the death of the Other, interrupting the carefree spontaneity of my naive perseverance.” (86)

Yet in what way does this claim of mauvaise conscience for the defacing of my habitual face occur? It seems to be displaying the same profound equivocation. Levinas renders it as a call of someone who, while naked, destitute and exposed as if about to be shot at point blank range (83), nevertheless resolutely demands: “Thou shalt not kill.” He explains the paradox of this unprotected face that does not hesitate to address imperatives as “an absolute resistance in which the temptation of murder is inscribed […]. This temptation of murder and this impossibility of murder constitute the very vision of the face. To see a face is already to hear: ‘Thou shalt not kill’” (Levinas 1990a: 8). What frustrates me to the point of my readiness to kill the Other – in theoretical terms, to immobilize, objectify, mortify or turn him or her into an empirical item – is the stubborn tendency of His spectral face to disown my ego. The Other seems determined to remove my social and political identity marks, raise himself to my master (maître) and lord (seigneur) who never stops keeping me under his irritating surveillance. Levinas’s visage is, covertly, also the peculiar French translation of Husserl’s German verb vermeinen (intending, having in mind, envisaging) (Eskin 2001:48): it implies the condition of permanent supervision, i.e. the same supervision that was forbidden to the Self. To underline this profoundly disconcerting, haunting, accusing aspect of the face’s activity, in Otherwise than Being Levinas re-describes another concept of Husserl’s, Ausdruck, in a similarly original way: he renders it as the continuous drive of the transcendental face to ex-press (tear out) all the empirical identity attributes of the self from their protected residence (demeure extraterritoriale).

In sum, there is an obvious violence exerted in this seemingly powerless interpellation; a pressure is inherent to its helplessness; a “high above” is manifested in its “far below;” the aggressive overreaction of the self’s response would otherwise be unexplainable. Far from being a purely ethical instance, as the philosopher is at pains to present it, Levinas’s face is also the agent of domination. The one conditions the other. The same equivocation holds for our response to it: Whereas we are politically disempowering the face’s wounding address, defacing it by our visual representation, we are simultaneously ethically empowering the speaking remainder of the face. It survives our immobilizing gaze, providing an unexpected justification to the claim “Thou shalt not kill.” Hence the face is never just looked at but also attended to. The theorist’s profoundly fissured response – defensive reaction and responsible action – reflects its political-ethical undecidability.

Levinas rejects this disturbing undecidability, introducing in its place a clear opposition: he associates the theoretical activity of seeing the face with murdering it and the theoretical passivity of hearing the face with serving it. He thus presents the double-edged, uneasy response to the equivocal urge of the face as a completely free choice between the two unequal options. “It is up to us, or, more exactly, it is up to me to retain or to repel this God without boldness, exiled for allied with the conquered, hunted down and hence absolute [ab-solu, also in the sense of departed, passed away], thus disarticulating the very moment in which he is presented and proclaimed, un-representable.” (Levinas 1987a: 66) After all, as Lyotard reads it, the silent command “Thou shalt not kill” has no other purpose but to turn our powerful, violently reacting I into a receptive, responsive You (1988: 110–111). Following this idea, Jill Robbins remarks that “the sense of killing must be enlarged here beyond its literal meaning to a more general sense” (Robbins 1999: 64). It includes all instances of transcendental violence such as representation, knowledge or vision that attempt to master the Other by bringing it in accordance with the self. “Much of the force of Levinasian ethics revolves around the premise that violence first arises conceptually […] Violence arises when the self makes prejudgments about the Other before the Other speaks to the self […] By extension, violence also arises in the will to comprehend the Absolute as ground, to name the Infinite.” (Schroeder 1996: 19) However, is the wish to understand and comprehend the Other always to be explained as a blamable determination for violence? Do we not sometimes visualize the face out of the sheer necessity to defend ourselves from its violence? Levinas seems to seriously underestimate the violence of the face.

He interprets practical physical violence as a sheer extension of the ontological “imperialism of the same” (Levinas 1969: 39). Instead of introducing necessary distinctions between them, he uncritically conflates vision, knowledge and violence, thus displaying the same indifferent and inconsiderate imperialism he is at pains to defy. The result is his diagnosis of a murderous “alliance of logic and politics,” knowledge and power, which “plunders the world for the booty of its self-seeking interest” (Rose 1996:37). The imperial Self (moi) or Same (même) is blamed for approaching the other obliquely, i.e. via the detour of linguistic representation instead of frontally, i.e. via the direct face-to-face contact. But how to avoid this detour if to encounter the face as a face (i.e. ethically rather than politically) necessarily means to listen to its discourse (Robbins 1999: 57), to receive it in actu, on the move and not as an immobile object? “To see a face,” states Levinas himself, “is already to hear it” (1990a: 8). “[T]he manifestation of the face is already discourse” (Levinas 1969: 66). However, does not exactly this discursive moment, instead of keeping intact the ethical singularity of the face, imply its transference to the political realm of difference and deferral? Is language not necessarily the reign of substitutions that forces everything entering it to become defaced and replaceable? Levinas’s attempt to align seeing with merciless murder and hearing with putting oneself at the disposal of the face seems therefore to be separating the inseparable. If hearing also defaces the face, then ethics is always contaminated by politics.

“What characterizes a violent act,” states Levinas, “is the fact that one does not face” (i.e. expose oneself to the regard of the face) but catches sight of an angle (i.e. takes the targeting position toward it) (1987b: 19). Yet how to make oneself directly vulnerable to an interlocutor who resonates in the infinite citational chain of the discourse? After all, the face cites its (biblical) command “Thou shalt not kill.” In addition, if it reaches us out of an irretrievable past, what is it expected to display if not a divided, double, grave voice? If the speaker of this command addresses us from a “beyond,” if we are “encountering [his or her] being through an interdiction” (21), are we not in the place of the face ultimately facing a mask, echo or effect instead of an identifiable interlocutor? This might have had Maurice Blanchot in mind, who asserts that “I am not indispensable, in me anyone at all is called by the other […] the un-unique, always the substituted” (Blanchot 1986a: 13). “I cannot draw any justification from a demand that is not addressed to anyone in particular, that demands nothing of my decision and that in any case exceeds me to the point of disindividualizing me.” (21) The singularity I address is only borrowed and temporary, because I just happened to be at the place summoned by the face. I am exposed as anyone else could be in my place, it is not exactly my but anybody’s place.

After all, for Levinas the Good becomes meaningful only through its representation in the concept. “Thus the Good is present […] only as the idea of the Good” (Schroeder 1996:34). Hence “when Levinas gives the face as voice […]he in a sense de-faces it, gives it as figure” (Robbins 1999: 57). This transfer of the face from the observing gaze to the summoning voice is by itself a prosopopeia (Derrida 1997:101). Trying to unmask its deceitful appearance, Levinas inadvertently masks his face into a trope, depriving it of the straightforwardness and rectitude he otherwise claims for it. While banishing rhetoric from the intersubjective relationship, he retrieves it on the intralinguistic level by making the deceitful figure inherent in the face. “This means that the face is to some extent a face-mask or a figure-face. It also means that there can be ‘face’ in figure.” (Derrida 1997:68) However, if there is a figure inscribed into the face, and if the face for its part also permeates the figure, then, despite Levinas’s meticulous efforts to strictly separate face and mask, facing and angle, uprightness and obliqueness, self-reference and signification, justice and violence, ethics and politics, their contagious interference is unavoidable. His claim that to become ethical the theorist’s self must be “devastated, traumatised, unthroned,” stripped of its identity, sacrificed in a sublime “passivity beyond passivity,” in an unconditioned obedience to the face of the Other (Rose 1996:37), in its conspicuous “sacrificial logic,” gains relevance less as a philosophical argument than as an inadmissible self-empowering by the victim’s trauma. This unconditional trauma signs for the unfathomability and intractability of the self’s transcendental. This is how Levinas’s politics of trauma, unnoticeably and unwittingly, becomes policing.

10.4 The disabling enablement of the theorist: Maurice Blanchot and Michel Foucault

Although Levinas raises the Other to the summoning agency and degrades the self to the summoned enabler, i.e. reverses the usual distribution of roles, he persists in claiming continuity between them. Exactly this continuity is targeted by Blanchot’s critique. For Blanchot the Other (as the agency) and the self (as the enabler) are irreconcilably external one to another, which induces between them a paradoxical relationship of the disabling enablement. Accordingly, the principal disagreement between Blanchot and Levinas pertains to the possibility of making language unconditionally serve the Other. Levinas interprets the call of the Other as a direct address on the model of face-to-face, i.e. oral, communication. For him, the face is beyond all attributes and categories, operating exclusively kath ‘auto, i.e. without any representational mediation. “A face has a meaning not by virtue of the relationships in which it is found, but out of itself […]” (Levinas 1987b: 21). This ensures the “coincidence of the expressed with him who expresses” (Levinas 1969: 66). To disclose the hidden phonocentrism of this conception of the face, Derrida pointed to the metaphysical presence to oneself as being typical of the “plenitude” (Levinas 1969:96) of oral discourse (Derrida 1978:101–102). Only oral discourse permits immediate translation of an utterance into the person authorizing it. Supporting this critique of Levinas’s pre-structuralist (i.e. phenomenological) conception of language, Blanchot observes that “this speech once again becomes the tranquil humanist” (1993: 56). It is clearly attributable to an outside speaker who takes responsibility for it in the first person, as is regularly the case in the spoken language and “contrary to what happens with what is written.” This elucidates Blanchot’s resolute introduction of the concept of “writing:” It “does not stand between; it stands outside” (Libertson 1982: 279) the interlocutors. Blanchot’s “writing,” therefore, acts in the same way as Bakhtin’s exotopic “Third in the dialogue.”

Surprisingly, in his effort to demonstrate this writerly displaced character of language Blanchot does not find recourse in Jacques Derrida (who also took recourse to the concept of writing) but in Michel Foucault. In discussing Foucault’s The Order of Things in his The Infinite Conversation (257), Blanchot approvingly points out the principal thesis that the classical age breaks free from the domination of the sovereign logos exercised through vocal speech. To escape “this obscure dictation,” language introduces anonymous writing that “turns away from the detestable Self” with the aim of ordering, i.e. organizing and systemizing, all human experience. Accordingly, there is nothing left over outside this order, no transcendental (divine or human) instance, no reality and no self, and thus language henceforth self-referentially represents only its transcendental order itself, the perfection of its disposition (ordonnance). To draw on Kant, whose philosophy Foucault represents (in this book) as the culmination point of the classical idea of language, man becomes the invisible principle instead of the visible subject (in both senses of the word subject) of linguistic order. By such a “redoubling of the empirical into the transcendental” (1993: 249) – Foucault’s principal discovery in The Order of Things – the figure of man disappeared before it was designated (Blanchot 1993:249; àpeine cette ftgureest-elledésignéequ'elle disparait (Blanchot 1969: 371)). Significantly, here Blanchot uses a distinctively Levinasian formulation, “left before having come” (Levinas 1987a: 68, “parti avant d'être venu” (Levinas 2001a: 294)) and “withdraws before entering” (Levinas 1987a: 66, “se retir avant d'entrer” (Levinas 2001a: 290)). Is he hinting that he is not just going to correct the “phenomenological” (or pre-modern) Levinas through the “structuralist” (or modern) Foucault but also, in a second step, vice versa? I will return to this characteristically poststructuralist “redoubling” or “folding back” of Blanchot’s argument shortly. The crucial point to be maintained is that, for Foucault, the classical age is “the first age of’structuralism'” (Blanchot 1993: 257): in this era, language that speaks through the human replaces the human who speaks through language. Henceforth all attempts to find recourse in pre- or extralinguistic instances, such as the one Blanchot has criticized in Levinas’s work are clearly out of place. This is how, in the first step, Foucault’s “structuralism” is engaged to correct Levinas’s “phenomenology.”

However, by making itself a transcendentally invisible instance of language, the figure of the human has not really disappeared from the world, as Foucault is frequentlybut mistakenly taken to have claimed in The Order of Things. According to Blanchot’s distinctively Levinasian formulation, it has only entered into “the new manner of being which disappearance is” (Blanchot 1987: 76), opening the posttraumatic age of its dispersal, discontinuation, redoubling. It has only withdrawn into “the absent” of language out of which it henceforth simultaneously enables and disables everything that is made present in the linguistic order of empirical knowledge. “Enables” because there would be no empirical order without this absent transcendental instance, “disables” because this haunting transcendental enabler of all empirical agencies undergoes for its part also an empirical figuration. Blanchot’s argument amounts to the following: As opposed to the divine, unbeatable transcendental status of Levinas’s absent face, Foucault limits the sovereignty of the transcendental enabler in an operation entirely atypical of structuralism. Man’s “absence is not pure indetermination, it is also always and each time […] determined” by a given distribution of empirical order (Blanchot 1993:250). In such a “poststructuralist” reading of Foucault’s argument, Blanchot insists that the transcendental principle does not only determine the empirical agency of knowledge but also results from this agency as its after-effect. From The Order of Things on, the transcendental principle becomes the “future anterior.” This parenthesizes its a priori character and weakens its determining force, producing “an impure alloy of an historical a priori and a formal a priori” or a “flawed transcendentalism” (Blanchot 1987: 71–72).95

Ever since the moment this aporetic empirical-transcendental circuit was established, reads Blanchot’s Levinasian-Foucauldian thesis, a continuously “shifting ambiguity” (1993: 250) has been inherent to it. Whatever Foucault’s “real” argument in The Order of Things may be, this is the way Blanchot reads his important concept of redoubling: Neither the empirical agency nor the transcendental enabler are original and autonomous as both originate “abroad,” which at the same time founds and ruins them. Several years later Foucault states in The Archeology ofKnowledge (1972: 128): “The formal a priori and the historical a priori neither belong to the same level nor share the same nature: if they intersect, it is because they occupy two different dimensions.” Neither can be completely founded by the other because it itself founds the other too. Yet even though I resist it, my determination comes from the Other who persists as the point of my orientation. Commenting on the permanent tension between the present and the actual in The Archeology of Knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari (1994b: 112) warn: “The actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the process of becoming – that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other.” Emerging from the perspective of the enabler, poststructuralism substitutes such unremitting othering of the self for the agency’s smooth assimilation of the other characteristic of structuralism.

In the same self-denying spirit, Blanchot asks “how does rebeginning – the non-origin of all that begins – found a beginning? Would it not first of all ruin it” (1993: 249)? Since the interval that separates the self from itself turns into “a new power of determination,” the “relation at a distance” characteristic of the modern age becomes “explosive” (251). With modernity, as Blanchot interprets Foucault, a disabling enablement of the two incompatible terms, the transcendental and the empirical, arises: The one simultaneously empowers and undermines the other. “Transcendence is brought down, the empirical rises up, the modern era is ushered in.” (255) Drawing from this mutual dispossessing a number of important consequences, Blanchot asks: “What speaks when the voice speaks? It situates itself nowhere […] but manifests itself in the space of redoubling, of echo and resonance where it is not someone, but rather this unknown space […] that speaks without speaking.” (258) Does not this multiplied spectral voice, bereft of definite meaning and representation and addressing us from a resonating “other scene,” signal a re-entry of Levinas’s exceeding face into Foucault’s argument from The Order of Things? Therefore, if in the first step of Blanchot’s argument Foucault was invoked to “correct” Levinas, then in the second step of the same entretien infini Levinas is called upon to “correct” Foucault.

In this second redoubling of the vanishing human figure, a traumatized folding back that disfigures this figure’s transcendental face, an equivocal surplus emerges beyond the transcendental linguistic order. It is even more spectral than the Kantian transcendental principle, destined to retreat perpetually like a Levinasian trace that “left before having come” and “withdrew before entering” (Levinas 1987a: 66, 68). Specifying its peculiar profile, Blanchot states that “anterior to beginning, it indicates itself only as anteriority, always in retreat in relation to what is anterior” (1993: 259). In order not to be assimilated into the imperial linguistic order, this simultaneously evasive and invasive leftover retreats into a cry or murmur of “man in passing” (both in the sense of “dying” and “redoubling itself”; Blanchot 1993: 262: “il crie mourant; il ne crie pas, il est le murmure du cri” (1969: 392)). Exposed to the repeated linguistic articulation, this simultaneously traumatized and traumatizing Other withdraws in such a way that he “absents himself in dying” (Blanchot 1983: 9). Such a spectral re-entry of the Levinasian grave voice into Foucault’s writing institutes Blanchot’s coupling of the transcendental with the reiterative quasi-empirical unworking (désœuvrement) of its terms. “Writing ceases to be a mirror. It will constitute itself […] as always going beyond what it seems to contain and affirming nothing but its own outside […] affirming itself in relation to its absence, the absence of (a) work, worklessness” (“l'absence d'œuvre ou le désœuvrement” (Blanchot 1969: 388)) (1993: 259). In Blanchot’s Levinasian re-description of Foucault, the transcendental is exposed to the persistent désœuvrement by its quasi-empirical “disregarded.” In such a way, the hitherto traumatized “disregarded” henceforth occupies the traumatizing position.

Blanchot adheres to désœuvrement not just out of the intellectual experience of the “theoretical collaborator” (of structuralism), but also from the empirical experience of the practical collaborator of an anti-Semitic regime (he worked throughout the 1930s as a journalist for various right-wing papers; Haase and Large 2001: 85–95). In the sixties, the rise of the Holocaust alongside the postcolonial consciousness exposed both the political and theoretical collaboration with the rule of exclusion to serious critical examination. As the inassimilable otherness henceforth prevented any smooth assimilation, it was raised to the point of departure of a cosmopolitanism of the disregarded. The quasi all-embracing theoretical Self was opened toward the non-integrable moment of the guilt toward the Other, which paved the way for grieving self-examination. As more recent readers of Blanchot’s legacy, such as Steven Ungar (1995) or Michael Rothberg (2000), have convincingly argued, his disconcerted and disconcerting thought exemplifies an irresolvable guilt, which surmounts all attempts to pin down the sacrificed Other (autre) in the empirical terms of “someone other” (autrui). His consistent reflection on the limits of any such representation draws its intensity from the traumatic resilience of this disregarded. This also elucidates the “Levinasian” mode of his reading of Foucault.

However, concerning the relationship between Levinas’s and Foucault’s ethics several caveats are necessary. As opposed to Levinas’s absolute transcendental agency that hauntingly enters and engraves itself upon the self’s vulnerable skin, Foucault’s quasi-transcendental horizon of the Other is consistently striven after by this self. The movement of defacement starts inside rather than outside the self, requires from the self a transgressing activity rather than obeying passivity, and implies opening and enrichment rather than expiation and renouncement. Finally, it departs from the present self (toward the evasive Other) rather than the absent Other (toward the present self). We can therefore speak of two opposite conceptions of the relationship between the (theoretical) agency and its enabler. If in Levinas’s conception the powerless victim is the source of the defacing action, in Foucault’s conception it is the remorseful theorist. In the conception of Emmanuel Levinas, in which politics and ethics are clearly separated from and opposed to one another, the agency of the self has the choice between politically defacing the Other or being ethically defaced by it. As we have seen, Levinas clearly privileges the latter option. In the conception of Michel Foucault, in which politics and ethics are mutually implicated, the ambiguous self has the choice between politically asserting its agency by adopting the political face of the Other or ethically defacing its agency by surrendering to the ethical face of the Other. Foucault opts for the latter but it is again up to the self to make the decision. Opponents agree concerning the freedom of self’s choice, but Foucault favors self-revolutionizing action over expiating passion.

Mirroring his “religious” opponent Levinas, the “revolutionary” Foucault advocates the ethical defacing of the theoretical self in a reverse form. Haunted by his experience of collaboration, Blanchot sympathizes with this advocacy. Although he had already developed his conception of désœuvrement in the early fifties (Blanchot 1992:42–48), in extending and elaborating upon it in the sixties, he finds an important ally in Foucault’s unworking of the theoretical transcendental. At the time Blanchot introduced his concept, he seems to have taken it from Alexandre Kojève, the crucial intellectual figure of postwar France. Kojève designated the idle man of posthistoire as a voyou désœuvré, i.e. a man in the condition of the eternal Sabbath (Kojève 1952: 396). However, he refuses to share Kojève’s apocalyptic Hegelianism that postpones the Sabbath to the end of history, because it surreptitiously re-introduces theology into philosophy. The theological synthesis that violently captures the totality of history, renouncing the compromising involvement of the philosopher in its course, has to be unworked. To accomplish that, Blanchot uncouples désœuvrement from philosophy, aligning it with Mallarmé’s modern, self-subverting idea of literature. This literary redescription of Hegelian transcendentalism reminds us of Friedrich Schlegel’s former redescription of Kant or Niklas Luhmann’s later redescription of Habermas’s transcendentalism, as analyzed in previous chapters.

Yet if désœuvrement is an eminently literary operation, then it cannot figure as the transcendental condition of the modern linguistic order, as Foucault seems to be claiming in The Order of Things. Blanchot remains profoundly ambiguous on this question. “Literature denies the substance of what it represents,” reads the definition of its “essence” in the early The Work of Fire (1949). “This is its law and its truth” (1995: 310). Yet earlier in the same book, Blanchot states that this inexorable “logic of permanent opposition” holds for the whole language as well. “Inherent in [language], at all its levels, is a connection of struggle and anxiety from which it cannot be freed. As soon as something is said, something else needs to be said. Then something different must again be said to resist the tendency of all that has just been said to become definitive […] There is no rest…” (22) Is the unworking inherent in the modern linguistic order per se or is it a strategy of literary resistance directed against this order? If the first is the case, then literature loses its messianic profile as the principle emancipator of the “transcendentally imprisoned” people; if the second, then the ethical literary unworking, setting itself the task of enlightening such people, becomes politically normative. Blanchot’s hesitation seems to be redoubling Foucault’s line of thought, which oscillates equally between these uneasy alternatives.

To demonstrate this, let us scrutinize his subversion of the theoretical self by subjecting it to the literary outside. In his essay on Blanchot, Foucault supports Blanchot’s claim that the modern age is dictated by literature which, sooner and more than any other discourse, leads us “to the outside in which the speaking subject disappears” (Foucault 1987:13). This insight is crucial because “the being of language only appears for itself with the disappearance of the subject” (15). Even more than de Sade, Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille or Klossowski (18), all of them prominent representatives of “the thought from outside,” Blanchot consistently testifies to this void in language. He thus treats both discourses he regularly uses, the reflexive and the fictional one, as being outside themselves, i.e. pushes reflexive discourse to the edge of fiction and fictional discourse to the edge of reflection. In the same way that Foucault, according to Blanchot (1987: 71–72), made the formal and historical a priori undecidably confront each other, Blanchot, according to Foucault, makes reflection and fiction enter an interminable dialogue.

Foucault points out “[t]his patient reflection, always directed outside itself, and a fiction that cancels itself out in the void where it undoes its forms intersect to form a discourse […] free of any center […] a discourse that constitutes its own space as the outside toward which, and outside of which, it speaks” (Foucault 1987:24–25). So one might infer that Blanchot’s peculiar discourse “neither-nor” merely lends expression to the fundamental structure of language in the modern age. Yet such an inference would be misleading if one considers Foucault’s characteristically oscillating argument. He claims that Blanchot not only displays emptiness genuine to language (12), but contests an “entire tradition wider than philosophy,” which denies that emptiness by filling it always anew with the particular content (13). In other words, instead of merely representing modern linguistic order, Blanchot offers ethical resistance to the dominant tradition of its conceptualization.

Foucault argues that Blanchot was courageously negligent of this powerful tradition because he was desperately attracted, amidst the dense structure of language, by “an absence that pulls as far away from itself as possible [… and that] has nothing to offer but the infinite void” (28). This attraction to the disregarded “non-linguistic outside” makes Blanchot negligent of the politically established linguistic order. “To be susceptible to attraction a person must be negligent.” (28) This negligence is nonetheless extremely dangerous because the inarticulate outside, through its endless withdrawal, gradually removes the human subject from his or her articulation (34), making his or her past, kin and whole life non-existent (28). Levinas would say, the inarticulate outside tears the human subject out of his or her abode. As if hinting at Levinas’s always retreating, ab-solving, ambiguous face, Foucault describes this spectral outside as “a gaze condemned to death” (28), averting and returning “to the shadow the instant one looks at it” (41). As soon as its withdrawal from the field of vision occurs, however, its underground voice begins to become discernible (47). In a curious repetition of the gesture of his interlocutor and intellectual affiliate, Foucault’s reading of Blanchot suddenly becomes Levinasian. “Is not this voice – which ‘sings blankly’ and offers little to be heard – the voice of the Sirens, whose seductiveness resides in the void they open, in the fascinating immobility seizing all who listen?” (45) Alongside his friend Bataille, Blanchot was powerfully seduced by this lethal void, no matter the price of denial and solitude paid for this fascination (Blanchot 1993: 201). This price is yet another reason for Foucault to interpret Blanchot’s “thought from outside” as an ethical resistance to the politicallydominant linguistic order, which was undertaken (out of bad conscience) in the name of its disregarded outside.

Blanchot for his part sees Foucault as equally strongly drawn by the insanity (of Hölderlin, de Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud), which folds back upon the world of sanity with powerful voiding effects. Foucault on different occasions focused upon these figures beset by madness as a paradigmatic limit-experience. In the homonymous chapter of The Infinite Conversation, which significantly gives the title to the entire section of this book too, Blanchot indicates the manner in which he is going to bespeak Madness and Civilization. That madness is an exemplary limit-experience, confirms Foucault himself: “It is for the other world that the madman sets sail in his fool’s boat; it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. The madman’s voyage […] develops […] a liminal position […] his exclusion must enclose him […] He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely.” (1965: 11) As Blanchot reads Foucault’s work, admitting that he is recalling “the marginal idea that came to be expressed in this book” (1993: 196), Foucault actually investigates the inarticulate liminal zone between the madness (folie)and the unreason (déraison). This zone was forgotten at the moment the unreason was expelled from reason and thus allowed madness to enter it. “The demand to shut up the outside, that is, to constitute it as an interiority of anticipation or exception, is the exigency that leads society – or momentary reason – to make madness exist, that is, to make it possible.” (196)

But the condition of the empirical possibility of madness makes the condition of the empirical impossibility of unreason, turning the latter into the unintended but necessary remainder of the first. Unreason is the inadmissible Other of the admitted other of madness, a disregarded limit-experience. Concentrating on the idea of the redoubling, Blanchot interprets unreason as something that remains in the form of the neuter,96 after the process of empirical differentiation into the positive (reason) and the negative (madness) has been carried out as far as possible; after “the clear knowledge of science” has finished its job (199). As he clarifies later on in Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (1987: 65), Foucault in Madness and Civilization deals not so much with madness as with the question of how and with which consequences unreason conditions reason to produce madness. That which reason ultimately obliterates in its ongoing normative production of differences is “the difference itself,” “which (does not) differentiate itself in nothing” (Blanchot 1993:199, translation modified: la différence même, ce qui (ne) se différencier en rien (1969: 297)). Akin to Derrida’s différance, it “does not differentiate itself in nothing” because it makes the ultimate, transcendental condition of the possibility of all empirical differences.

Following on the one hand Foucault, who highlighted this quasi-transcendental liminal zone that conditions all operations of differentiation while completely escaping them, and on the other Levinas, who pointed to the lawgiving face that operates in similar fashion, Blanchot stresses the irresistible “appeal of indifference” (1993: 199) to being subjected to further differentiation. His neuter thus presents itself both as a “differentiated indifference,” which is continuously outlawed by the operations of power and an “indifferent differentiation,” which continuously sets the new horizon for these operations. Its “flawed transcendentalism,” such as that of Foucault (Blanchot 1987: 72), is on the permanent quasi-empirical move. “Preventing the sick from dying in the street, the poor from becoming criminals, the debauched from perverting the pious is not at all reprehensible but is a sign of progress, the point of departure for changes that ‘responsible authorities’ would approve of.” (65–66) Blanchot admits that the continuous introduction of oppositions and distinctions is necessary to make the world intelligible. However, the ethical task undertaken by Foucault is to let the disregarded, which is located “outside everything visible and everything invisible” (Blanchot 1993:256), to re-enter the articulated order created by these operations. Blanchot unreservedly reads his early “book from such a perspective” (196). As this remainder is also located beyond the empirical reach (being precisely for this reason quasi-empirical), Foucault’s “redoubling” makes a messianic promise never to be fulfilled but nonetheless forwarded through the postponement. He was aware that his search for the truth is irrevocably enmeshed in “the myriad configurations of power” (Blanchot 1987: 68), which pervert his imperatives. This is why he used to “proceed to the very limit” of a given discourse and then, starting the same route again, “turned toward other horizons” (69). (In a sense, he thereby proceeded like Blanchot himself, who untiringly played out fiction against reflection.) A “man always on the move,” he toyed “with the thought that he might have been, had fate so decided, a statesman (a political advisor) as well as a writer […] or a pure philosopher, [unqualified worker, i.e. nothing or nobody in particular]” (68).97

At this point, one is well advised to recall that Lacan considered this je ne sais quoi (“nothing particular” but at the same time “something unfathomable”), i.e. the “real” as the disregarded moment of the symbolic order, to be the decisive, most powerful instance in the constitution of the human subject. In this light, Foucault’s readiness to completely dissolve his identity, to let his thought pass “through what is called madness,” to “withdraw from itself, turn away from a mediating and patient labor […] toward a searching that is distracted and astray […] without result and without works” (Blanchot 1993:199), presents itself as an unprecedented self-empowerment. This insistent self-désœuvrement, in its turn, redoubles Blanchot’s unworking of his own self. Gradually and imperceptibly, in both works, the resistance to the imposed transcendental condition turns into the new transcendental condition imposed upon all modern selves, notwithstanding the huge power differences between them. This is the final consequence of the “ethical” privileging of incessant redoubling.

The delineated ethical shaping of the self forgets that, to be without qualities at the symbolic level is substantially different from being bereft of them at the political level: the first freely chosen de-identification implies an unlimited mobility while the second enforced condition of “boat people” or sans-papiers condemns people to harsh immobility. To render this in Elisabeth Povinelli’s terms: “As a result a gap seems to open between those who reflect on and evaluate ethical substance and those who are this ethical substance” (2011: 11). Despite being extremely remote from each other and “never having to meet,” these agencies and enablers appear to be firmly coupled. Is the famous brake-release that facilitates the overall mobility of the First World not somehow connected to putting the brakes on the movement “outside the walls” through a finely balanced combination of economic, administrative and sanctionary policies?

How ethical is it to demand mobility from the selves that are extremely deprived of it? Is this immobility not the disregarded moment of mobility’s raising to the transcendental principle, is it not this principle’s neglected empirical prerogative and the silenced basis of its legitimacy? Whatever might be the answer to these disquieting questions, Blanchot was not the right person to direct them to his elected affiliate Foucault. Neither was Foucault the right person to address them to Blanchot. Consequently, they remained obliterated by both of them.

10.5 Empowering the literary transcendental: Jacques Derrida

This raising of modern literature to the new and pressing political transcendental characterizes the poststructuralist cosmopolitanism of the disregarded perse. Associating the singularity of community members with the “never assured or guaranteed,” i.e. heterotopic status of literature, Derrida tacitly supports Foucault’s and Blanchot’s deduction of the “poetics of rebeginning” from (modern) literature. “[I]t receives its determination from something other than itself.” (Derrida 2000a: 28–29) The literary fascinates the Derrida of the late 1990s because it proposes to its audience a realm of possible referents that are as if shared among them, though both the author and reader know they cannot be really shared as they belong to an altogether other world (Clark 2005:150). The same holds for the “singular plural” literary community in which “we know in common that we have nothing in common” (Derrida 2001a: 58) and yet act and behave as if we do. This is how the literary subverts the empirical political bond, occupies “the site of its articulation” (Clark 2005:152), introduces into it “the ordeal of undecidability,” and produces a literary community relying on an unknown future yet-to-come. Such community is bound to remain absolutely hospitable (2000b: 83) to this unpredictable alterity that is always on the way to arriving.

Following the logics of the enabler who sacrificially surrenders to the unfathomable Other in order to receive his authorization, Derrida joins the company of Levinas, Foucault and Blanchot. All of them empower the powerless. This peculiar supreme powerless agency, which Derrida in the late 1990s renders in distinctively literary terms, appears in his early work in the form of différance.Via traces, breakthroughs, shifts, delays and folds this “law of laws” ceaselessly disappropriates all identities, but for its part resists any such disappropriation (Derrida 1985: 121). “The law of laws” was probably an allusion to Levinas’s ethics labeled by Derrida (1967a: 164) as “the ethics of ethics” because it resists historical recollection (Levinas 1961: 136). Inasmuch as Derrida places the differance equally beyond historical “pindownability,” in the irretrievable past behind the back of history, it promises an equally discontinuous future: à-venir, yet-to-come. In the late 1990s, he replaces the former concepts such as différance, trace or undecidability with the rewritten concepts of the gift (don) and specter (Gespenst), and, finally, the messianic promise of the literary (Beardsworth 1996: 36). He did not even hesitate to call this all-differentiating structure that resists all differentiation justice, in order to establish a clear opposition to law (droit) that reduces and represses it.

The delineated argumentative steps undertaken by Derrida spawn a stark binary opposition between ethics and politics, justice and law, literature and philosophy, which escapes his attention, remaining surprisingly spared deconstruction. When he equates his concept of justice with Levinas’s concept of ethics based on their common undeconstructibility,98 he seems to have forgotten two important caveats. First, Levinas uses the concept of justice primarily in order to emphasize exactly the opposite, i.e. the legal aspect of the original French word justice (Levinas 1961: 188, 1992: 132–133, Levinas and Nemo 1982: 94–95). Second, Derrida himself once criticized Levinas’s concept of ethics for not having taken into consideration its philosophical and historical “memory” (Derrida and Labarrière 1986: 76), i.e. for freeing its urging face of any representation that would undermine its irresistibility. Although Derrida in this and other ways repeatedly drew attention to the possibility of a violent implementation of such an alleged “command from beyond” (1997: 65),99 of its perilous proximity to “the bad, even to the worst” (1992b: 28),100 he simultaneously unreservedly reiterates the welcome, irrefutable and obligatory character of this tout autre. Accordingly, he states that it underlies no satisfactory translation but just acceptance, affirmation and obedience.

From this perspective, one can understand why one of Derrida’s most authoritative American interpreters, John Caputo, translated his conception of the Altogether Other into the idea of God of the medieval philosopher Saint Anselm. “God is in-finite by definition. […] God’s measure is to be without measure. God is the sheer excess of never containable or comprehensible excess, Who is always more than anything we can say or think […]” (Caputo 2000:180, 183). Derrida himself richly underpins this “hermeneutic” interpretation when he openly equates the Altogether Other with God: “God looks at me and I don't see him and it is on the basis of this gaze that singles me out [ce regard qui me regard (1992e: 87, 59, 67)] that my responsibility comes into being” (1995: 91, 51, 67). Since such a hypostasis serves as the hideous instrument of deconstruction’s authorization – Derrida unreservedly proclaims, “deconstruction is justice” (1992b: 15) – his enabler’s perspective presents itself as a mirror inversion of the hermeneutic perspective of the agency. Uncritically used as a categorical imperative, “the trope of the Other […] must a priori fail to do justice to the complex activity, creativity, and engagement of those whom it figures simply as relegated objects” (Sedgwick 1993:147). Such an imperial flattening of important historical, political and cultural differences among the empirical others might ultimately elucidate why Levinas’s face, which lurks behind each “human other” (autrui), demands an “unconditional obedience” (Levinas 1961: 23, Levinas 1996:19).101 Levinas states that, in welcoming the Other, I welcome the Most High to which my freedom is subordinated (1961: 335). Even though Derrida, Foucault and Blanchot oppose Levinas’s philosophical rendering of the Other, the literary in their programs of ethical redemption nonetheless functions in the same way as Levinas’s despotic Absolute Other does.

But if Blanchot reminds us that modern literature is tightly co-dependent with modern political identity, if it is always weakened, undermined and ruined by the latter, if it is but a remainder of the latter’s techniques of differentiation, then why should we be absolutely hospitable and unconditionally surrender to it? To prevent this we have to argue with Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida against them: Absolute hospitality implies a divine sovereignty of Levinas’s absent face whereas, according to Blanchot’s “Foucauldian” correction, “absence is not pure indetermination, it is also always and each time […] determined” by the given distribution of an empirical order (Blanchot 1993: 250). Far from being a pure transcendental force, modern literature is just “an impure alloy of an historical a priori and a formal a priori” (Blanchot 1987: 71–72), one of the historical figures of the enduring human redoubling forever prevented from completing itself. Why should we unquestionably other our empirical face, recommence our empirical identity, and renounce our empirical brother for the benefit of this always equally problematic, i.e. empirically refracted exteriority? If this outside cannot but be represented, and its voice broken, then its demand for everybody’s unconditional and interminable repentance and expiation is obviously misplaced. “What speaks when the voice speaks? It situates itself nowhere […] but manifests itself in the space of redoubling, of echo and resonance where it is not someone, but rather this unknown space […] that speaks without speaking.” (Blanchot 1993: 258) Even though Blanchot and Derrida explicitly and Foucault implicitly critically reexamined Levinas’s transcendental ethics, it seems that this ethics nonetheless reentered Foucault’s revolutionary technology of the self, Blanchot’s remorseful elaboration of désœuvrement and Derrida’s messianic concepts of friendship, gift, specter and justice. It did so in the “inimical” guise of literature. Through such a literary reentry, something that was envisioned to be purely and strictly ethical acquired a biased political shape of literary community. Pace Levinas, Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida, the ethical and the political on the one hand and the transcendental and the empirical on the other appear to be doomed to an unwanted proximity.