Audience of the Other

Abstract

THE LITERARY ARTS AND ETHICS IN LEVINAS Can art jolt you out of ordinary? Can it interrupt your quotidian ways, ways of thinking and being, ways of relating to yourself and others? Once in a while, does some piece of art suddenly catch you off guard, and leave you radically different, unable to approach world as you had before? I suspect that answer to these questions is yes. Then a new set of questions arises: could those moments capture encounter with radically Other in Levinas's philosophy? Can Levinas help to explain experience of art - both moment of experiencing a work, and beyond to creativity which founds artwork? If so, can art be ethical in Levinas's sense? Levinas asserts that ethics is closely tied to language, or even, that ethics is discourse. This points especially to artistic works whose medium is written word over purely visual or musical arts, for example, but it is by no means a stretch to describe artistic experience as one of discourse. Some art - theatre, novels, film-even depicts conversation. And while Levinas clearly proposes that living, active discourse, exhibits this possibility of ethics, if not exclusively, at least more than the said, which might include written artwork, artworks at very least depict instances of saying, thereby complicating a strict distinction between and in their case.1 This saying carries weight and indeterminacy of ethical. In contrast said is in some sense fact, language that has been thematized and immobilized and so constitutes a betrayal of living, pre- formulated ethical relation. The superficiality of with regard to infinite responsibility involved in leads Levinas to describe this mode of language as game-like, a type of play. Though irreducibly separate, two are intimately woven- giving rise to which in turn subordinates original or pre-original gravity of saying.2 Levinas's own language, too, takes a turn in his later work towards what can be called a style. He strays from traditional philosophical terminology and argumentation, adopting language that evokes more than refers, that spurns its literal dictionary reference, and whose formulation into sentences or even fragments is often more beautiful than informative. The poetic face of his writing suggests a deeper affinity with literary art. Levinas's readers might struggle to pin down a concrete understanding of relation to Other. Since this relation is so radical there is no easy way to explain it and no ready examples upon which to draw. His descriptions verge on paradoxical: face remains something that is not seen, widow and orphan are somehow transcendent, Other is infinite but destitute. The world we live in and way that we ordinarily relate to one another are hardly Levinasian; and yet Levinas does not want to issue normative ordinances telling us what we should do. He remains committed to his belief that - even if it does not seem to be so in slightest - ethics is, and not merely should be, fundamental. He thus insists on writing in mode of description, also drawing on his background in phenomenology and its commitment to description, even though I do not think that we can take him to be describing our usual ways of dealing with one another. In his Preface to Totality and Infinity he writes of philosophers: they found morality on after establishing that their politics starts with assumption of war.3 Yet our world often reflects this view, so that we live in a kind of war with one another, for instance, how deeply competition characterizes our interactions with one another. To not fully listen to one's partner, to end a telephone conversation for sake of convenience or economy, to ask someone else to get you a glass of water: no other ethicist would condemn these as strongly as Levinas, and yet these characterize our daily existence more than encounters with radically Other. …