Levinas, Language and the Face of the Other

by

Steven Hendley

Birmingham-Southern College

900 Arkadelphia Road

Birmingham, AL 35254

(205) 226-4793; shendley@bsc.edu

Levinas, Language and the Face of the Other

Levinas's philosophy is grounded in a central claim: in my proximity to the face of the other I find myself encumbered with a sense of responsibility for the other. Or, as he puts it,"The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation ..."(1) But it is difficult to know how to take this claim. As a normative exhortation that we should find ourselves responsible for the other it points to an inspirational or prophetic tone to Levinas's work which is unlikely to be controversial. But as a descriptive claim about the significance of our lived encounters with other people it often seems wholly unfounded. This is particularly evident in the way Levinas puts it forward in a historically and culturally unqualified way as valid for any encounter with another person, tracing the "birth of morality" to "the gaze of man aiming at a man precisely as abstract man, disengaged from all culture".(2) What can be said for such an idea? It is this question I would like to pursue in this paper drawing from what I believe is Levinas's most convincing case for the universal validity of his claim - his reflections on language and the other in Totality and Infinity and, in particular, his claim that "Meaning is the face of the Other, and all recourse to words takes place already within the primordial face to face of language."(3)

Levinas's reflections on language begin with a particular use of language as conversation. "The very fact of being in a conversation," he writes, "consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this (my) egoism, and hence in justifying oneself."(4) It is not, therefore, just any relation or mere physical proximity to the other which constitutes our ethical proximity to the other. It is the other as my interlocutor who reveals to me her/his face, in Levinas's ethically loaded sense of that term. "The word that bears on the Other as a theme seems to contain the Other. But already it is said to the Other who, as interlocutor, has quit the theme that encompassed him, and upsurges inevitably behind the said.... the divergence that inevitably opens between the Other as my theme and the Other as my interlocutor, emancipated from the theme that seemed a moment to hold him, forthwith contests the meaning I ascribe to my interlocutor."(5) Though I may attempt to present the other as an object I comprehend in my word about the other, as something true which can be said about the other, a conversational relation to the other as my interlocutor always establishes a divergence between the other as theme and as interlocutor, the one to whom I present this theme. As my interlocutor, the other always reserves the right to contest what is said of her/him and, indeed, to contest whatever is said.

This is a part of what it means to be in a conversation. It is to be in a relationship in which the other, as Levinas puts it, "is called upon to speak" and in so doing "'come(s) to the assistance' of his word".(6) Herein lies what Levinas refers to as the essentially "magisterial" character of speech, the way in which my interlocutor presents her/himself as interlocutor, as irreducible to anything said insofar as s/he always maintains the right to say more, to comment on what is said.(7) To this extent, my interlocutor is my master, my teacher(8) the one to whom I am obliged to be attentive. Not that being in a conversation implies being gullible, naively accepting whatever my interlocutor says. But it does imply responding to my interlocutor in terms of what s/he has said. To be in a conversation with the other is to recognize the other as worthy of that kind of consideration.

Hence, Levinas's reference to the conversational duty to justify oneself.(9) To converse with another person is to find oneself called into question,(10) called precisely to question what I would say in the light of what the other has said, to only say what can take into account what the other has said and, in this way, genuinely respond to the other. Though I might not be inclined to concern myself with what my interlocutor has said, I find that inclination called into question, called to justify itself in the light of the commitments I have undertaken by virtue of entering into a conversation with the other. And so I might try to move the conversation to my own interests but only insofar as I can justifiably do so, which means in a way that is responsive to the other, which finds a way of connecting my concerns with what the other has said so that I pay the other the consideration I owe her/him as my interlocutor.

A conversational obligation to respond to the other is, of course, hardly equivalent to a properly moral obligation to, say, care for the suffering of the other, "to take the bread out of one's own mouth," as Levinas says, "to nourish the hunger of another with one's own fasting."(11) But Levinas's point is, I believe, just that this properly moral sense of obligation is inconceivable outside of an essentially conversational relation with another person. When I see another human being who is suffering and find myself called to assist even when it is not convenient, even when it entails some, however minor, degree of sacrifice on my part I am effectively in a conversational attitude. I grasp the other as someone who could speak to me or does speak to me in the transparent presence of her/his suffering, asking me, in effect, how I can justifiably turn aside in indifference to that suffering. I can, of course, turn aside and in that way relate to the suffering of the other merely as if it were an interesting theme, a curious object, to take up and then put aside. But this is an option inconsistent with the kind of consideration of the other demanded in a conversational relationship. Indeed, lacking a genuinely compelling justification for why I should not or cannot come to the other's aid, failing to try to alleviate the suffering of the other will always be non-responsive, a matter of breaking off the conversational relationship which opens up between us when I grasp the suffering of the other as making a claim on me, as demanding a kind of consideration which no object or theme can conceivably demand of me, but only another who speaks to me. It is only as my interlocutor, if not in fact then at least in principle, that the other shows me her/his face as one to whom I am obliged to give a kind of consideration which, in some contexts, can only be characterized as moral.

Locating our proximity to the other in a conversational relationship to the other is helpful in specifying how a particular use of language may implicate me in a sense of responsibility for the other. But it also seems to make problematic Levinas's more general claim that "all recourse to words" involves this implication. For not every recourse to words is conversational. Sometimes, as with reading a text, for example, there need even be no one around with whom to converse.(12) Linking our proximity to the other to conversation, therefore, is not yet to link it to language generally, to "all recourse to words."

How, then, can Levinas generalize his insights into conversation to language generally? An insight he offers into the nature of propositional language appears, at the very least, to take us farther along toward the conclusion he wishes to draw. He writes, "the proposition that posits and offers the world does not float in the air, but promises a response to him who receives this proposition, who directs himself toward the Other because in his proposition he receives the possibility of questioning.... A proposition is maintained in the outstretched field of questions and answers."(13) Certainly, a proposition always makes what it proposes open to question in a way that it would not be prior to being proposed. To this extent, a proposition always exists in a possible field of questions and answers regarding what it proposes. But why is this "possibility of questioning" essential to a proposition?

We see an answer suggested in the lines which follow: "A proposition is a sign which is already interpreted, which provides its own key. The presence of the interpretive key in the sign to be interpreted is precisely the presence of the other in the proposition, the presence of him who can come to the assistance of his discourse, the teaching quality of all speech."(14) Here Levinas seems to be suggesting that our interpretation of the meaning of a proposition is a function of its being placed in an "outstretched field of questions and answers", that a proposition provides the keys to its own interpretation only insofar as it makes an essential reference to the one "who can come to the assistance of his discourse" by answering my questions about it. But how so? Can I not understand a proposition without having its author present, able to respond to my queries? How, if this were necessary, would reading be possible where the author is not typically there to answer my queries?

Levinas seems to respond to our queries regarding his own proposition when he comes to emphasize a connection between speech in which one maintains the ability to come to the assistance of one's discourse and the overcoming of dissimulation or equivocation. "Speech," he writes, "consists in surmounting, in a total frankness ever renewed, the dissimulation inevitable in every apparition. Thereby a sense - an orientation - is given to every phenomenon."(15) This seems to be the key to Levinas's ideas. For every proposition taken unto itself apart from a context which would help to fix its meaning is subject to equivocation and manifold interpretation. It is only as we define the relevant contexts for how to take the sense of what is said or read that we may overcome this inevitable dissimulation, establishing a more or less univocal meaning through this process. But if we imagine this process of contextualization as a private act, a matter of the personal assumptions each of us brings to bear on what we hear or read that enables us to make some sense of it, we only complicate the problem of the polysemy of language as what is said or read can mean different things to its different recipients as they bring different assumptions to bear. Only a public contextualization of language can make inroads on this problem by establishing shared contexts for the interpretation of what is said or written and, consequently, a more or less shared, univocal meaning. But this is impossible apart from the questions and answers we raise to one another concerning what we say or write. It is only through the possibility of questioning you and taking your responses concerning what you say into consideration that I can develop with you a shared sense of the context in which to take what you say to me. Only the deference I show to you as my interlocutor, allowing your commentary to set the appropriate context for what you say to me, allows us to construct a shared context in which a more or less univocal meaning for what you say can emerge for both of us.

Even the relatively solitary act of reading is bound to this conversational sense of deference to the other. For we can recognize what we read as the same as what others have read, with enough minimally shared meaning to make it recognizable as the same, only insofar as we read each sentence with an eye toward the internal context the author has constructed in the other sentences which populate the text, reading it as the author has presented it, in other words.(16) We read in what amounts to a virtual field of questions and answers, questions we raise about the meaning of what we read that we allow to be answered by the other things the author has written in the text. There is, of course, nothing preventing us from opening a text randomly and reading the first sentence we come to apart from its textual context and, in that sense, encountering a proposition that really does "float in the air", as Levinas puts it. But then we would be forced to project our own context for it in order to make any kind of determinate sense of it - a process which, as noted above, only complicates the problem of the manifold things the text could mean to manifold readers.(17)

In his essay, "Meaning and Sense," Levinas gets at what is in part the same point when he writes of a "unique sense" ("sens unique") as the ground of any otherwise culturally constituted meaning.(18) Exploiting the ambiguity in the French phrase "sens unique," which can mean both a unique meaning or direction,(19) Levinas appears to want to claim that the unique sense of a publically shared meaning that would not be abandoned to the otherwise inevitable dissimulation of language is always a conversational achievement, a matter of the unique orientation or sense of deference to the other we find in the social practice of conversation. Taken on its own, this is not an insignificant point as it suggests that every shared linguistic understanding within a community is a product of such a conversational relation with the other, that a community could not share in any univocal way an understanding of what is meant by the words they use without resorting to a conversational use of language. This point, if true, would go a long way to establishing a degree of universality to Levinas's claim regarding our ethical proximity to the other as it would imply that no linguistic community with relatively univocal shared linguistic understandings could be completely alien to a conversational relation to the other. But it does not establish the more demanding point that Levinas sets for himself, that meaning itself is impossible apart from a conversational relation with the other, that "all recourse to words", every "said" is in some way said to the other. After all, a proposition which "floats in the air" apart from any shared context may be inherently equivocal. I may be able to project a number of different contexts in which it might mean a number of different things. It still has meaning, however, in terms of the different contexts in which I can project its use.

But what of this equivocal semantic potential of language? If I open a book at random and read, "It's a blue day," I will, perhaps, understand the sentence to mean that the day the sentence refers to provokes sadness in some way. This is not, however, the only thing it could mean. It could mean that the day was literally colored blue in that everything as far as the eye could see had, for that bizarre day, been somehow rendered blue. The difference between these interpretations will, of course, depend on the context we project. But what can we mean here by 'projecting a context' except a process in which we anticipate what answers a person in a position to utter such a statement might make in response to our questions concerning it. We imagine, as it were, what such a person would say if we responded to the statement with "How so?" asking her/him to elaborate, to comment on it. With the first interpretation, we suppose that the answer would refer to the sadness the day provokes in the speaker. With the second, less likely interpretation, we suppose that someone might refer to the color of things in the perceived environment. But in any event, we will only be able to understand the sentence as meaningful insofar as it plays a relevant role in a field of questions and answers that remains implicitly or virtually conversational insofar as I defer in each interpretation to the commentary of a possible interlocutor to establish the sentence's meaning.(20)

This may be as much as Levinas could say for his claim that "meaning is the face of the other". But it also may be as much as he needs to say. For it does not make good sense to claim much more than this. To suppose that what is said or written can only mean something insofar as I am in an actual conversational relation with the speaker or author, deferring to her/his actual commentary to establish its meaning is ridiculous. At that rate we would never be able to read much of anything. But to recognize that meaning is dependent, at the very least, on a virtual conversational relation with another is to recognize that linguistic meaning would be inaccessible for anyone who was not competent with a conversational use of language, who was not familiar with what it means to defer to an interlocutor and so capable of reproducing that sense of deference for themselves in the absence of any actual interlocutors. No meaningful recourse to words would be possible without this conversational competence. And this implies that we could not find anyone who could speak with us or understand what we say or write who could not appreciate the sense of obligation to another person which emerges insofar as s/he is my interlocutor. An ethical sense of proximity to the other is, in this way, as Levinas proposes, a presupposition of "all recourse to words". It may, of course, be a rather distant presupposition in many cases. For someone who is reading a light novel for pleasure or a set of instructions for the assembly of their child's new holiday toy, a sense of deference to the other will, no doubt, be the last thing on their mind. But they must draw, nevertheless, from a conversational competence with language which contains the resources for a recognition of the ethical worth of the other, a proximity to the other from which no one who makes a meaningful use of language can distance themselves entirely.

Notes

1. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 201.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense" in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), p. 101.

3. Totality and Infinity, p. 206.

4. Totality and Infinity, p. 40.

5. Totality and Infinity, p. 195.

6. See Totality and Infinity, p. 69, "The interpellated one is called upon to speak; his speech consists in 'coming to the assistance' of his word - in being present."

7. Totality and Infinity, p. 69.

8. Levinas also relates conversation to teaching. "To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression ... to be taught." (Totality and Infinity, p. 51.)

9. See Totality and Infinity, p. 40.

10. See, for example, Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 195. "For the ethical relationship which subtends discourse ... puts the I in question."

11. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans., Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), p. 56.

12. With the example of reading, I am thinking, in particular, of Jacques Derrida's reflections on the non-communicative dimensions of language. (See, for example, his "Signature, Event, Context" in Limited Inc., ed., Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).) We might also allude to the way in which Speech Act theory has clarified how there are many things we can do with language, not all of which are conversational, such as the perlocutionary objectives we may have with our speech acts when we insult someone, for example. (See, in particular, J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962).) But the general point is surely evident without having to appeal to any particular theory of language.

13. Totality and Infinity, p. 96.

14. Totality and Infinity, p. 96.

15. Totality and Infinity, p. 98. Levinas also emphasizes this connection elsewhere in Totality and Infinity. See p. 99 where he characterizes the teaching the other brings to me in a conversational relationship by virtue of her/his ability to come to the assistance of her/his word as "the end of equivocation or confusion." Also see p. 92-93 where he describes the signs that would be delivered by someone who "declines the assistance he would have to bring to the signs he delivers" as consequently delivered "in equivocation".

16. I take this point about reading a text as the author presents it from Adriaan Peperzak's essay, "Presentation" in Re-Reading Levinas, ed., Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

17. I have been thinking here of Derrida's example in "Signature, Event, Context" of citing or "grafting" part of a text out of its "internal semiotic context". As Derrida notes, this does not prevent the cited text from signifying something. But, as he also argues, it only continues to signify something insofar as it is grafted onto another discursive chain of signs which provide a new context for it. And this only exacerbates the polysemy of the fragment of the text which is cited. Levinas's point, as I take it so far, is not that this sort of reading strategy is not possible but only that attempting to overcome this polysemy to establish a shared meaning for language among a linguistic community entails the kind of conversational attitude he discusses.

18. See Emmanuel Levinas, "Meaning and Sense" in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans., Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), pp. 88-89.

19. See Levinas, "Meaning and Sense," p. 87, translators note # 37.

20. This Levinasian idea anticipates, I believe, the main outlines of an "inferentialist" account of meaning as this has been developed in the work of many contemporary philosophers of language such as Michael Dummett (See his essay, "What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)" in Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, ed., Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).), Jurgen Habermas (See his essay, "Toward a Critique of the Theory of Meaning", in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans., William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992).), and most impressively, Robert Brandom (See his Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994).). The basic idea here is that what Levinas is referring to as a field of questions and answers can be understood in a more determinate way as a "practice of giving and asking for reasons", as Brandom likes to put it, borrowing a phrase from Wilfred Sellars. We only understand a speech act when we can understand it as inferentially related to other speech acts or appropriate circumstances which could serve as reasons for it or for which it could serve as a reason; which could provide, in this way, an answer to our questions concerning its sense, a commentary on it, as Levinas puts it.