Maurice Blanchot--Writing the Disaster

Vigilance, insomnia, wakefulness in the night--one might imagine Blanchot (or whatever the 'subject' of Blanchot' reflections is) as a strung-out grad student at 4 am, thinking in a chair on the verge of madness.

Blanchot writes both in and 'about' the fragmentary. He writes, "fragments, destined in part to the blank that separates them, find in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them" (58). Fragmentation is only an interruption, but an interruption that also pushes forward to continue--it as if the fragments cannot stop--the gap that stops is also that which allows it (forces it?)  to continue. As Blanchot puts it, “the interruption’s somehow having the same meaning as that which does not cease” (21).  Furthermore, fragments are not simply isolated, but because of their juxtaposition (even though there might be “nothing in the text”) suggest meaning and connection at the same time that they deny meaning—or create absent meaning. Blanchot distinguishes the ‘fragmentary’ from the “isolated sentence,” which is “aphoristic” not fragmentary. Aphoristic, isolated sentences, “tend to reverberate like an oracular utterance having the self-sufficiency of a communication to which nothing can be added” (132). The aphoristic sentence “affirms definitively,” the allusive sentence “makes ambiguity a positive value,” whereas the fragmentary is exposure to these two kinds to risks: normativity and that which thinks it escapes the illusion of truth only to “succumb[] to the illusion itself as truth” (133). The fragmentary is related to citation (and incitation). Blanchot writes (fragmentally),

“If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are nto only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severance, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable” (37).

I am not sure what to do with that bloc quote given Derrida’s ideas about citation, quotation, and context.  I think we should think through the relations among these different types of utterances.

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The last word of the book: disaster. We as readers are still left wondering what this "disaster," 'is'. References to the holocaust and the immemorial suggest that the disaster is that which cannot be justified (in ethical terms) or sublimated (aufhebung) in Hegel's terms. But most importantly, the disaster (besides its "proper" meaning relating to 'star'--although we will have to question the notion of the proper as well) is an experience which is not experienced. Thus, the disaster is not an event that arrives or comes. Like death (and is ‘death’ the disaster? Are these two terms synonyms?), it is “imminent” (1) and at the same time always-already past (the immemorial). It is that which we can neither forget nor remember, because in order to forget we would have to have been able to remember it as something that ‘happened,’ and that is experienced.

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I think we must ask after the status of theory. First, so we can determine whether Blanchot’s notion of theory is related (or the same as) what we call in literature Theory (which is, as Greg Ulmer once put it to me, philosophy done in literature departments); second, in order to attempt to determine the relation (or nonrelation?) among theory, philosophy, and poetry, and what Blanchot understands as writing; third, to figure out why theories are “necessary and useless” (75).  Is theory what Blanchot understands by “System,” who is designated by the name Hegel? If this is true, then should we take Blanchot at his word when he writes,

“shouldn’t we have done with theory to the extent that ti does not ever get over and done, and also to the extent that all theories, however different they may be, constantly change places with one another, distinct each from the next only because of the writing which supports them and which thus escapes the very theories purporting to judge it?” (80).

Have we all not had the feeling that the theories of Levinas, Derrida, and Blanchot as theories of “the other” collapse into one another? Can we even call these thinkers “theorists?” Are they creating theory, writing, poetry—all of these?

Blanchot decides to investigate three thinkers that we in our department may refer to as “theorists” (alternately, philosophers—alternately, poets)—Levinas, Bataille, and Heidegger. Although Blanchot, like Derrida, seems indebted to Heidegger, he seems more indebted to Levinas. I think this is because that Blanchot agrees with Derrida that death is never one’s “ownmost possibility,” that death is not an authentic relation to being and to self. Both Blanchot and Levinas are thinkers of the “other.” For Heidegger, our relationship is with being and truth, something that language allows us to access (even as it reveals-conceals). Indeed, the “they” is the realm of inauthenticity and idle talk, just as ‘dying’ (or merely perishing) is not an “authentic” relation to death. For Heidegger, we do not know death from the other’s death, but rather because it is our ‘ownmost possibility’ as that which individualizes us.  In contrast, Blanchot writes that death is “never individual” and Derrida rejoins that Blanchot speaks of “death in general.”   Levinas and Blanchot (along with Derrida) think our relation to the other. More precisely, language is not the “house of being” but something radically other than being. Language is not “proper” to human beings. Rather, as Levinas puts it, “Language is in itself already skepticism” and as Blanchot continues, “to write is to be absolutely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely” (110). 

For Heidegger, language gives, but for Bataille and Levinas, “the gift as the inexhaustible (the infinite) demand of the other and of others” (110). Blanchot sees Heidegger’s focus on language (perhaps, at the expense of writing) as a “dangerous leaning toward sanctification of language” (110).

On the topic of “language,” we should return to the question of etymology, something incredibly important for Heidegger. Before we get into Blanchot’s extensive discussion of etymology, we should remember that etymology is the study of words. We treat words like independent entities. This is why it is problematic to ask what the disaster “is” as if we can isolate a proper meaning of it. Blanchot suggests, following Valery, that we neglect “sentences”—one might add, fragments (96). The idea that words are the “seminal cell of language” is something etymology takes as its object. The issue with etymology is that it presupposes a “proper” and “original” meaning. Etymologists wish to trace back words to some ‘concrete’ or ‘first’ meaning.

Blanchot discusses two words of Heidegger’s that uses etymology for his philosophical analysis. The first I will discuss is aletheia, a word that is usually translated into English as “un-veiling.” Heidegger relates aletheia to lethe because his claim is that philosophy has “forgotten the meaning of being.” The river lethe, in mythology, is the river or forgetting. So, in a way, aletheia is a kind of “un-veiling” the meaning of being—that which appears, the phenomenon—that which shows itself. On Heidegger’s use of the word, Blanchot writes,

Was the Greeks’ understanding of aletheia based upon the meaning of lethe. This is doubtful. And that we should be able to substitute ourselves for them—saying that they were nonetheless determined by this unthought element in their understanding—is a philosophical move to which there would be no objection, if it were not that we make it by wielding a philological experitise, thus making philosophy dependent on a particular discipline. This contradicts the relations clearly affirmed by Heidegger between thought and determined bodies of knowledge. (104)

Blanchot’s analysis may remind one Derrida’s move on “cultural” and “anthropological” understandings of death. Heidegger would argue that this is not getting to the “existential structure” of death because they assume they know what death is (Derrida 25). In this sense, Heidegger’s analysis is much more than the cultural writings on death. But at the same time, Derrida points out “neither language nor the process of this analysis of death is possible without the Christian experience, indeed, the Judeo-Christiano-Islamic experience of death to which the analysis testifies” (Derrida 80). We could say with Blanchot that Heidegger’s analysis of “aletheia” would not be possible without the discipline of etymology.

Blanchot reveals the essentially metaphoric language of etymology. The “root” of the word is the “germinating principle” by which words receive “the power of development and creative enrichment” (107). Etymology presupposes filitation rather than “affinity” (93). Etymology by “affinity” may describe better Heidegger’s operation on lethe, aletheia. Etymology by affinity may be another way to elucidate what Greg Ulmer calls “conductive logic.” It uses the play of the material signifiers, the associations that it calls up for inventive purposes rather than to believe that one is getting at an “origin.” Blanchot uses this to investigate Heidegger’s term, Ereignis, which usually is translated into English as “event of propriation” (see pgs 97-98).

Rather than thinking etymology by filiation let us think by affinity. There is some sort of seduction and attraction to etymologies: “What attracts us to etymology is its unreasonable part more than what it explains: we are interested by the form of enigma that it preserves or doubles as it deciphers” (106). We are subject to “etymological clues which we take for proofs from which we draw philosophical conclusions that secretly influence us” (104). Is Blanchot here endorsing this kind of “unreasonable thinking.” Or is it the case that language is always seductive in this way—seductive and yet prone to skepticism, or rather, makes us skeptical.

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Returning to an earlier question, it seems that the disaster is the dissolution of the possibility of etymology (that there can be a natural meaning to a word). Blanchot writes, “Naturally [haha], disaster can be understood according to its etymology [. . .] But the etymology of ‘disaster’ does not operate in these fragments as a preferred, or more original insight [. . .] On the contrary, the indeteriminateness of what is written when this word is written, exceeds etymology and draws it into disaster” (117).

One gets the sense that for Blanchot, we cannot take comfort in Being,  in the cosmos (in the fixity of the stars—no, there is dis-aster), or in language, but rather that we “keep watch over absent meaning.” Whereas for Heidegger, man is the preserver and keeper of truth, we (?) keep watch over absent meaning. True, Blanchot is much closer to  Heidegger than he is to the more “action” oriented existentialists, namely, Sartre, but he revels in the neutral rather Being. The neutral, it is important to understand is not the same as “giving neutrality to language as a characteristic,” as if to refute that language has weight, values, and history, but rather the neutral is that which cannot be grasped and held theoretically as “knowledge.”

The positive value we usually ascribe to knowledge, meaning, and totality is turned to a horror show in Blanchot’s text. The absolute meaning is the absolute justification—Hegel’s system, were it right, would justify the Holocaust. In the most harrowing anecdote of the work, Blanchot mentions a certain man who was “saved” from death only to be “obliged to hold the victim’s head so that the bullet could be more easily lodged in the neck” (82). When asked how he could bear this he said he “observed the comportment of men before death” ( 82). Blanchot comments that “when he was faced with an impossible question, he could find no other alibi than the search for knowledge, the so called dignity of knowledge: that ultimate propriety which we believe will be accorded us by knowledge” (82).  We may recall here Blanchot’s Demeure, where the protagonist is “saved” and yet not saved—there is no salvation. 

Ethics Before Ontology?

Because Heidegger’s fundamental ontology left open the question of ethics (given his own allegiances in his lifetime) we have called into question the priority of ontology, the study of being. For Levinas and (late) Derrida, there is a return to the (ground?) of the ethical. Levinas’ thought has called into question the self-fashioning, active style of living existentialists such as Sartre. Sartre’s philosophy, influenced no doubt by his politics, argues for a philosophy of action and commitment, taking responsibility for one’s own actions as well as the facticity of one’s life. In What is Literature, Sartre argues for a ‘committed’ literature, focusing on the power of prose to alter the world rather than Heidegger’s turn toward poetry in order to think it.

John Caputo, taking his cue from Levinas and Derrida,  critiques phenomenology for its conception of the body as active, healthy, and in full possession of itself. While Maurice Merleau Ponty (early) argues for the primacy of perception, Caputo dares to riff on Derrida’s tears that may blind him to such easy access and movement through the world. He also dares to discuss the flesh as opposed to the body, the flesh of the wounded, the hurt, the sick. Not everyone is a prototypical phenomenological subject.

Levinas’ ethics and the thinkers that have followed in his line (such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Derrida) emphasize the passive aspects of human existence; This is not merely in the mode of “facticity,” as our situation in the world, but on a bodily level—we are all flesh. This leads us to consider questions of suffering as much as understanding (and their relation). Furthermore, this leads away from the ontology of the human being (Dasein) although as many have pointed out, Levinas still remains a bit anthropocentric.  

In this sense, what I will call flesh-phenomenologists, is the inverse of Sartre because they consider the ethical relation of beings rather than trying to define that being in its essence (even if, as Sartre once said, existence precedes essence) or understand the “meaning of being.” Before meaning, before understanding the other, we have to act toward the other in a certain way, perhaps without fully understanding him or her as a “human being.”

For what is it to be a ‘human being’? Heidegger implied that language set us apart. We can inquire into the meaning of our own being (see Being and Time) such that it is at issue for us. Interestingly, the late Heidegger argues that language ‘speaks us’ rather than us speaking it but still, if language is the House of Being then we deny a certain way of being to many things in the world. Yet, there is a passivity in Heidegger’s later thought that we find less in the rhetoric of Sartre. Freedom is a less a matter of Dasein’s possibilities and re-framed as a “letting things be” what they are. Dasein’s task becomes a stewardship to the meaning of being, a protector of its potential. Heidegger writes in “Question Concerning Technology” “Everything, then, depends on this: that we ponder this rising and that, recollecting, we watch over it [. . .] so long as we represent technology as an instrument we remain transfixed in the will to master it” (339). For Heidegger is concerned with What is called for thinking? Thinking does not seem related to writing or action, but is a contemplative act of Dasein. If we ponder truth and safekeep it, what is there left to change?

We can contrast this kind of pondering and revealing mood of late Heidegger with Kenneth Burke’s work. Burke’s pragmatic conception of language and man’s relation to it is that we are the “symbol using, abusing, and making” animal. Language for Burke is a tool. To be sure, not necessarily a tool that we fully possess—our language contains implicit exhortations and attitudes. But, nevertheless, language never achieves that quasi-mystical tone that later Heidegger contains. Burke is concerned primarily with the realm of the human and seeks to lay out a working definition of what man is [enter link to previous post]. But, whether we consider Burke to be working from ontology or from the ethical is where we place our emphasis.

For me, Burke remains a moralist in the best possible sense, taking into account Nietzsche’s deconstruction (for lack of a better term) of traditional morality and his task of transvaluation of all values. While there have been some (me included) who have drawn together Burke and Heidegger based on their interest in language, I think that if we shift the focus from the verbal to the “more than verbal” we can find parallels between Burke and the flesh-phenomenologists.

Perhaps the most basic (and crude) distinction we can make between the existential phenomenologists (Heidegger, Sartre, Camus(?), De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty) and the flesh-phenomenologists stems from looking at the religiosity of the latter. Levinas and Derrida draw from the Judeo-Christian religion as does Jean-Luc Nancy. For Levinas, the ethical imperative of a person’s “face” is the presence of the infinite within the finite and commands us not to kill. “Face” is not what one would expect. D. Diane Davis writes (citing Levinas):

Neither visible nor conceivable nor perceivable, face ‘is what cannot become content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond.’ What one encounters in the face to face is the other’s finitude, the other’s exposedness—that is to say, both his or her mortality (susceptibility to wounding, to ravaging illness, to ‘the cold and the heat of the seasons’) and, simultaneously, his or her transcendence as sheer ungraspableness. (11-12)

Burke, in his dialectical and more pragmatic manner sees the ethical imperative of Thou Shalt Not Kill as the negative, which is an “idea” in the sense that it cannot be properly pictured. The realm of the Thou Shalt Not is that of action rather than ‘motion’. But Burke’s action is rarely a passive action. Obviously influenced by Kant, Burke writes: “And action is possible only insofar as the rational agent transcends the realm of sheer motion—sensory image [. . .] he can act rather than merely being moved or ‘affected’ (430-31). Thus, we see that for Burke, commands are not related to our passivity, which is rather in the realm of the sensory—we are affected by those things that ‘move’ us rather than allow us to act.

However, we have to be careful here because, again, Burke’s dialectical thinking provides a caveat: “Hence, though the injunction, “Thou Shalt Not Kill” is in essence an idea, in its role as imagery it can but strike the resonant gong: kill!” (431). To me, this is the Hegel coming out in Burke—the negation of something is that something plus something else.


 Levinas, however, is interested in how the realm of the ‘senses’, the flesh, the face of the other, its irreducible difference can command us to ethical being. We have no choice in the matter because there is not properly speaking an “I” before the confrontation with the other. As Gerald Burns recently puts it,

It is rather than I am a subjectivity without a subject—until I become subject to another’s claim, redeemed (so to speak) by the accusative voice that summons me out of my clandestine self to exist for another. I am not I (whoever I may be) until another interrogates me. (Bruns 23)

If we think about this from Bruns perspective, then it is not incompatible with Burke’s insistence on the limitations of man’s biological central nervous system. Diane Davis sums up Burke’s position:

Prior to language acquisition, psychosexual development, and class consciousness, burke proposes, there is biological estrangement, ontology’s insurance premium for securing his entire rhetoric of relationality [. . .] For him, the division between self and other is the ‘state of nature’ that is identifications motivating force: identification’s job is to transcend this natural state of division, and rhetoric’s job is identification. (Davis 22)

I think that biological separation (which, surely, Levinas would not deny!) is not the same as ontological separation. However, I agree with Davis that Burke does locates a separate ontological individual. But I wouldn’t go about showing the tenuousness of Burke’s claim through appealing to mirror neurons. Davis argues,

The ‘centrality’ of each individual nervous system can hardly be characterized as ‘divisive’ when it doesn’t manage consistently to distinguish between self and other; indeed, at the level of the organism, a rather astonishing condition of indistinction announces itself. (Davis 24)

I will look at Burke’s claim in terms of individuation with respect to the body and what we would call ‘soul” or “mind,” looking at how Burke conceives our bodies. Davis rightly identifies Burke’s conception of the biological necessity of private property: “What the body eats and drinks becomes its special private proprety; the body’s pleasures and pains are exclusively its own pleasure and pains” (Burke qtd. in Davis 22). For Burke, the concept of private property is not only important to our “egoistic impulses” but also to morals. In Permanence and Change, Burke writes,

Property and propriety are not etymologically so close by mere accident [. . .] Morals and property are integrally related. They are obverse and reverse of the same coin. They both equip us for living. There is an integral relationship between these two kinds of weapons, tools, or capital.” (212)

But what if we take away not the fact that we are separate biological organisms, but rather question our relationship to our bodies themselves? This is what not only the flesh-phenomenologists have done, but also, to a certain extent, Stanley Cavell. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell writes, “A better relation to the body is expressed by saying that I am the body’s possession. I am of it, it has claims upon me” (383). Yet, like Burke, Cavell ultimately affirms a separateness among us. This is the problem he sees with skepticism: “the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle,” a “metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack” (Cavell 493). Although, Cavell is not quite sure what separates us (and what causes our finitude)—it does not seem to be merely the central nervous system. He writes,

The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated by something; that we, each us, bodies i.e. embodied; each is this one and not that, each her and not there, each now and not then. If something separates us, comes between us, that can only be a particular aspect or stance of the mind itself, a particular way in which we relate, or are related to one another. (Cavell 369)

But, I see a major difference in Cavell and Levinas’ thought. For Levinas there is no “I” or “we” prior to the other to acknowledge others. Cavell analyzes are condition in similar ways, but comes to the conclusion that we should self-fashion ourselves—take responsibility for creating ourselves. But for Levinas, we do not create ourselves. Paul Standish argues that this difference stems from the fact that Cavell does not accept Levinas’ emphasis on ethics before ontology: “From a Levinasian point of view, Cavell’s concern with “claims of the existence of the other” comes too late” (Standish 7-8).

Standish asks: does ethics before ontology “make sense,” which, to a Levinasian, is probably considered a silly question. The critique Standish offers of Levinas is his Western/Occidental focus, which I think is easy to pick on. To be fair, Standish is looking at these two thinkers from the point of view of education. I have already discussed Levinas’ idea of education according to D. Diane Davis as a trauma, a “shattering of self and world.” Cavell and Levinas are both skeptical about the possibility of “knowing” the other (in the sense of “grasping” and appropriating). But although Cavell also believes that learning takes place as a disruption of one’s identity, it is not so that it stays shattered. In fact, it becomes a way to know oneself:

It is the ability to make oneself an other to oneself, to learn of oneself something one did not already know. Hence this is the focus at which knowledge of onself and of others meet. I should think a sensible axiom of the knowledge of persons would be this: that one can see others only to the extent that one can take oneself as another. (459)

To make oneself another is a bit different than “identifying” with a specific other, but rather involves (it seems to me) a shattering of the self, but then, somehow, we are also supposed to learn something else about ourselves through this process? Do we create ourselves based on this process? There is no “self” prior to the confrontation? I am not sure. Although, it is interesting that Cavell takes us from the ethical relation of “acknowledgment” back to the realm of knowledge of oneself. Is this the same kind of knowledge Davis argues from Levinas’ work: we can only “undergo it; suffer it as an interruption, a rhetorical rupture” (207). But then—is it the other that makes us an “other” or is it ourselves through our own devices that can make of ourselves an “other.” If it is the latter, maybe this is why Cavell does not derive from his reflections a fundamental responsibility toward the other, but responsibility toward ourselves (which is definitely related to his study of Emerson). We have a choice as to our attitude on the world (this is the kind of ‘moral’ Cavell derives from his texts): “that we are tragic in what we take to be tragic; that one must take one’s imperfections with a ‘gay and sociable wisdom’ not with a somber and isolating eloquence. It is advice to accept one’s humanity” (494).

            Let us look at how Cavell frames responsibility to the other:

I wish to understand how the other now bears the weight of God, shows me that I am not alone in the universe. This requires understanding the philosophical problem of the other as the trace or scar of the departure of God. This descent, or ascent, of the problem of the other is the key way I can grasp the alternative process of secularization called romanticism. And it may explain why the process of humanization can become a monstrous undertaking, placing infinite demands upon finite resources. It is an image of what living our skepticism comes to. (470)

For Cavell, the problem of the other stems from the ‘trace’ or ‘scar’ of the departure of God—following Nietzsche in his proclamation that God is Dead (and we have killed him). Rather than claiming a “departure” for God, Levinas asks what possible meaning “God” can have if he is otherwise than being. Furthermore, Levinas frequently appeals to Descartes’ claim that there is an “idea” of infinity placed into the other; However, Levinas does not want this to translate into the claim that we have a “part” of God in us so that ‘God’ is distributed among people; remember, God is not essence/being. And yet, contra Cavell, I do not think that Levinas would think there has been a trace of a departure; instead, there is a ‘trace’ of God within the other.

If this is true, then Cavell’s use of the term “monstrous” to describe the process of “humanization” does not have to hold. True, the other does place an infinite demand upon finite resources in the sense that we must consider the third man in order to look toward Justice. We cannot let the infinite demand of the other make us forget about all other others (yes I know this is a strange way of putting it). But if Levinas is right that there remains the “idea” of the infinite, an idea and a trace that allows for some kind of transcendence, then perhaps it should not be framed as “monstrous[1]
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Cavell claims that being human is “the power to grant being human” (Cavell qtd. in Bruns 41). In Levinas’ theory it seems that each ‘other’ human has the power to grant being human simply because they are other. So, in that sense, Cavell and Levinas would agree. However, Bruns frames Cavell as offering a theory of candidacy of the ‘human’ rather than the human as a category with set criteria. Humanness for Levinas seems already there—Levinas has frequently been critiqued for his anthropocentrism.

Bruns’ own argument in On Ceasing to Be Human concerns the question of the animal. According to Bruns, Derrida advocates ridding ourselves of the word ‘animal’ and to stop thinking about the line between animal and human as one binary line. Bruns interprets this as a shift from the “what” (let us say, “cat”—or even the “I”)  to the who: “In contrast to the ‘givenness’ of the ‘I’ [. . .] the mode of existence of the who is just that of being in doubt or in question, being addressed, accused, or called to account (Bruns 95). Questions we may ask are, “Who am I to attribute abilities to myself that I refuse to the animal-other? Indeed, by what right, that is, on what basis to I attribute to myself this or that capacity at all, whether I deny it to other or not?” (Bruns 94).


Thus, we turn to a who question: Who(ever?) has the power to “grant being human”? For Levinas, any human other with a ‘face’, a trace of the infinite. For Cavell, it seems that we ultimately are the ones that have to decide to what extent we want to grant human status, but that there are no set, universal criteria on which to base this decision. Cavell recommends that we make ourselves another to ourselves. So far as I understand it from Bruns, Derrida claims that this is not something we have to actively do: “To the question ‘Who am I?’ there is no answer, for the simple reason that I am as much an other to myself as I am to my neighbor or to my host or, for that matter, to my cat” (Bruns 96). Perhaps we can draw on Levinas here and argue that it is the other others (human and non) who make of us others to ourselves because it calls us to responsibility for the other in his place. But can we take the place of the animal other? Is substitution possible?

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[1] Query: If the human is the ‘face’ of the other (and thus the trace of the infinite) then is not Levinas’ own thought based primarily on ontology? True, God may be conceived of a relation but surely we would have  to make clearer distinctions between human and non-human others. D. Diane Davis in her “P.S.” to Inessential Solidarity shows Levinas wavering on this point—he cannot say for sure if snakes, for instance, “have a face” in his sense. 

Responding to D. Diane Davis and John Muckelbauer's conversation on Levinas, Ethics, and Hermeneutics

This is an old post from a prior blog I wrote last year. I have begun to revisit this conversation as I work my way through Davis' new book Inessential Solidarity. 

    In “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative Relation,” Diane Davis discusses the limits of rhetorical hermeneutics. Rhetorical hermeneutics, or, a hermeneutic rhetoric leaves out the “non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning making” (Davis 192). In order to investigate this dimension, she adds to Stephen Mallioux interpretation of communication in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Mallioux believes there is no way to encounter the other without subjecting him or her to one’s own cultural assumptions because a completely other would be unintelligible (Davis 198). Far from refuting this claim, Davis (citing Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time of the pre-understanding) believes that this is the only way to understand a subject. Davis disagrees with Mailloux, who argues that it is impossible to encounter the other as completely other. To do this, she draws on the work of Emmanual Levinas.

       The distinction between a Levinasian conception of the other and Mailloux hermeneutical one is framed by the way they describe learning. Whereas Mailloux argues that learning is an appropriative relation that forces us to deal with the other on our own terms, Levinas’ conception of learning involves the other’s intrusion into our own system of meaning. Levinas makes a distinction between the “said” and the “saying.” The “said” is the signifying and thus hermeneutical side of an “address.” The saying is the performative, asignifying aspect of the address. In Davis’ words, the address is “both the exposedness of the other and the obligation to respond” (194). Thus, the other calls us to respond, in a sense, by interrupting our hermeneutic desire for meaning. Learning does not take place by appropriating or colonizing the other on one’s own terms, but rather true learning, for Levinas is a “trauma, a shattering of ‘self’ and ‘world’” (Davis 199). We cannot “know” the other because we are in no position to ‘know. That is, we have no position outside our relationship with the other. Indeed, as Davis writes, we cannot “know” radical alterity, we can only “undergo it, suffer it as an interruption, a rhetorical rupture” (207).

       Just as Davis makes clear that she is not merely refuting Mailloux’s position, so John Muckelbauer is at pains to make sure that he is not offering “a critique or defense of either Davis’s or Levinas’s discourse” because he does not believe that the “risks” he will identify stem from any failure on their part. Instead, he argues that their discourses “expose” risks and impossibilities (Muckelbauer 241). Just before jumping into the four risks he reminds the reader again that he does not want to either take sides in an intellectual debate nor offer a ‘third’ alternative. Such a desire for a different and yet not different style of engagement stems from discussions that occur in his then forthcoming, now out, book The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change. He argues that even though humanism and modernism seem directly opposed to each other in content, they do the same thing: “Because they advance themselves as a position, as a content that locates itself in relation to some other position, they cannot help but partake of the logic of identity and the dialectical movement of appropriation that it enables” (Muckelbauer 32). In the spirit of not taking sides, Muckelbauer offers four “risks” that Davis and Levinas expose.

      The first risk involves the difficulty of “thematizing something that is irreducible to understanding or knowledge” (241). Even thematizing something as “unknowable” makes it knowable, is to “the make the other into a theme, a “said.” The second risk is that even if this is avoided, they risk saying that theencounter with the other can be “subjectively experienced,” so it is important to make sure that the “undergoing” Davis discusses are not experiences. Muckelbauer acknowledges that Davis seems to effectively understand this risk (Muckelbauer 242). The third risk is addressed to the use of “metaphorics of excess,” which Muckelbauer argues that the “discourse of excess is coterminous with the discourse of signification itself” (243). Again, Muckelbauer doesn’t charge that Davis has not thought of this, but rather explicitly points to Davis’ attempts to clarify her meaning. The fourth and final risk is the risk that even the discourses that call us to recognize the other “on its own terms” implies that the other possesses its own terms. I take Muckelbauer to mean here that it is as if the other is a unified subject that, should we be able to, we could “properly” respond to it.

This fourth risk seems to be what we might call Muckelbauer’s “critique” of Levinas and Davis. While it is true he uses an interesting style of engagement that points to the “risks” (the “effects” of Davis and Levinas discourse) while, at the same time, showing how Davis attends to these risks, the fourth risk seems to reveal Muckelbauer’s “position.” He writes,

 attending to the ethical encounter with the irreducible other can quickly become yet another moralism. . .it is not far from attentiveness to irreducible otherness to a discourse that wants to distinguish the right way of attending to this irreducible other (through such familiar terms as welcoming, generosity, and openness) from  the wrong way closing down, violence, appropriation). Through such a   movement, the irreducible other is reduced to the new terrain for judgment (244).

     I can understand Muckelbauer’s fear that this will become simply another “moralism” in the sense that Levinas is trying to get at an ethics that goes beyond the mundane, but Muckelbauer seems to have something against judgment. His strongest claim in the entire essay is that “one can never simply point to any of these discourses as being somehow ethically or politically superior because it is more attentive to difference or more concerned with the other” (246).  As Muckelbauer seems to slide back into this idea that we might be able to inhabit these discourses in an effective way, but, I think, Davis will argue that this doesn’t take the Levinasian challenge to ethics seriously enough. Davis identifies the “fifth risk” that “such discourses may invite the unfortunate conflation of an im-mediate encounter with alterity (over which “I” have no power) and the attempt to attend to the implications of that encounter” (248). I sense either a hidden polemical tone or a solidarity in the way she engages with his response. For example, when she says “and Muckelbauer understands all of this” and as she cites Muckelbauer saying “Davis’s project” (Davis 248). She clearly states that her project “if we must call it that” has nothing to do with agency or advocating a particular engagement with the other (249). She makes a very astute observation that Muckelbauer “conflates the im-mediate relation with alterity and the (scholarly) attempt to attend to it” (251). We cannot choose a particular response, but we can choose to attend to it or, instead, notattend to it to stay in the safe realm of knowledge and appropriative learning.

Davis then comments on Muckelbauer’s sense of “judgment.” She reads closely the very end of the essay where he first says that this “hope for the impossible encounter for the other” cannot tell us what to endorse but then says “perhaps it can.” Davis is flabbergasted why Muckelbauer won’t come down on either side or the other. Rather than explore that statement at length, she says that she would at the very least argue that one must take it up in one’s discourse. I think that Muckelbauer would say that is ok, but that he wouldn’t say it was the only discourse that could produce similar ethical “effects.” First, I’m not sure that I didn’t just create a straw man to knock down, but if I didn’t, then I’m not sure I (nor, I suspect) Davis would agree with that response.

      Rather than making that rather crude accusation of mine, Davis “assumes” that his reluctance to advocate has something to do with Levinas’s distinction between justice and judgment. But while Muckelbauer seems to distinguish between them as if he comes down in favor of justice when he says “[. . .] each of these discourses risks becoming a discourse of judgment (rather than justice)” (246). In contrast, Davis points out that justice “demands judgments” (253). I suspect that Davis may be subtly critiquing Muckelbauer’s reluctance to advocate. Though Davis admits that one would “miss the point” if Levinas was used to justify any determinate ethics and politics, using those ethical descriptions “to justify an avoidance of advocacy altogether is to make things too easy for oneself” (255). I would suspect that she would apply the same logic of non-advocacy to Muckelbauer’s deployment of Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari.

Works Cited

Davis, D. Diane. “Addressing Alterity: Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and The Nonappropriative

      Relation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric. 38.3 (2005) pgs 191-212. Web.
 

Davis, D. Diane. “The Fifth Risk: A Response to John Muckelbauer’s Response.” Philosophy

      And Rhetoric. 40.2 (2007) pp. 248-256. Web.
 

Muckelbauer, John. “Rhetoric, Asignification, and the Other: A Response to Diane Davis.”

      Philosophy and Rhetoric. 40.2 (2007) pp. 238-247. Web.