Abstract
Levinas's comments on art appear contradictory. On the one hand, he criticizes art as being disengaged from ethical concerns and constituting a possibility of moral evasion; on the other hand, he engages quite closely and in a supportive fashion with some art, such as Paul Celan's poetry. Interpreters commonly argue that only one of Levinas's conceptions of art, either the affirmative or the negative, represents his true attitude towards art. In this article the author seeks to make both statements compatible with each other and thus relevant to Levinas's conception of art. She focuses on his essay `Reality and Its Shadow?, where art is diagnosed as an ambiguous phenomenon. She argues that full understanding of the ambiguity of art demands that Levinas's different statements about art are considered together; only thus can the complete picture of the ambiguity emerge. Furthermore, it turns out that the very same feature which makes art open to misunderstanding - namely, its precarious materiality - also allows an artwork to sustain itself and to be revived. Art reveals a shadow, withdrawal, or resistance that belongs to reality itself.
Highlights
By way of its sensuous character, it diverts us from our ethical responsibility, and by way of its multiple meanings and layers it provides a possibility for evasion
Levinas points to several dangers inherent in art, but at the very moment when we have identified him as a prototypical Platonist, he complicates his claims, pointing out that art responds to certain ambiguities in reality itself and does justice to these more than any other human enterprise
In the light of our previous considerations, we may describe another dimension of art’s ambiguity: art discloses something about reality – namely, the shadow of strangeness within it; but by alerting us to ontological questions, art may distract us from the importance of ethics
Summary
Levinas criticizes art and artworks in several texts, such as Totality and Infinity3 and the essay, ‘Reality and Its Shadow’.4 Art lacks the immediacy of the ethical encounter with the Other. 15 The idea that Levinas’s reflections on art in ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ respond to Heidegger’s account of art is corroborated by Eaglestone (Ethical Criticism, 101–10) and Hand (Levinas, 69–75).
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