Terror of the Ethical: On Levinas’s Il y a

Rien est ce q’il y a, et d’abord rien delà….¹
 

–Maurice Blanchot, Une Scène Primitive

 
Let us imagine, along with Levinas, that the all too obvious opposition of being and nothingness is not our only destiny, and let us suppose, moreover, that there is “something” otherwise than being, which is not, strictly speaking, nothing. In line with the Levinas orthodoxy, the otherwise-than-being will prima facie refer to the transcendent relation to the other, the ethical excess, and the final liberation of an existent from her tie to essence, the Spinozan conatus essendi. Nonetheless, nothing is less seamless or less secure than the transition from being to the ethical relation beyond being. An unavoidable risk associated with such an adventure without return to the same is that the otherwise-than-being is not a homogeneous field, since it entails both the ethical approach to the Other and a de-personalized, absolutely impersonal rustling of the there is (Il y a), which remains after the dissolution of hypostatized existence, of everything that is in being. Henceforth, it will be impossible to maintain a neat separation between these two senses of the otherwise-than-being that is other even to itself, in keeping with the Levinasian figure of alterity that is wholly other both in its form and in its content. While the ethical relation is anticipated in the anonymity of the there is, the trace of which it always retains, this residue itself poses a persistent threat to this relation ready to revert, at any moment, into the other avatar of what “is” beyond being. I call this double possibility terror of the ethical.
 
Not only the ethical relation, but being itself stands in the shadow of the there is. To resort to an allegory, we could picture being as a wrinkle in the fabric of infinity. This fabric, which is not to be confused with Spinoza’s substance, appears or is given to us only in and through its pleats (and, therefore, as a negation of its infinite character), in a mode of givenness that precludes all “metaphysical speculation” on the question of being’s limits. Levinas, on the contrary, recommends taking the analytical path that feigns the smoothness of infinity, “feigns,” in other words and in the best of phenomenological traditions, “the disappearance of every existent” (Difficult 292). The reductive return to the irreducible there is, still enthralled with Husserl’s imaginary exercise in Ideas I that, just before World War I, aims to establish who or what outlives the annihilation of the world, irons out the pleats on the fabric of existence. It laughs with the terrible rumbling laughter in the face of the dull seriousness of the work of being, or the being of work, that really makes the existent disappear; even as the existent inscribed in its existence lays claim to and masters its being or its work, it suddenly dissolves behind the translucent screen of representation. This rumbling laughter, without anyone who or anything that laughs, not only precedes inscription, mastery, representation, and possession, but also succeeds them in a virtual threat to swallow up the systems of meaning they laboriously construct against the background noise of “existence without existents.” If it signifies anything at all, the rustling of the there is should be taken as a sign of the incomplete separation of sense from non-sense, a reminder of the constant danger that the latter will overflow the former, a proof that it is impossible to derive pure sense as a corollary to pure consciousness, and a mark of a certain depersonalization, or defacement, that is both promulgated by and deferred in being, sensation, and labor.
 
Levinas’s theoretical feigning of destruction testifies to the impossibility of committing a “perfect crime”—or of imagining, simulating, or premeditating such crime—that would succeed in eliminating all phenomenologico-criminological evidence and all traces of the wiping out of traces (“The Trace” 357). When nothing is left, there is still or already “something”: not Husserl’s “pure consciousness,” but the nocturnal and anonymous rustling of the there is (Existence 58; Hand 30). Henceforth, the infinity of the there is will traverse and trouble every event of, in, and beyond being, infecting and inflecting sensation, labor, the face of the Other, and the ethical encounter. It will invade uniqueness with anonymity, seduce the I to desecrate and eliminate the face of the Other, and fill the ethical relation itself with the terror of ceaseless giving, which cannot be harnessed or domesticated for some determinate purpose. In each case, it will be necessary to question the goodness of the Good warped by the rustling of the there is and to ask whether the hazards of transcendence beyond being are justified by this goodness.
 
Being, then, is produced as a fold in the fabric of infinity, which Levinas diligently unfolds, first into the rustling of the there is, and second, into various attributes of ethics such as metaphysical desire, the encounter with alterity, and transcendence. The fact of folding is what he terms “hypostasis”: “the event by which existent contracts his existence” (Time 43). Hypostasis is the existent’s attempt to separate itself from non-sense, to break with the anonymity of existence via the founding of interiority, and, eo ipso, to nourish its inter-estedness in the perseverance in essence. Conversely, in ethical transcendence, the infinite alterity of the Other exceeds the finitude of the I and of the relations with the world it sustains, while the interestedness of the existent is replaced with the disinterestedness of what lies beyond essence (Otherwise 5). Hypostasis is enframed or delimited by two terms that are, themselves, unlimited and that, in this de-limitation, partake of one another: the there is and the infinity of the ethical.
 
The finitude of essence manifests itself in essence’s activity or activation, in the essentialization that modifies “without alteration” (Otherwise 29-30). If we are to read Levinas closely, “without alteration” must be understood in the sense of “without alterization.” Despite its unremitting modifications—and here a reference to Spinoza’s Ethics will be more than justified—essence is devoid of the alterity of the Other who is not the other of the Same. But as soon as essence unravels and comes apart, the psyche experiences an “alteration without alienation” (Otherwise 141), where the hold of the infinitely Other on the Same alters its very sameness. Beyond sense and consciousness, the I is obsessively moved and inspired to assume its responsibility for the Other and for the responsibility of the Other for the third, who is the anonymous Other of the Other. Having shed the vestiges of mastery and contract, the ethical is ineluctably infected with the “altered” infinity of the there is, where the face of the Other becomes a passageway to all the other Others.²
 
Keeping abreast with the thrust of the “modification without alteration,” we will observe that what is happening in the pleats of infinity includes sense and labor. But the pleats themselves are a “happening,” an event of being, in which being comes to be when comprehension “does not invoke . . . beings but only names them, thus accomplishing a violence and a negation” (Levinas, Basic 9). The emergence of the name against the noisy background of the nameless (the name that remembers its origin and carries the fatal impulse of namelessness, reducing the interlocutor to silence) crumples the infinite, even as it inscribes itself on this crumpled body. The partial negation that attaches itself to the naming of beings is the negation proper to mastery and possession that repeat, in a diluted form, the violence of the there is.³ The name both designates and erases the named, simulating the nameless. Biblical Adam’s first act undoes the very creation it supplements. This is not yet the kind of an event for which Derrida would reserve the term “the economy of violence,” since partial and total negations are absolutely incommensurable with one another and with the remainder of any destruction that resurfaces in the there is. The work of being is the redoubled work of the negative that struggles on two fronts: against the unnamed singularity of the Other and against the nameless generality of the void. And it is those two fronts that merge in the movement of the ethical beyond being, setting it on the open-ended path toward absolute alterity.
 
Sensation—and, above all, vision—is made possible by the forgetting of the nameless generality of the void (Totality 190). Yet the panoptic gaze, the extreme case of vision, reintroduces that which is forgotten. It belongs to the spectator who transforms what is seen into a spectacle, that is, into a completely present, fully assembled and representable being. And precisely because this gaze folds being into itself, it cannot be seen. The spectator pays for this mastery with obscurity; one withdraws behind one’s gaze and eliminates oneself, in short, renders oneself liminal. Invalidating the laws and the evidence of traditional phenomenology, vision is no longer the unity of the seeing and the seen. The open monstrous eye is the night staring into the night that unwittingly taints the work of representation with an absence that yawns in the midst of the painstakingly assembled and synthesized presence.
 
Nor is Levinas’s face of the Other given to vision. In the unutterable condition of the absolute denuding, it withdraws into the nocturnal realm no phenomenological light can illuminate and, maintaining the memory of the there is, expresses a trace of threatening facelessness. Still, it would be wrong to assume that the face is merely secretive and invisible, for its self-expression overrides both vision and blindness. To the extent that it reverses the relation of hypostasis with the summons to face the Other as a Master “who judges me” (Totality 101), the judgment of the face inverts the meaning of the intentional act, reconfigures the relation of visibility into the infinity of Others who watch me through the Other, and, thereby, inflects the Other’s gaze with the trace of the there is. While the effaced and forgotten face is infected with the originary facelessness, its judgment leaves the I at the mercy of absolute exteriority. The singularity of the face joins forces with the generality of facelessness and shifts the horizons of being and presence. The pleats of infinity are everywhere ready to fade away.
 
Labor, in Levinas’s sense of the term, is another position of non-transcendent mastery,⁴ where the grasp of nameless matter “as raw material” “announces its anonymity and renounces it,” both exciting and stilling “the anonymous rustling of the there is” (Totality 159-60). In a twist analogous to the elimination of the spectator, the renunciation of the anonymity of matter announces the anonymity of the one who labors (or writes) and comes to pass behind one’s work, disappearing behind the produced sign. The author or the doer is able to emerge victorious from the fight against the resistance of anonymous matter only by becoming the anonymous force behind creation, the force whose will, intentionality, and consciousness merge with the night of the there is. Here Levinas agrees with a certain Marx for whom work is the consummation of the worker’s being. But to consume even the ashes of this consummation, as Levinas seems to demand in Otherwise Than Being (50), is to work for the Other. Outside of the sociological and political-economic category of exploitation, to work for the Other is to take radical generosity to a new height of my disappearance behind my work, so that no return, no reflux of gratitude, may be expected from the recipient. This is, no doubt, what Spivak has in mind when she reads Virginia Woolf’s pledge to work for the ghost of Shakespeare’s sister “even in poverty and obscurity,” noting that “we have to work at that word ‘work,’ elaborate it” (35). And indeed, there is no work that does not ultimately result in the obscurity of the worker whose interiority withdraws the moment the work is finally produced. As the passage for the work, the worker comes to pass behind it (or else, dies in the work) and, reaching the threshold of being, reverts into the other of the Other—the non-identical, unidentifiable, anonymous phantasm.
 
Sense and labor inhabit the cleft between “the event [of death] and the subject to whom it will happen” (Time 77). Through them, the subject relives the agony of this cleft, in which the postponement, the infinite deferral of finitude, collides with the perpetual eventalization of the event. Paradoxically enough, the ultimate violence of death is infinitely postponed in the operations of consciousness and in operationality as such (Heidegger’s Besorge, concernful dispersion in the world): in what still has time in the face of passing away (Totality 224) and in what, at the same time, interminably accomplishes this passing in the form of the subject’s disappearance behind the sign and the gaze. Death is deferred in that which dies, not in the anxiety experienced in its anticipation—this is the oldest mimetic defense, permitting one to become what one fears. In order to “become” the there is, however, the existent must relinquish its substantiation, undoing the achievements of hypostasis. The transcendence of sense and labor approximates this becoming and stands for a de-scendence and dissolution back into the impersonal existence where the I does not survive its passage to the beyond. The itineraries of work and the gaze lead back to the silent Neuter of history and optics (Totality 91, 246), if not even further to the absolute impersonality of the there is.
 
In analogy to the sense bathed, from all sides, by the overwhelming stream of nonsense (Otherwise 163), labor futilely resists the elemental signification of non-possession (Totality 131). The de-substantiation of the I, its melting away into the Neuter, that transpires in the gaze and in the product of labor, as well as the noisy monotony of non-sense and the element, challenge and ultimately flatten subjective, conceptual, and ontological borders. But in addition to the pleats of being, labor, and sense, infinity folds upon itself, disclosing the site where ethical responsibility incorporates the there is. This fold of infinity upon infinity, this crease holding the absent center of Levinasian philosophy, this “alteration without alienation” requires further analysis and elaboration.
 
The territory “Beyond the face” mapped out in Section IV of Totality and Infinity and immanently traversed in the transcendent face of the Other anchors the facelessness of the void elongated into the third, that is, into the neutral and neutralizing alterity of the Other’s Other. The unique Other, refractory to concepts and categories, is not Buber’s Thou (Proper 32) but what I would like to designate as the inter-face of ethics and politics/justice. The crux of the interface is that il y a is transcribed into illeity in the face of the Other, into the s/he-ness of the Other that opens the dimension of sociality and refuses the clandestinity of unjust love showered on one human being (Totality 213). Anachronistically, the third precedes the I and the Other (the first and the second) and, demanding justice at the heart of ethics, threatens de facto to nullify the ethical relation by integrating the election of the irreplaceable I and the incomparable face of the Other into the procedures of conceptuality, comparison, and totalization. The demand for justice does not exclude the prospect of reinstating a modified version of the anonymity of the there is in the very heart of ethics. But, for Levinas, the apparent betrayal of the ethical is not the opposite of ethics. The inter-face of the third in the face of the Other non-synthetically binds together the conjuncture and the divergence of the ethical and the political.
 
Illeity in the Other is the figure of the Other in the Other, infinity in infinity, “oblivion in oblivion,” “sky blue in blue sky” (Jabès 26).⁵ The anonymity of the unique, namelessness in the proper name, is not a departure of the identical from itself in the hope of a subsequent self-recovery that defines the work of consciousness (Time 52). On the contrary, it denotes the fullness of the trace awash with itself so that no dialectical negativity and overcoming of negativity would be required for its enunciation. If both the form and the content (not to mention the “identity”) of the Other boil down to its alterity [L’Autre est Autrui] (Totality 251; Totalité 281), then the Other in itself is other not as a tautological confinement in a hermetically sealed (though autochthonous) entity but as the modality of accommodation, welcoming the infinity of Others in the Other. The finite difference (faiblesse) of the Other is disseminated in this unfathomable hospitality; Illeity in the Other “is” the fold of infinity.
 
The anonymity of the unique resists the will to name at any price, which—for Levinas-refers to (a certain variety of) evil. This does not mean, however, that pure anonymity without uniqueness is the embodiment of the good. In its shadow, I can try to hide and evade my responsibility to and for the Other. But when I avow this responsibility, my avowal verges on the erasure of the name—hence, on another kind of anonymity—in “Here I am,” which is my response to the immemorial election, whereby I am called to the aid of the Other. But who, precisely, utters these words? Is the singled-out I named or nameless? The ambiguity of the I is captured in Bruns’s suggestion that the “‘I’ is a name without a name, parentheses in the regime of signs that cannot be filled by death” (185). “Here I am” is an elliptical expression of “Here I am, despite my death,” despite the deferred anonymity that does not know any uniqueness. Although the uniqueness of the name without a name wards off the fulfillment of death, it does not preclude the agony of dying in me, which corresponds to the anonymity of the unique within the Same. In the name without a name, the I “does not come to an end, while coming to an end” (Totality 56), unsaying the said, and expiring for the Other. Before the empirical “regime of signs,” the signifyingness of signification encrypts the I as the sign given to the Other in the proximity that endows with meaning the uniqueness and the anonymity of the I in spite of its death (Otherwise 115).
 
The threshold of existence, where I say “Here I am” and am summoned to justify myself or to live an inner life of apology in the Greek sense of the word (Totality 240), is crossed in the exilic deliverance for-the-other (Otherwise 138). “Here I am” is the response affirming the immemorial demand of the Other. Even so, the threshold is internal to the I who is interiority turned inside out. In contrast to the effects of the panoptic gaze and of labor, my justification intended for the Other does not detach me from the sign offered. On the model of Husserl’s intentionality that structures consciousness as openness to its object, as the configuration of transcendence in immanence, interiority is nothing but a movement toward the outside, an aspiration toward the Other, which remains irreducible within the depths of interiority itself.
 
But it will prove unfeasible to distill the purity of the ethical from the interiority that turns inside out in its exposure to the Other. The noise of the boundless element transmitting the rustling of the there is keeps resounding in the dwelling it has never evacuated, just as the anarchy of obsession has never left consciousness alone, for both are always already broken into. The idea of the immanent enunciation of the transcendent threshold underpins Levinas’s project to solve the problem of unjust transcendence in which the existent did not survive its passage to the beyond, and to “personalize” transcendence such that the I would not be lost in it, such that uniqueness would be able to span the dead time of anonymity. Granted: transcendence in the face of the Other (Basic 27) keeps the promise of justice for the I, for the Other, and for the third. And yet, having traversed this gap, the unique both keeps and loses itself as it emerges clothed in the name without the name, in the quasi-anonymity of the I, both in service of and aligned with the Other and the Other’s Other.
 
Besides saying “I,” how is it possible to orient oneself toward the anonymity of the unique? Levinas terms such an orientation “prayer.” Rejecting both the thought that names creation and ontological thought, the I invokes the Other in a prayer (prière) that undergirds discourse (Basic 7). Instead of following the path of consciousness that sets up the name in the anonymity of the night (Levinas Reader 32), this invocation seeks the anonymity of the night in the name. A bracketing and reduction of the name, it unsays the said and reconstitutes it in the saying. For the invisible and the inaudible to manifest themselves non-phenomenally, the facelessness in the face and the namelessness in the name must be able to speak. And yet, the extreme fragility of the not-yet-speech, of prayer, of the breath drawn before the first word is uttered—fainter than a whisper—beneath and beyond discourse, spells out a constant self-undermining of the invocation tempted to name the anonymous, be it the night, the void, or illeity. The names of alterity name something other than alterity. “Only the Void is entitled to vouch for the Void” (Jabès 65).
 
Prayer is the decomposition of the said that attends to the Other in the presence of the I, implores the Other to listen, to remain an interlocutor in the relation without representation—”an irreplaceable being, unique in its genus, the face” (Totality 252). A being “unique in its genus” is not merely something or someone belonging to an absolutely singular genus, the non-idealizable and the unrepeatable par excellence. It is, more precisely, a being unique in its anonymity, which is to say, the one who silently refuses the imposition of the generic name that suffocates the alterity it names and no less vehemently rejects pure namelessness.
 
The non-givenness of the fullness awash with itself, the self-erasure of the trace on the other side of namelessness and the name, marks the face. The overdetermined etymology of the face offers some clues to the strange convergence of anonymity and uniqueness I am sketching out here. The Hebrew word for the face, panim, shatter(s) the unity of the face in indicating a certain multiplicity in the plural ending -im. Panim is/are unique in the derivation of multiplicity outside of conceptual differentiation. The third in the face of the Other does not stand for a latecomer who disturbs the ethical with the demand for justice, nor for a mere conjunctive, synchronous addition to the Other, nor for another example of the Other deduced from the same mysterious genus. Rather, the third is part and parcel of the originary non-phenomenal formation—a formation lacking the formalism of form—of panim, which preserves the exceptional separation within its genus. The face, so understood, expresses the anarchic order of multiplicity.
 
The French word for face, visage, also retains the overtones of order, albeit in a slightly different context. Associated with the verb viser (to aim at), it upsets the Husserlian notion of intentionality. In the face, it is not a consciousness that directs itself toward its objects, but the order of the face exposed to the I: “The order that orders me to the other does not show itself to me, save through the trace of its reclusion, as a face of a neighbor” (Otherwise 140). That which aims at me so as to order (in the double sense of commanding and organizing—hence the military connotations of Autrui highlighted by Derrida in “Violence and Metaphysics” are more pertinent than ever before) me to the Other is anonymous to the extent that it is not embodied in the Other and does not follow the logic of a manifestation or a phenomenon. But, at the same time, the order’s intentionality is unique because it calls upon me and no one else to face the Other in response to my pre-discursive prayer, which attends to alterity in anticipation of the unexpected command. The self-expression of the face of the Other is a prayer answered more profoundly than any vocal revelation.
 
Levinasian “caress” is also a prayer—this time, a prayer that has become flesh. Swerving from the initiative of discourse, the caressing hand without the eye is fixated on the pre-discursive abjuration of intentionality. It touches the “impersonal dream” (Totality 259), wholly absorbed in the anonymity of the Beloved, wholly attuned to what-is-not-yet peering through the transcendence of the continuum potentiality/actuality. Here the anonymity of the caress inflects the correlation of prayer and discourse and arrests saying in its track, forestalling its relapse into the said, or into the anonymity of the there is. This inflection experienced, for instance, in the sealed dyad of lovers uproots illeity from the face of the Other and, at once, re-situates it in the multiplicity of fecundity which is not allowed to “dissolve into the anonymity of the there is but . . . go[es] further than light . . . go[es] elsewhere” (Totality 268). In the autotelic movement of the caress, self-absorbed anonymity denounces itself by internalizing (inflecting) all light without yielding a reflection.
 
To be sure, Levinas distinguishes between the “night as anonymous rustling of the there is” and the nameless “night of the erotic,” extending alongside the first night (Totality 258). Ostensibly more personal and familiar, the second kind of darkness yields intimacy without distance, an ecstatic meltdown of boundaries between the I and the Other, who do not yet make their theatrical appearance in the first kind of night. Still, the indeterminacy of the nocturnal complicates the efforts at a conceptual differentiation. Without a clear line of demarcation, one night passes into the other, as the vicissitudes of the nameless and the anonymous, of the denuded and the unveiled, entwine. Instead of marked borders, there are only wrinkles and pleats that migrate, vanish, and reappear, as the fabric is worn and worn out. The interpenetration of the two nights is another sign for our inability to ward off and to quarantine the rustling of the there is. The prayer-flesh is, like the self-expression of the face, a prayer answered in the absence of any perceptible response or revelation and materialized in the night of corporeity. The “ambiguity of love” awakened in this night is more serious than the laughter, raillery, and indecency denouncing language (Totality 260), for caressing the wound, the hand without the eye suffers the suffering of the other and in the same breath pre-meditates, before and beyond the interference of consciousness and of knowledge, the murder of the Other, or the wholesale transformation of the other into an open wound. But, of course, any premeditation is necessarily belated. The caress is already a post-meditation, an afterthought, and therefore a sign of guilt. The other is already dead (or else, has already withdrawn, has gone elsewhere) when the illeity of the third that animates it is excluded from the dyad of lovers, or when the face is horribly disfigured, owing to the fateful modification in its originary non-phenomenological formation. The caress reaches nothing but the corporeity of a sentient corpse and wistfully strokes the wounds of rotting flesh.
 
With the already dead, the pleats of infinity gather solemnly—as if attending to the deceased—in the uniqueness of anonymity. The normalizing reversion to the uniqueness of anonymity is, first and foremost, history’s fruitless approach to subjective interiority forced to manifest itself outside of the immediacy of expression, in the obliqueness of works (Totality 67). Such an incursion on the part of objectivity entails both more and less than the rustling of the there is. More than the there is, historical existence is differentiation and individuation in the trace of the absent existent imprinted in the works left behind. Less than the there is, it brings forth its chroniclers, survivors, and witnesses of the past and, thereby, falls short of the complete destruction of every existent. The historian’s unspoken dream is to caress pure illeity extricated from hypostatized existence and locked in a mute but phenomenally demonstrable s/he-ness of the dead other. Unlikely allies, phenomenology and history share the project of describing the other.
 
Conceptualized in terms of the uniqueness of anonymity, the verbs “to see,” “to labor,” and “to be” come to represent a non-substantive concentration of a “field of forces” in language (Time 48). With this conceptualization, Levinas takes Nietzsche’s side in a thinly veiled anti Hegelian argument that envisages existence neither as subject, nor as substance, but as the anonymous deed detached from any doer (25). The lateness of the doer’s fabrication into the fabric of doing hints at the logical priority of the there is followed by the event of the hypostasis. The uniqueness of anonymity (of the spectacle, or of the being/product of labor) bears the trace not of the existent’s eye or hand, but of her disappearance. In each case, however, the trace of disappearance refers to writing, which is to say, to the concurrence of the “limination” of the writer behind the sign and the resistance of the sign to the anonymity of the there is. It is this verbal concentration of a field of forces that gives rise to the economic par excellence, where the liminal writer pays with a newly gained anonymity for the uniqueness of the text.
 
The murderousness of the caress invites the conclusion that, after all, a certain version of Hobbesianism is correct—even for Hobbes’s arch-antagonist, Levinas—in that there is no murder that is not preemptive. The act of killing aims at the face, at that which is “exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill” (Ethics 86). Aiming at the face (now read as visage) one attempts to skew the asymmetry of the face-to-face in the direction of a quid pro quo, to target intentionality that essentially and from the very first aims at me and is intended toward me as an ethical order, or, perhaps, as an evil design, which I cannot decipher, make sense of, aim back at. More importantly, it is absolutely impossible to know which extreme the Other has chosen. This impenetrable night of not-knowing is frightening, but what is even more terrifying (what provokes the first murderous thought) is not the face per se, but the facelessness of the face,⁶ containing like a series of Russian dolls the trace of illeity harboring the residue of the there is in the face of the Other. The facelessness dwelling in the face infects the ethical order with the persistent delusions and suspicions of evil design famously raised in Descartes’s Meditations. Preempting the Other’s self-expression, the murderer seeks to uncover the Other’s ostensibly murderous plan, to completely “void” the silent void of another interiority, to expose the forever hidden in the exposure of the face, to reveal the menacing trace of the there is, in other words, to phenomenologize the Other. All this can be accomplished when the Other is “purged” of her otherness, when the murderer is able to exclaim, “Here I am, despite Your death!,” when the eliminated other is, thus, confined in the sign of the there is given to the I and, predictably enough, confirming the worst of my fears that come true in metaleptic, misguided violence mistaking the surrogate (the face) for the true target (facelessness).
 
But the impossibility of murder is inscribed in the very face of the Other (Basic 16) and, more pogniantly, in the trace of the there is which it harbors, transmitting, like a seashell, the murmur and the laughter of impersonal existence that returns after every negation. First, the logic of total negation that drives the murderer would be undone in the successful outcome of its “operation,” in which the there is remains as the indestructible trace of absolute destruction. The violence of the unlimited negation (Totality 222) would find its insurmountable limit in the sole target it can posit. The second limitation of murder would emanate from the face’s auto-referentiality, self-expression, and self-signifyingness (Totality 51) that allot the status of secondary supplements to ethical imperatives and written laws. If we read between the lines of the ethical asymmetry and the self-erasure of signification in the face of the Other, we will discover that the Other cannot become an object of my outrage, nor even another subject analogous to me, without being converted into something other than the Other. Any murderer who hits a target will invariably miss the Other.
 
With regard to the second limitation of murder: the self-signifyingness of the face defies all horizons of meaning-bestowal, even as it signifies [se signifie] only itself (Totality 140). The horrifying and indifferent void of facelessness in the face of the Other comes into my purview only as sheer non-sense, as a foreign, thoroughly forgotten, and indecipherable hieroglyphic sign of the immemorial past. Against the background of this unfathomably dense non-sense, the delusional wish to negate the Other interprets and, indeed, embraces murder as a function of sense. The truth of this ostensibly outlandish interpretation hides in the fundamental connection of murder with the prototype of phenomenological comportment, namely, the act of seeing.
 
For vision to take place, every place must be abandoned for the empty, leveled, and homogeneous space, which already wrinkles the fabric of infinity, preparing the stage for the anticipated spectacle. The procedure for converting a place into deserted space hinges upon the emptying, or “voiding,” of the shadows’ abstruse fullness with the triumphant ray of light: “The light makes the thing appear by driving out the shadows; it empties space. It makes space arise specifically as a void” (Totality 189). Repressing non-sense, sense tired of avoiding the void, which stubbornly recoils into itself, confronts—quite bluntly—the excessiveness of this impenetrable, mute menace. Vision rebels against the void, but in the course of this rebellion creates the monstrosity of a transparent and unwelcoming, placeless void of its own that co-originates with light itself. Mimetic preemption recurs. While murder is a function of sense derived from the spasmodic urge to level and to nullify, it mimetically falls back on that which has been leveled and “renounces comprehension absolutely” (Totality 198). The murderer’s clasped hand is empty, since, a mere sweaty palm apprehending itself without the Other, it clutches nothing but a vortex of air. Here is the grasp that puts an end to the intentionality of grasping, sense that annihilates sense, light that extinguishes light.
 
The void of the there is and of illeity is not filled with darkness in the same way that voided space oozes light. The spatiality that enables vision is defined by the ever-expanding horizons of luminosity, postponing the fall of darkness whose ominous signs consign the gravity of vision to a dialectical child-play. Seen on the horizon of luminosity is the Other’s silhouette robbed of the face (Basic 9), which is but the non-expandable horizon of the horizon. In its turn, the void of the there is knows no horizon, no expansion or contraction, no dialectical fort-da of light and shadow; it disallows even the quasi-Cartesian hypothesis that “only I and this black void have ever been” (Beckett 304). As such, murder occupies the non-place of difference between the two voids and attacks each of them with the weapons of the other. On the one hand, the act of murder breaches the horizon of luminosity by subsuming vision and comprehension under the blindness it borrows from the there is. On the other hand, this very act mirrors the lesser violence of vision, reflecting the light of perverse signification onto illeity hidden in the face of the Other. Exposure and closure, but also vision and blindness, intersect in the unbridgeable disjuncture of the void that divides the two voids and characterizes the aporetic situation of murder.
 
In a frantic attempt to void the Other, the murderer strikes at the finite difference (faiblesse)—the uniqueness and the exposedness of the face—and blends it with the infinity of anonymity and materiality from which the face arises. The absencing of the face and the presencing of a “trace lost in a trace, less than nothing in the trace of . . . excess” (Otherwise 93) are two interlaced dimensions of the absolute profanation, revealing “more than nothing in the trace of lack” (to paraphrase Levinas). Ironing the pleats of infinity, murder brings time to a standstill, confines it to the atemporal instant thick with suspense, in which no happening—not even murder—is feasible. Or, more precisely, murder invalidates itself in the course of its own execution. It is necessarily inoperative insofar as its “success” dilutes, in anonymity without uniqueness, the field of verbal forces conducive to any action, including murder itself, and bars the existence of the doer and of the deed alike. The voiding of the Other is the negation of the execution, as well as the paralysis of the executioner “no longer able to be able” (Time 74), prevented from exclaiming, “Here I am, despite Your death!”
 
The “existential density of the void itself, devoid of all being, empty even of void” (Levinas Reader 35) is the unfolding of infinity in an avalanche of the there is, from which the murderer cannot retreat. In contrast to the luxurious byproducts of historiography that can, at least, study the works in the absence of those who brought them about, murder does not generate survivors alongside its victims, but abolishes, at least in principle which echoes Kant’s moral philosophy, the event of hypostasis by which existents (including the murderer himself) contract their existence. Although it seeks to escape from the horror of the there is (Levinas Reader 33), this self-defeating act is irrevocably trapped in a voided presence, in the aftermath, but also the antecedence of the desperate erasure (read: integration, totalization) of the I and the Other. It appears that the effects of this erasure may be remedied or avoided in the construction of a more “humane,” less restrictive totality. Yet the edifice of any totality is visibly sallied with the blood of sacrificial victims: yours, mine, the Other’s, that of the Other’s Other, and so on. The voided avoidance of Benjamin’s divine violence—bloodless and expiatory (Reflections 300), corresponding, mutatis mutandis, to Levinas’s notion of the ethical—is the only alternative, if it is still possible to speak of alternatives in this context, to such an edifice. But, though bloodless, the ethical is not free of violence. It therefore behooves us to retrace the trace of the there is in the ethical and, perhaps, the foreshadowing of the ethical in the there is.
 
While Levinas refers to the there is as the subject of Existence and Existents, he distances this term from the “joy of what exists” and the sort of exuberant abundance of giving signaled in the Heideggerian es gibt (Ethics 47). Elsewhere he comments that “none of the generosity which the German term es gibt is said to contain revealed itself between 1933 and 1945″ (Difficult 292). Fair enough. In the period just before and during World War II, the plentitude of es gibt reverts into the bareness of il y a. A de-subjectivized remainder of Husserl’s annihilation of the world invades Heidegger’s existential world-formation. But, to complicate things somewhat, does not es gibt—literally, “it gives”—already stand for the terrible generosity of existence, of apeiron which by definition gives itself without end before and after there is an existent, let alone a recipient, capable of assuming this gift? Would the subsequent emergence of a “recipient” who is not afforded the right to refuse the gift of existence even when its burden becomes unbearable, not belie the utter terror of this generosity? And would not this terror be magnified by the dreadful hospitality of being offered without an exit: a mute but relentless insistence that the “guest,” to whom being is given, must accept, prior to any decision or calculation, the (unacceptable) gift of dwelling—and stay?
 
The terrible hospitality of es gibt, the extreme openness of the closure in which the existent dwells, is unmatched even by the anonymity of the unique. It prefigures the very essence of generosity. The impossibility to assume this radical generosity imposed on the existent, to inherit it directly from what—the it, das Es—gives, is the condition of possibility for generosity as such, since no true gift can institute an economy, or be repaid. At the heart of this impossible possibility is the non-mediate inflection of the there is in the face of the Other that both defies all horizons of meaning and bestows meaning on my existence in spite of my death (Otherwise 115). Inflected in the face of the Other, the light of meaning passes to the hither side of reflection, expression bypasses manifestation, in sum, existence is given and not given, exposed and opposed to the violence of acceptance. This interminable suspension of the finality of giving and receiving—the suspension perturbing the economy of hypostasis, or the ideal conditions of possibility for the process by which the existent folds and binds (but in each case, as Levinas says, “contracts”) his existence—is not a simple withholding, or a custodial protection of what es gibt dispenses so freely, but, on the contrary, the infection of metaphysical desire with the “never enough” of the there is that conditions the inordinate “generosity nourished by the Desired” and divorced from the certainty of satisfaction (Totality 34).
 
The bizarre kinship between the there is and metaphysical desire is what impels the inexhaustibility of the ethical relation even there where all material resources of/for giving have been depleted. The I situated in proximity to the Other does not offer something extraneous to itself, but neither does it offer itself in the martyrdom of self-sacrifice, since the ethical is defined by “having been offered without any holding back and not a generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act” (Otherwise 75). From the standpoint of consciousness, the effects of passivity, in which I have been offered to the Other, redouble and resonate with the terror of the there is. Besides the painful fact that the subject’s decision to listen or not to listen to the call of the Other is not taken into account, it now appears that generosity itself is “reserved” for the Other and for the there is. My offering involuntarily responds to the prior immemorial reception of something (existence, meaning in spite of my death, etc.). I cannot recompense, of the common root that renders both my terror and metaphysical desire uneconomical, “inordinate,” overwhelming.
 
The terrifying feature of the face of the Other, the facelessness of that face that suddenly transforms the Other into my worst enemy, shares more than a mere trace of the there is with “existence without existents.” Like the anonymity of the there is, it forces me to turn inside out, this time not only in a confirmation of my anxiety that I will be stripped of my power “to have private existence” (Levinas Reader 33), but because of the dynamics of signification, in which I am the-one-for-the-other (Otherwise 79). The facelessness of the face is an inflection of anonymity in uniqueness, a glimpse of the finite difference (faiblesse) of the Other that ethically translates my fear of him into my fear for him, and my feeling of being trapped in essence into the glory of election. Broadly understood, this translation presupposes my “fear for all the violence and usurpation my existing, despite its intentional innocence, risks committing” (Entre 149). Ethics does not repress or stifle the primordial terror of the there is, but capitalizes on its boundlessness and on the passivity it introduces into my existence⁷.
 
An unsettling question should arise before us at this point, namely, what determines the difference between two contrasting reactions to the finite difference of the Other: the pre-meditation of murder and my fear for the Other. Why does the caress disfigure the Other, while signification is moved by and for the Other in response to finite difference? To recall the clandestine force of the caress is to be transported back (and forth) to the ambiguous territory beyond the face. What the caress encounters is faceless corporeity, the body already transfigured into a corpse, time already elapsed—hence, its voluptuous impatience (Totality 260). The caressing hand perpetually runs out of time. On the other hand (but this is no longer a matter of the hand), the signifyingness of signification is given to the “facialized” Other who stands for the preoriginary multiplicity of Others, demanding language and justice. And this is the heart of the question. An insufficient, facile, but not incorrect answer would be that the face with its facelessness “is” what makes all the difference in my response to finite difference. But how? I would like to put forth a tentative hypothesis that the face is a site where the infinity of silent spaces (the there is) is temporalized. In other words, the face retains the terror evoked by the spatial infinity prior to hypostasis, all the while mixing this terror with its postponement that opens the dimension of temporality in the suspension of spatiality.⁸ The facelessness that animates the caress is a much closer replica of the there is than the facelessness concealed in the face of the Other. Unlike the former, the conjunction of facelessness in the face, of anonymity in uniqueness, leaves just enough time to fear for the Other and “to come to the assistance of his frailty” (Totality 256). And the by-product of this temporalization is the movement of signification.
 
“Terror of the ethical” thrives on the equivocacy of the genitive form. Is it the terror proper to the ethical qua ethical, or is it the terror ethics harnesses and appropriates? Are we afraid of the ethical? Can this terror account for the constitution of the ethical, or does it, on the contrary, inflect, impede, and, perhaps, reroute the ethical movement of the Same to the Other, thereby terrorizing the fragility of the ethical? Or, to put it differently, is this terror foreign to ethics? If so, could it, despite its foreignness, bind to the body-host of the ethical like an infection that interrupts the (otherwise) “smooth” functioning of the organism?
 
The non-ontological force, the “weak power” with which the ethical, the saying without the said, and a host of other Levinasian terms resist any intentio recta—any correct, rightful, right approach as well as the directness of phenomenological intentionality—will prevent us from taking up these questions head on, from offering something like the finality of a response, from determining the indeterminate. But this is not to say that these questions must stay unanswered. If we keep track of Levinas on the methodological course of feigning or simulating a response whose substantiality and content are inseparable from the act of feigning, then, perhaps, we will be on our way to the impossible epistemic adequation to the non-adequation of the ethical. To feign a response is to defer a response, to respond with a “perhaps” and, above all, with an “as if” (Derrida, “The Future”). Perhaps, then, terror is neither proper to, nor is harnessed by the ethical. Perhaps, regardless of all talk concerned with the straightforwardness of the faceto face, the subject of ethics can work (in the fullest, most elaborate sense of “work”) as if there were an inflection, diverting labor from the Other, as if it were all done “for nothing” (Otherwise 74), as if this work were lost before it could reach the Other. Perhaps, also, the ethical interruption of this work is responsible for the “smooth” performance of the ethical, for its diversion from the obdurate temptation of the caress. Perhaps—finally—terror is neither foreign nor innate to ethics, but stands for a marker of its improbable boundary, where the indeterminate unfolding of being’s pleats is equally surprised with the return of the there is and with the absolutely new but persistent and irreducible event of metaphysical desire, the encounter with alterity, and transcendence.