Session 2: Same versus Other, Saying versus Said

(Discuss first 5 pages of Guwy interview.)

A: Same vs. Other
Continuing our original approach of clarifying the core concepts of Levinas through a simple system of binary oppositions, we are about to approach the contrast same/other. This dichotomy is in fact present in Greek philosophy, with the important difference that what drew the attention of Greek philosophers was the identity of same and other, in the sense that the same can be considered the other of the other. In short, these were logical concepts: part the Logos, which in Greek means, interestingly, both logic and language. (We see the appearance of logos in the sense of language in “logotherapy,” or the talking cure, developed by Sigmund Freud in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: in the sense of logic it appears in the various “ologies.” such as ontology (the logic of being, biology, the logic of living things…). What is new and vital to Levinas's philosophy the connection made between same and self, as opposed to other qua other person. If the foreigner, the stranger, is “other” to me, that “otherness” (also referred to as alterity) is all that is different than me. I am, for myself, the same. If I see something odd, disturbing or puzzling, I am likely to make every effort to integrate this unknown into what is already familiar to me. It may be said that I attempt to reduce otherness to the same. I may explore the object or person in question and end up concluding they are but new variants of what I already know. “I is only, or just, a new kind of ....” To know is to recognize. If it is a foreign language, I “master” it. I assimilate otherness, I make it my own. An acquisitive mind is one that acquires, or takes. I grasp your meaning, I “comprehend” it (from Latin cum + prehendere, to take [several things] together).

The fact that knowing is a form of taking or assimilating or mastering is of no particular moral significance when we are dealing with things. But with people it is otherwise. If this is what knowledge is, this imperialism of the self, leveling otherness to sameness, the question arises: “Is it appropriate to know another person?” Certainly we get used to other people, and there is a sense in which we get to know them. But perhaps the well-known phenomenon of the adolescent turning to a parent with an impassioned "You don't know me” really means—“You are trying to make me in into a variant of yourself. I am no longer that person you thought I was. I am alive. I change. I am not a thing to be understood. You imprison me in your knowing. I am what I become.” (Of course few adolescents would be able to articulate these things. The silence of separation does its tragic though perhaps necessary work of distancing young sensitivities from the tyranny of “understanding.”) Or consider the following excerpt from an essay on the novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, by Marguerite Duras. “This assertion by Hold that the two women's femininity is similar to his own could initially be read as evidence of a desire on his part to appropriate their radical alterity, to reduce the Other to the Same. Yet, far from seeking to deny sexual difference, to close the gaps which Lol has opened in his life (and in his discourse), Hold displays a remarkable willingness to hollow out the gap, to dig it deeper. He accepts unreservedly, for example, that « ne rien savoir de Lol était la connaître déjà. On pouvait, me parut-il, en savoir moins encore, de moins en moins sur Lol V. Stein » (p. 81). Seen in this light, the narrator’s statement that the voice of the women's femininity strikes a chord in him suggests that he is receptive to—rather than appropriative of—the otherness they represent.” (From Mairéad Hanrahan, « Je est une autre: Of Rimbaud and Duras », MLN 113.4 (1998) 915-936.) The French passage quoted above may be translated as: “to know nothing about Lol was already to know her. One could, it seemed to me, get to know even less, less and less about Lol V. Stein.”

This aspect of same vs. other in Levinas's philosophy has been described by Wlad Godzich as a reaction to the gnostic tradition (which is taken to underlie later forms, such as seventeenth-century rationalism, in the following terms. “The most consistent denouncer of the gnostic position in our day has been the French philosopher and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Lévinas, who, in a work that spans nearly fifty years, has rigorously argued for a notion of truth that is at considerable odds with the dominant rationalist one, a notion that relies upon the category—or, more accurately within the Lévinasian framework, upon lived experience—of the other. Against a notion of the truth as the instrument of mastery being exercised by the knower over areas of the unknown as he or she brings them within the fold of the same, Lévinas argues that there is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me, and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and the same in order to settle in a land that it under its rule. Here the knower sets out on an adventure of uncertain outcome, and the instruments that he or she brings may well be inappropriate to the tasks that will arise. Reason will play a role, but it will be a secondary one; it can only come into play once the primary fact of the irruption of the other has been experienced. And this other is not a threat to be reduced or an object that I give myself to know in my capacity as a knowing subject, but that which constitutes me as an ethical being; in my originary encounter I discover my responsibility for the existence of the other, a responsibility that will lie at the root of all my subsequent ethical decisions” (Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Theory and history of literature, v. 17. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986], xv-xvi).

B: Saying vs. Said
This dichotomy was expressed in Levinas's original French as "le Dire" and "le Dit." It would be more literally but not necessarily better translated as "the To-Say" and "the Said," since the first element is the infinitive of the verb to say. This circumstance may be of some importance, since the "infinitive" form is thus called because it lacks such specifiers as person and number, and is thus less "finite" or defined than the conjugated forms. Indefinite rather than infinite, the form Dire (=to say) may well be related in Levinas's thinking to the infinite, since he wishes to express by it a pure enunciation or an intended utterance without the defining traits we are forced by the grammatical conventions of language to furnish. But leaving these considerations as for the moment, let us accept the fact that English uses the present participle form "saying" in place of the more literal "to say" as the first element of this conceptual opposition.

What is the Saying? Before we fall from silence into words, on the verge of speech, there is a nebulous intentionality we wish to convey or express. That pure intentionality is the saying. A possible example would be "Hello." What does it mean? It is a recognition of the other person. Just that. Of course timing and intonation, "affect," may nuance even this minimal acknowledgement of the other person. This undefined, indefinite or infinite acknowledgment of proximity to the other is the mother of pearl of speech, the placenta of whence the life of language issues. But the very fact that I can communicate these thoughts to you is dependent upon a different aspect of language, namely "the Said."

What is the Said in Levinas? It is the richness that is made possible by embracing definition, limitation, differentiation. Meaning thrives on context, and the excitement of the exploration of the logos, the concatenation of reasoning, the endless search for a more adequate expression of nuance--these are the aspects of language that engender all literature, poetry and philosophy.

But behind and at the source of the Said is the inexhaustible fecundity of a silent proximity to the other, endless approach, metaphysical desire that is only deepened ("creusé," says Levinas, dug deeper) by the Saying. "La monnaie de l'absolu," in André Malraux's phrase. Making change for the absolute.