Emmanuel Levinas: The Entry of the Other

"Not I But the Other in Me"

Emmanuel Levinas: The Entry of the Other

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, Chapter 2: The Event in Philosophy (Temple Lodge, 2018)

This breaking through and opening of the "I," "ego" or "self" to the “not I but the Other in me”, gives me the power to stand outside my-self. This is the other in me as the primal, unconditional responsibility for the earth and all her children. Here Levinas finds the only place in which modern humanity, Cain's children, may begin to reverse the original reversal and reverse Cain's fundamental cynically questioning answer: Am I my brother’s keeper? Into a new affirmative answer, that will eventually become as primordial and constitutive of a future subjectivity as Cain's original deed is constitutive of our egoistic individuation: Yes, I will become my brother’s keeper!

“In the face the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends”.

 “To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea... It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-ideal relation, an ethical relation; this conversation is a teaching. Teaching comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”

(Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority)

Emmanuel Levinas: The Entry of the Other

What we need now, in order to complete the composition of the "holey five," is to introduce Levinas’ major contribution to modern thinking. This is also a starting place for the becoming process of Cognitive Yoga, which actualizes an in-breathing and out-breathing of creative thinking. While D&G and D&F work from the threshold of difference more towards the pole of out breathing and de- actualization, greatly intensifying the actualization of virtualized thinking, Derrida’s operation does not want to leave the zone of the threshold itself, helping us to deepen the actualization of différance and precisely delimiting the emergent point of new creativity. With Badiou and Levinas, we turn our attention to the other pole, and learn how to actualize the in-breathing process, taking in the event of truth (Badiou) and the event of the other (Levinas).

 For the "I think," the unity of the thinking substance with itself is a given thought percept (with or without its dialectical development). We discussed above to what extent this unity offers the strongest resistance to deconstruction and de- actualization. Now in the meeting with the other person, it is much more difficult to uphold this resistance. (This is why Husserl produced some of his most self- torturing texts when he tried to assimilate the other into the "I think"). The reason is that it is really hard to deny the existential and experiential fact that the other breaks through, and deeply disrupts and disjoints my seemingly unbroken inner unity with my-self as "I think." But again and again my ordinary consciousness rebels and hides this truth. When I stand over against the other in my daily cognition, I turn him immediately into another object of my intention; he becomes an object of perception and knowledge as any other object. Furthermore, even over against myself, I can assume an intentional position of external observer, and make "my self" into an objective percept or object. So long, therefore, as we keep to the

phenomenological point of view, we can only describe external observation of states of affairs, processes of kinetic and formative change, and external or internal "lived experiences." These will both keep and enhance the unity of the "I think" as a block of individual identity (and the most common modern ground of universal dogmatism).

The only way out of this deadlock is the following. I can experience not only the fact that I am looking at you, but I can also have a rather fleeting and suppressed experience of "being looked at." I do not only perceive you, but I am also perceived by you. What would have happened to my "I think" continuum and fixed identity, if I could perceive the fact of my-being-perceived by you? What would I have to become if I could become conscious in the moment in which another being perceives and grasps me? What would be experienced "in me" in the moment that I grasp the fact of being grasped? (We should have asked Rousseau what it means, because he tried to hypnotize a lizard and was in turn hypnotized by it! Becket should also be seriously consulted because he used Berkeley's formula: I am perceived therefore I am, in his struggle against Descartes’ cogito).

What happens to my personal, inner, autonomous existence as a modern, self-enclosed subject, when I truly experience that I am grasped by a totally other being, by someone or something that is wholly, and irrevocably, other than my-self? In this case, I will be seized and taken away from myself by the reality of the real, the otherness of the other, the wholly strange and estranging pure event as such. The fact of me being grasped by wholly different otherness does not take place within ordinary consciousness, but only in a "different" consciousness, one that can become conscious of the event in the time of its happening. In ordinary consciousness the event is immediately "forgotten" (because after all it was never consciously perceived, only felt). I actually fall asleep in the meeting with the other, though this falling asleep occurs with great speed while my daily consciousness continues, seemingly uninterrupted.

 The Other places unperceived "sleep," deep black unconsciousness, right inside the core of my radiant and wakeful daily consciousness, because it actualizes in the center of my unity with myself an unbridgeable otherness - its own foreign being. In doing so, it shatters and dissolves my self-continuum and unity, and opens a gap that as an existential abyss, or difference, may become the greatest help in the development of higher stages and states of consciousness. (This help is far more powerful than many inner "meditations" that only serve to harden the inner subjective ego-enclosure). Such an event, that lulls my waking consciousness to unconscious daily sleep, opens in me this "black hole" and makes it accessible during the day; it brings the night's otherwise oppressive and omnipotent power into "my" reach. It may help me - if I so desire - to lift up to consciousness the unconscious night that prevails all the time in my subconscious existence. Therefore, if I could perceive the presence that grasps me, or the "look" of the other while being looked at (as Sartre described with phenomenological accuracy), I would experience a total metamorphosis. In that singular moment, I would actually become something else (a stone, ant, flower, woman, star). For what is deep sleep but the cover that hides the fact that a third of the time of our earthly life is spent in becoming something entirely different from anything our daily self would have dared to know? To become a star or stone, for example, means to be grasped by their wholly different nature, becoming their non-human, strange world, joining the company of the beings and events that form and sustain them in the universe. I would then have to experience the most overwhelming anxiety and abyssal shock, because I would have entirely lost myself out there, becoming dismembered and scattered in the open, becoming a multitude, losing my center and finding infinitely diverging and multiplying universes taking the place of "my" self.

 This means that the other is truly a liberator (and this is exactly what Levinas experienced so profoundly), a savior that frees me from bondage to my centralized, autonomous subjectivity. It frees me from my self and overtakes my place within myself, while, at the same time, allowing me to take a line of flight and to expand, decentralized and multifaceted, into the great open world outside. But then where would we find a "center" again? When I am lost outside myself in the vast universe, I can only recover a sense of self if I look back to remember the earth (remain true to the earth, as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra said), to recognize what was "my" body, and experience that now another self is not only inhabiting the place of "my" destiny, but is becoming my fate. For Levinas, becoming aware of the "not I but the other in me," means always that if I wake up while being outside myself, I experience the total terror of my dismemberment, and can only find again a "center" when I find the other in me, investing me, incarnating in me, giving me the revelation of the true nature of reality. "He in me" shows me that the world's only center isn't an ego, and definitely not my "I think/feel/will therefore I am an ego," but my primeval subjugation to pure moral substance, a primordial, infinite obligation to the other (to use Levinas' expressions).

Of course, individuation, until now justified from a certain evolutionary point of view, suppresses this abyss of infinite love and moral obligation in our daily life, in order to consolidate our purely egotistical modern self-consciousness. But its time has come to an end as a leading, positive evolutionary impulse. Today we must find ways, conscious and healthy ways, to reopen what was closed, to free the captives, to actualize this openness, and to make ourselves a new body, a new fundament and ground. The new body will be a reversed body, the opposite of the body we had in the time of individuation: it will be another body, a virtual body without organs, the body of the other.

 Let us look somewhat closer into this abyss whose desire surfaces in each moment in which I struggle to become conscious of the fact that I am grasped or looked at by another. Waking up while falling asleep means, on the cognitive level, experiencing something that can be compared to standing up while the body falls down. The impact of the other on me pushes me out of my body; when I am pulled out like a sword from a scabbard, infinitely fast, the other takes my place. I am now watching from outside myself the other taking hold of and inhabiting my vacant home, body, or center. This is a terribly unsettling and uneasy feeling. "I" find "my" self (precisely the terms that now designate what I have lost), in between two differences, two other-worldly existences and I am lost in both. For in what was once a bodily "me," there is now "you" (but as a wholly foreign, alien, unrecognized being), and outside, where I took flight, there is a world in which I become a multitude, a flowing stream of infinite becomings. In between such a "center" and "circumference," I find myself in this awakening, but in this moment the terror of self-loss becomes totally unbearable (and hence I immediately fall asleep to protect my self from this double revelation and extinction).

 Levinas firmly grasps that the ontological ground of subject-ivation is based on the fact that you make me first into a sub-ject at all. It therefore cannot be a subjective experience of an "ego" or "soul," because it is non-human, pre-individual, and primordial, and it comes before any self-consciousness starts to awaken. It is like the baby giving herself as subject to her mother's enveloping care and responsibility; it is the wholly naked, innocent existence before existence, being helplessly delivered onto a world, becoming the total carrier of the parents' presence. The primordial defenselessness of the infant, its in-fantile ontological situation (Agamben finely developed this notion) is the very foundation of the pure assumption of responsibility for the other, because the other is nothing less that the giver of my self, my animator, who forever already in-spired my humanity and actualized it through this primordial inspiration. I learn to breathe as a newborn by breathing together with my mother's gentle, rhythmical breaths. I learn to do this again, but now in full consciousness, through breathing in the other.

 Now this experience cannot of course be gained by any phenomenological observation... The other in me is not the guarantee of my subjective experience but the ground out of which my selfhood would emerge in the first place, primordially. On the contrary: the other in me shatters my subjectivity entirely, destroys my autonomy forever, and puts me into primordial responsibility and universal, wholly non-personal, ethical obligation towards him or her. He or she becomes flesh in me - incarnates in me - only because my flesh is from the very beginning made of the stuff of the logos, but a logos that is not the wisdombeautymight of the Greeks or Germans but a pure nakedness and helplessness of the dejected, persecuted other and each persecuted minority.

The “not I but the Other in me”, is a new human center of selfhood and identity; it would have always already imprinted, nay, in-carnated in "my" flesh, as revelation of the fact that my flesh, my body, is precisely not "mine" but ITS, HERS, HIS. This breaking through and opening of the "I," "ego" or "self" to the “not I but the Other in me”, gives me the power to stand outside my-self. This is the other in me as the primal, unconditional responsibility for the earth and all her children. Here Levinas finds the only place in which modern humanity, Cain's children, may begin to reverse the original reversal and reverse Cain's fundamental cynically questioning answer: Am I my brother’s keeper? Into a new affirmative answer, that will eventually become as primordial and constitutive of a future subjectivity as Cain's original deed is constitutive of our egoistic individuation: Yes, I will become my brother’s keeper!

The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art