3.2 Eschatology as a Condition of Revelation
3.2.3 Language and Revelation
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which is the condition, Levinas says, of peace.45 There is an ethical mode of knowledge. This ethical mode comes as a crisis. It comes as an exogeneous command. This ethical mode of knowledge is eschatological.
Ethical or eschatological knowledge comes in the apocalyptic crisis that judges our fidelity to the Infinite ethical demand. The infinite, like a Stranger:
disturbs the being at home with oneself. But the Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension . . . He is not wholly in my site.46
Disturbing my being at home with myself, I am judged precisely through my response to the call of responsibility that comes from time-out-of-mind. This call to responsibility echoes out from the Other who is also the Stranger, the one I cannot know except as the origin of responsibility.
In my responsibility, I know not the Other, but the infinite. I know the infinite by virtue of my fidelity to the call of responsibility.
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more originary grounding of Descartes’ ego, even prior to the cogito. And when infinity exceeds definition, Levinas says, “it accordingly refers to a ‘knowledge’ of a new structure.”47 In
Levinas, this new structure is ethical, and the face, even or precisely as metaphor, plays a cornerstone role in that structure. Seeking evidence as a foundation for this belief in the ethical structure of the face, Levinas insists that the face itself “is the evidence that makes evidence possible.”48 Consequently, the face does not need to be grounded in prior evidence. Instead, the metaphorical face is the foundation of ethical knowledge, and ethics is the basis of the resultant rationality. Levinas is arguably a foundationalist, though an ethical foundationalist.
From the face and ethics, we move to language. Arguably, language is Smith’s fundamental concern. Comment ne pas parler? How do we convey through language what is exterior to language? That was Smith’s underlying question in Speech and Theology. Because Smith seems to conceptualize language as representational, the non-predicative ‘concept’ was his answer. He claims that the ‘concept’ resists the normal function of language to re-present, having overlooked his conception of language as representational. Rather, the ‘concept’ expressively indicates. Happily, the ‘concept’ is non-violent, for Smith, because it does not reduce
transcendence to predicates, which would cause the (transcendent) phenomenon to play a role in which it no longer recognized itself. As we can see here, Smith’s violence is primarily linguistic and ontological in nature. But Smith’s approach left intact what Levinas calls the egological structure of language, thereby disincarnating it from the actual, which is to say ethical, relation of persons. Egological language is a function of the Same, a language which I have the capacity to choose to exercise non-predicatively. I would do this because I recognize and respect the rights
47 Ibid., 204.
48 Ibid.
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of the Other, and Other who is like me, and thus dialectically resists my own liberty. But this language, egological language, has no essential or ethical connection to the Other. Its structure proceeds egologically from the Same.
In contrast, Levinas posits an incarnate language whose origin is in the face-to-face relation, what I will call ethical language. It is the structure of language, always and necessarily originating from the face-to-face, that allows the Other to reverberate within and through language, invading my very consciousness of the Other. This reverberation and invasion are the possibility of revelation. That revelation can have this apocalyptic form again suggests its
eschatological nature. My representations of the Other, my concepts of the Other, are continually shaken in this ethical language of the incarnate Other who attends and comes to its own aid in its expression. Should language become detached from the Other, it would fail to remain incarnate.
It would cease to be ethical. The Other would disappear from language. Therefore, it is this proximity of the Other in language that renders it ethical.
In light of the above, Peperzak says that “‘language’ must be understood here as speaking as such, which does not coincide with its content.”49 Here we begin to see epistemological implications. Content – what might traditionally be called concepts or knowledge or datum – is within the totality of the Same because content does not convey the Other or transcendence. In content, the reverberation of the Other in language has been stilled. While content remains necessary for aspects of knowledge, the eschatological nature of discourse remains necessary to prevent content from devolving into the imperialism of knowledge.
Smith seems to sense the threat of stagnate content as witnessed in his efforts to avoid the objectification of predicative concepts. He wants his ‘concepts’ to stand and point in an iconic
49 Peperzak, Other, 111.
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manner. As much as this solution represents a critical creativity on Smith’s part, formal
indication does not yet convey the Other. Smith’s ‘conceptual,’ indicative content becomes, as for Climacus, the historical occasion for the Same to make the leap of faith: “the I think in the I can.”50 In that case, it might indicate ‘the god,’ but it could not convey ‘the god.’51 Because ‘the god’ has no proximity, no parousia or presence, in the ‘concept,’ we find no escape here from the egolatry of language. Without ‘the god’ reverberating in language, coming to its own aid, we find no escape from pure immanence. Like Moses, we can gaze upon the promised land, indicating it to ourselves and others, but we can never enter it.
However, that is only a small concern. The bigger crisis, entirely ignored by Smith, is the following:
Disincarnate thought, thinking speech before speaking it . . . adding a world of speech to the world antecedently . . . [is] a myth. Already thought constitutes a system of signs, in the particular tongue of a people . . . receiving signification from this very operation.52 Here we find that the origin of conceptual violence has less to do with predicates and much more to do with the economy of language. We saw an example of this previously when we recognized that Smith’s ‘concept’ was based on his representational concept of language. Smith is trying to add a world of speech to the ontic world antecedently through a revision of the ‘concept.’ The
‘concept,’ laboring to make a home for itself in thought, did not, therefore, itself evade
conceptualization. This economy is the reason, not Gnosticism, for the violence of the concept and for the fall of interpretation. It is not finitude that is the traitor in our midst, but the linguistic
50 Levinas, Totality, 205.
51 I will show later that Levinas makes use of metaphors in ways that seem to ‘formally indicate’ without conveying.
Therefore, the face as a metaphor indicates a mode of the infinite without conveying the infinite. Therefore, I do not want to suggest that what Smith has accomplished is unhelpful. It is just not yet sufficient.
52 Ibid., 205-6.
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economy. We see in Smith’s work a persistent ‘I can’ that labors within language. The ‘concept’
labors to indicate. This operation labors before expression to constitute the self and the
incarnation. The body of incarnation is represented to itself in thought. Thus, formal indication receives its signification from its intentional object.
What I am referring to as a linguistic economy, following in the tradition of Bourdieu, Levinas may refer to as “the structure of constitutive consciousness.”53 What is potentially damning to Smith’s ambitions is Levinas’s subsequent assertion that “the structure of
constitutive consciousness recovers all its rights after the mediation of the body that speaks or writes.”54 So, the divine is incarnate in the person of Jesus, whose mediation re-establishes the rights of the finite speaker. God affirms finite immanence in Smith’s incarnation. This is precisely how Smith opposes Gnosticism, through his assertion of the divine affirmation of immanence. His project, for the very outset in The Fall, is the affirmation of the finite. We have returned “to a transcendental consciousness constituting objects.”55 Incarnation has become the transcendental ground of finite signification. However, in Smith’s work, the incarnation is made to play a role in which it no longer recognizes itself. The incarnation receives its signification from the ‘concept.’ There is no revelation and no eschatology here, unless that eschatology be one fully realized in the ‘concept.’
The argument that I want to make in the conclusion of this section is that what Levinas considers ‘ethical’ can also be viewed formally as eschatological – a surprising, unanticipatable demand coming from outside intentionality and economic rationality. Already the presence
53 Ibid., 206.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
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(parousia) of the Other that comes to its own aid requires a penetration of the totality of the Same, invading the Same’s atheism that had cut it off from participation in being.
Ethical or eschatological language, in contrast to economic language, understands truth as a function of speech. In speech the Other who remains absolutely Other, with no metaphysical point of contact to the Same, becomes proximate (parousia) in its command.56 Truth, then, is “a modality of the relation between the Same and the Other.”57 Truth is the faithfulness of that relation, a relation born both of distance and paradoxical, disruptive presence. If truth were a function of content, then truth would be representational fidelity. It would faithfully represent what is far off or not present. When truth is an ethical function, it is faithfulness to the Other who is present in its demand. Presence is ethical proximity, the proximity of the obligation, which is the call of holiness. And language becomes the formal ground of truth, as the Other comes to its own assistance in discourse through the ethical obligation that is revealed in discourse.58
Therefore, language, and by extension knowledge and truth, originates in the face-to-face relation. They are intersubjective and ethical, in this regard. Their surprising and infinite nature implies their eschatological origins.