Out from Behind the Shadows

Abstract

Levinas's ethics and visual art: an analysis of relationship between them would appear to be futile exercise, one which could lead only to dead end. Levinas's understanding of art's relationship with ethics widely understood to be iconoclastic, and for good reason: Reality and its Shadow, Levinas's sole essay to deal with phenomenon of art, argues that art's representational and rhythmic nature will always distract us from ethics.' The vehemence with which Levinas rejects art summarized in one of his more provocative statements, where Levinas writes that there something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during plague (RS 142). From point of view of Levinas's 1948 essay, if we are to take ethics seriously then we should avoid art entirely. When it comes to considering visual art in particular, this relationship between art and ethics becomes even more problematic, since vision for Levinas totalizing embrace which refuses to acknowledge alterity of other, an encounter which is, for Levinas, ethics.2 In this context it surprising indeed to find that many of Levinas's works - dating from both before and after Reality and its Shadow - appeal to particular examples of art in terms which make it plain that works of visual art play an important role in ethics. Just how such apparently contradictory attitudes toward art can co-exist in Levinas's thought subject of this essay. Ethics Levinas's wariness toward art founded on primacy he accords to ethics, over that of ontology. According to Levinas, ontology, the comprehension, embracing of Being, begins its search for knowledge with philosopher as sovereign.3 In setting out to contemplate being, oncological philosopher implicitly claims to have and capacity for knowledge - even if that knowledge simply about limits of philosophy. In itself these implicit claims are not necessarily problem: Levinas's own philosophy draws attention to ontology's limits. Problematic for Levinas is, however, ontology's emphasis on comprehension of being, rather than on that which exceeds comprehension.4 The wisdom springing from ontological investigation, even if that wisdom concedes limits and imperfections of thought and knowledge, remains wisdom which is, as Levinas puts it, reduced to self-consciousness.5 As consequence of this return to oneself, Levinas argues that ontology (along with Husserl's intentional consciousness) an egology. For Levinas, Anything unknown that can occur to it [ontology] in advance disclosed, open, manifest, cast in mould of and cannot be complete surprise (OBBE 99). So while ontology may not claim to have perfect knowledge of being, whatever exceeds knowledge ontology does claim to have given secondary interest due to ontology's privileging of what known. For Levinas, in so far as ontology appropriates and grasps otherness of known, this traditional first philosophy philosophy of power (respectively: EFP 76, Levinas's italics; TI 46). This means that ontology a philosophy of injustice, enacting as it does form of violence against other: it - and this crucial - form of representation which reduces other to same (TI 46). In distinction to forms of representation of other (like that of ontology), in ethical relation my attention on that which exceeds knowledge. The other unpresentable and beyond being. In other words, Levinas's ethics concerned with my encounter with other.6 This encounter not with an impersonal object of knowledge or lack of knowledge, and it not an encounter with an idea or representation of alterity, it not an experience of something or someone over whom I have control. As an inversion of egology and assumption of attendant to representation, ethics is in laying down by ego of its sovereignty (EFP 85). …