3.2 Eschatology as a Condition of Revelation
3.2.2 Signification and Escape
If escape from the pure immanence of the totality of the Same is to come, then it must come from outside. This claim is fundamental to Levinas’s position. The Same cannot escape itself. How can one escape oneself? Where would it go? It cannot rescue itself, liberate itself, or otherwise save itself from its need to bring all things into its own totality. Why is this? Because it is the totality of the Same that provides the basis of understanding and practical engagement with
38 Ibid., 41.
39 Peperzak, Other, 138.
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Being. The totality of the Same is pragmatically the totality of Being, the self’s preservation within Being. How can we escape our own preservation within Being? Our persistence in Being, our preservation, is what saves us from death. And that persistence in Being is part of what makes the Other into a competitor. It is what reduces freedom to the imperialistic domination that is liberty. Could any of us give up our own freedom? And if we did, would that free us from pure immanence or would it merely exchange one master for another while leaving us within the totality of the Same? Must we embrace our own death in order to be perfectly free?
In this context, there cannot be revelation but merely the disclosure resulting from my epistemological labor in making sense of the Other within the totality of my own experience and the horizon of the Same. Therefore, if there is to be revelation beyond disclosure, a revelation of the Other, of transcendence, that is not reduced to the Same, then that revelation will have to be apocalyptic. It will have to come from outside in a way that provides egress from the totality of the Same. The Other must be savior and liberator. The Other, not the Same, would be the condition of revelation and, perhaps too, of knowledge.
When the Same is the condition of revelation, then the Other must show up in a way that the Same can understand. When the Other is the condition of revelation, then the Other provides its own mode of signification. “[I]t is not the mediation of the sign that forms signification, but signification (whose primordial event is the face-to-face) that makes the sign function possible,”
says Levinas.40 Levinas seems to be rejecting the very functionality of the sign that makes Smith’s logic of incarnation or analogy possible. The face of the Other is not a sign that
40 Levinas, Totality, 206.
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mediates. Rather, the signification of infinity is what makes the sign and the face possible.41 For Levinas, signification appears to come prior to the sign. This is the result of ethics taking priority over ontology as first philosophy. We might, therefore, claim that the signification of infinity is eschatology.
For Levinas, the face of the vulnerable Other is the metaphor du jour, but we must never forget this is a metaphor.42 Levinas, perhaps, chooses this metaphor because it is a relatable phenomenon. Who could imagine looking into the face of a starving, destitute child and not feeling the infinite demand of responsibility? So, the metaphorical face is the mode of the infinite demand, which is signification. The infinite demand comes through the face. In this sense, the Other that confronts us is only modally the human Other. What confronts us in the face as Other is the infinite. What confronts us transcends us because it refuses to be contained by us and, through signification, it apocalyptically puts the Same into question.
At this point, nothing has clearly and formally differentiated Levinas’s Other from the competitor of economic liberalism. In economic liberalism, if I am to avoid destitution myself, of course I must push that destitution off onto others. It takes a lot of money and resources to die of old age. And I would expect other humans to oppose me with their own efforts to persevere in Being. That is the great game of capitalism, with high stakes indeed.
41 Christologically, it would not, then, be the Incarnation that signifies God, as Smith has portrayed. Rather, the divine signification would make the Incarnation possible. From Levinas’s perspective, this may be the reason that the Incarnation is mystery, why every attempt to collapse the Incarnation into a logical theory has resulted in heresy.
The Incarnation is salvific not because it can or should be understood, which is to say, that it would present itself “to the constitutive freedom of transcendental consciousness” (Levinas, Totality, 206). Rather, it is salvific as it
provokes faithfulness by “putting into question, in an ethical relation, constitutive freedom itself” (ibid.).
42 Consider that the body as a whole or in part might function as a ‘face.’ A group of people might present itself as a face. An animal too might present itself to us as a ‘face.’
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The ‘relative others’ of liberalism have particular identifiable qualities of differentiation – perhaps race, gender, political affiliation, economic status and so forth. These differentiating qualities are points of contact with the Same and they allow the Same to distinguish itself from the Other, perhaps through negation. This distinction nullifies absolute alterity. If the Other is to be absolutely Other, then the Same and the Other cannot share a genus.43 This is important because if there was a point of contact, if we did share a genus, if the difference were merely relative, then there would be no escape from the totality of the Same. Liberation could not come from outside. For this reason, I stated above that the human Other is but the mode of the infinite.
The Other must be infinitely Other.
Likewise, Levinas says that the face as the mode of infinity “is neither seen nor touched—for in visual and tactile sensation, the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.”44 Levinas is rejecting the reduction of knowledge to sense perception, though not quite for the reasons that Descartes or George Berkeley might.
Rather, sense perception is still within immanence. Levinas is not arguing that knowledge cannot come from immanence or from sense perception. He is not rejecting empiricism as such. He is, however, arguing that the knowledge of immanence remains imperialistic. Any experience of the Other that would nullify its absolute alterity by subjecting it to an empiricist understanding – or rationalist understanding, for that matter – is a destruction of the Other, a destruction of
transcendence. In contrast, the face is experienced and known not thematically or conceptually. It is experienced and known ethically when the Same is gripped by its obligation to the Other,
43 Levinas, Totality, 194. We saw in the previous chapter how Smith insisted on a point of contact between humanity and God, thereby reducing the absolute otherness of the divine. The passive point of contact he argued for is
formally no different from an active point of contact in its effect on alterity.
44 Ibid. Content is no longer Other because it no longer speaks. Content, therefore, while necessary for the Same, does not escape imperialism or totality. Content requires an Other to continue to speak.
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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.