Re-reading the Present through Levinas and Blanchot:A Paper on Death, Time and Art

From Plato to Husserl, philosophy has understood time to adhere to, or be constituted by, unity or the idea of a whole, which comes into being through a coherent order of the different temporal elements of past, present and future. In this sense, time was thought of as the dialectical reconciliation of temporal horizons without any irreducible interruptions. Even though Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger were among the first to overcome this view of an externally coherent and scientifically objective time by analysing temporality grounded in human existence, it was the Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who went even further, situating temporality within subjectivity by understanding the temporal self not as a solitary subject in isolation from others and time, but as an ethical and intertemporal subject constituted by death. In fact, and as I will shortly touch upon, it is Levinas’s original and radical views on death, which stand in contrast to Heidegger, who was his teacher, that are essential for an understanding of his ideas on temporality, from the instant to infinity, which will be explored in this paper. 

The second part of this paper’s analysis of Levinas’s philosophy is concerned with his aesthetic, not ethical, conceptions of temporality, which have only received sporadic academic attention up until now. Therefore, it is important to contextualize Levinas’s argument for art’s distinctiveness in temporal terms in relation to the nature and value of art – at least in the manner in which he conceives it – and within the framework of his ethical metaphysics, in order to understand how his radical views on time and death shape his conceptualization of art, as well as to understand the distinct difference he draws from that between ethics and aesthetics.

In addition to Levinas, the work of writer and theorist Maurice Blanchot will be explored with reference to his ideas of temporality in relation to art or, in his case, specifically to literature’s temporality, as he considered literature as a serious philosophical problem, as well as the demand that literature poses to thought. Blanchot’s body of work is marked by his close friendship to Levinas, which shaped the evolution of his own writing. On the one hand, Levinas introduced Blanchot to phenomenology more broadly and to the philosophy of Heidegger in particular, and on the other hand, and more importantly, perhaps, Levinas’s own philosophy influenced his focus on ethics. This paper will bring the ideas of these two thinkers into dialogue, through a close juxtaposition of their interrelated ideas on death, time and art, in order to understand the tension between the time of ethics and art, so as to think the ways in which art can be freed from the temporal constraints put onto it by Levinas and Blanchot.

TEMPORALITY: LEVINAS

An analysis of time and death is fundamental to both Heidegger and Levinas’s philosophy, yet their conceptions are oppositional. Whereas for Heidegger temporality produces an anxious mortal being, Levinas shows the self to be primarily, morally and temporally, responsible. In fact, it can be argued that Levinas offers a deeper understanding of time, going beyond the ontological structures proposed by Heidegger, to a time characterized by proximity, ethical intersubjectivity and the other. 

Even though Levinas inherits from Heidegger the importance of death, he profoundly revises the meaning attached to it and thereby changes the consequences it poses. Levinas argues against Heidegger’s formulation of death as the ’possibility of impossibility,’ and proposes instead, as always commited to radical alterity, the ‘impossibility of possibility.’ For Levinas, meaning does not derive from ‘being-toward-death,’ no matter how ‘authentic’ it may be in a Heideggerian sense, but rather from a person’s relation to the death of an other; hence, a social relation external to the self.

Ethical Infinity

A further key difference to Heidegger, as well as to Bergson, is based on Levinas’s understanding of alterity beyond the subject, resulting in his claim that the principle of time is infinity, as opposed to the Bergsonian-Heideggerian focus on the finite aspect of time. However, Levinas is not thereby reinstating the traditional Aristotelean conception of time, but quite to the contrary, sees the infinite dimension of time as primordial and more original. In a similar comparison, like René Descartes, Levinas believes that infinity precedes finitude, but not due to the relation to God, as in the case of Descartes, but because infinity reveals itself in the face-to-face encounter with an other whose face cannot be reduced to the individual.

For Levinas, time is essentially the relation to the other, while “the other is the future.” (Time and Other, 77) From this follows, according to Levinas, that the future is the foremost time of ethics. For him, it is not the other who is defined by the future but the future is subject to the other. It is important to note that Levinas understands the future of death to be defined by complete alterity, in a way comparable to his conception of the other. However, Levinas is not interested in the future in isolation but locates the responsibility for the other in “a past more ancient than every origin, a pre-original and anarchical passed” and as “an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment.” (Otherwise than Being, 23/9) To Levinas, this past “is ‘older’ than the a priori.” (ibid)

From even this brief outline of Levinas’s view on time that I hope to have conveyed, especially to those of you not familiar with his philosophy, that his is an original contribution to the history of philosophy, as the idea of an infinite future and an immemorial past that are neither present at any given time, cannot be found in any of his predecessors who traditionally have understood the past and the future in terms of the present. Infinite time should, therefore, not only be understood in relation, on the one hand, to the other’s otherness and, on the other, to death’s unknowability, which both in their ungraspable nature are necessary for the constitution of time as a whole, but also constitute the radical responsibility for the other that reveals the future and past as unreachable and, therefore, never as present.

Ethical Instant

Levinas does not only disagree with Heidegger, but strongly agrees with his critique of classical metaphysics, in which time is equated with ‘presence,’ understood as infinite successions of instants passing. However, as each instant is only ever understood as an instance of eternity, it deprives each individual moment of its existence. Heidegger attempts to resolve this problem through proposing an existential continuum of past, present and future across a finite temporal horizon. Yet, Heidegger’s response only replicates the reduction of the instant to ‘presence,’ as the continuum becomes a whole, in which the temporal horizon cannot accommodate or account for Levinas’s radical revision of the diachronic nature of time, as we have just touched upon. Only in Levinas’s view of temporality can the future’s alterity remain radically unpredictable and the past’s alterity preserved as immemorial. Therefore, according to Levinas, Heidegger fails to free the instant from the false unity of time, because he fails to account for the radical diachrony of it.

The transcendence of diachronic time can never be achieved by the individual subject, but only ever through the ethical transcendence of the intersubjective relation at the heart of Levinas’s philosophy. To disrupt the falsely perceived unity of the instant, is to understand the false identity of a subject as an isolated ethical being. Therefore, the idea of ‘presence,’ ‘self-presence’ or the ‘presence of the present’ is shattered by the subject’s identity in relation to the other, the being-for-the-other, standing in an ethical immemorial responsibility to the future, which contains the other and the radical alterity of both.

Aesthetic Entretemps

Since his early work, Levinas argues that the alterity of art is not situated in an ontological ‘beyond,’ but in the intervals of language and time, which he defines as art’s proper temporal mode. He establishes a close connection between the alterity of an artwork, his anti-ontological account of being, in particular that of time and specifically his concept of entretemps or ‘meanwhiles,’ which he defines as the excessiveness of time from within the moment of the instant. Levinas first developed the notion of entretemps in his early essay “Reality and Its Shadow,” which can be understood as the temporal equivalent to his central notion of being as il y a or there is, which served as the starting point of his critique of classical metaphysics and modern ontology. It is of interest to take note at this point that the il y a and entretemps are Levinas’s counter-Heideggarian equivalents to being and time respectively.

For Levinas, art’s distinctiveness comes into being through art’s closed temporal nature, which is bound to entretemps. Therefore, to him, art always remains frozen, hinting at a future which never arrives, an instant always suspended in time. This ‘suspended’ instant of the artwork, which is part of the temporal dimension of past, present and future, stands in contrast, as we have seen in my remarks on his notions of the ethical temporality with view of the ‘instant’, which is a moment in time detached from temporal flow, from the immemorial past and the infinite future, a moment also referred to as the ‘specious present.’ This, however, is not a phenomenon, as is the ‘suspended’ instant of the artwork, but a concept derived from ontological presuppositions. From this follows that for Levinas the temporality of art is always chained to destiny, always frozen and never freed from a future, which cannot arrive.

Entretemps and Death

Yet, Levinas’s entretemps is not just a purely ‘aesthetic’ instance of temporality, but also bears close proximity to the time of death and dying. He writes, hinting at his critique of Heidegger’s being-toward-death: “What is unique and poignant in this instant is due to the fact that it cannot pass. In dying . . . one is in the interval, forever an interval.” (“Reality and Its Shadow,” 11) Once an instant has passed, one no longer exists. In addition, the idea of entretemps also undermines the ontological account of time as finite, as well as the metaphysical notions of time as a “moving image of eternity” (Plato, Timaeus 37d). As the Levinas scholar Henry McDonald points out: “Whether in the time of dying, or the entretemps of the artwork, by repeating or eternally suspending the present as present, one is locked in a nightmare of the eternal return of the same.” (“Aesthetics As First Ethics,” 28) 

Arguably every moment of life is in some profound sense the moment before death, a suspended eternity which imprisons the subject in the omnipresence of death, the impossibility of time to escape. Yet, it also appears that entretemps stands in a special relationship to death. But instead of seeing entretemps as monstrous in and of itself, it might in fact be a means of exposing the inhumanness of time overall, which has been hitherto concealed within modern metaphysics. Therefore, art, as a prisoner of the moment before death, can also show the overcoming of death through the continuous escape of it and the gaining of more time.

TEMPORALITY: BLANCHOT

Yet, it is this material link of art to the experience of entretemps and the il y a, the there is, that makes it appear monstrous to Levinas, in the same way as dying is the impossibility of death in Blanchot’s poetics, to which we shall turn now. The question of death runs throughout Blanchot’s body of work, as much as it does throughout Levinas’s work, and organizes his reflections on language, literature and philosophy. In fact, both Blanchot and Levinas inverse Heidegger’s famous formulation of death as the ‘possibility of impossibility’ to the ‘impossibility of possibility’. For Blanchot, death only shows itself in the experience of literature, whereas the philosopher, to him, is unable to understand death.

Present

Blanchot’s works characterize time as something which is absent or “without present, without presence.” (The Space of Literature, 26) Hence, this temporality is not constituted by the passing of moments or the successive, irreversible passage of presents. It is important to note that for Blanchot this temporality is neither the time of everyday life nor that of philosophy, but the time of art, or more precisely that of literature, the time of narration and the time of the narrative voice (The Space of Literature, 126). However, the question this raises is how temporality is at all possible in light of the present’s absence.

Even though, for Blanchot, this narrative temporality is characterized by an absence of time, it is nevertheless not an ontological negation of time as such. As Blanchot writes in The Space of Literature: “the time of the absence of time is not dialectical” (ibid). The consequence thereof is that time cannot be dialectical due to absence, because if it were, it would no longer be time. In addition, and according to Blanchot, nothing can mediate between the time of literature and time in the ordinary sense. Therefore, for Blanchot, this time of literature is neither the negation nor the non-existence of time, but a double affirmation of time’s existence and non-existence. In that sense, literature’s temporality is always non-dialectical, which for him affirms both presence and absence.

Instead of negating time, Blanchot highlights the intrinsic nature of time’s uncertainty, not denying the present, as much as rendering it uncertain by neither rejecting its existence nor its eternity. Therefore, the time of literature, or counter-time, is time, in which presence and absence do no longer stand in a relationship to one another, and by that notion, a time in which the past, present and future do no longer stand in a relationship to one another. Hence, no one time exists any longer.

The consequence of this is that time cannot constitute a unity or a whole, as I have mentioned has been the case from Plato to Husserl. Blanchot’s understanding of time is that it is made up of disconnected elements while also lacking overall coherence, therefore, lacking the possibility for simultaneity or succession. Consequently, for Blanchot, time is irreducibly and necessarily interrupted and fragmented.

Past, Present and Future

Time without present could (traditionally) be understood as either past or future. However, according to Blanchot, in spite of the presence of the past and/or future, neither actually contain the present. Whereas the past only contains an ontologically non-existent present or a passed presence, the future equally does not contain the present or only a coming presence, which is never present. But, as Blanchot insists on the non-dialectical nature of literature’s temporality, a center in the form of a present, from which the past and the future can be deduced, does not and cannot exist. Blanchot explains that “[t]his ‘without present’ nevertheless does not refer to a past” (The Space of Literature 26), because time without present can only have a past without a passed present. In this sense, the past has always and already passed and the future is always yet to come. Therefore, this temporality is an eternal past and an infinite futurity, as it has never started in a present, so it will never finish either. Hence, the past and the future are always present in their absence but without direct relationship to the present. Or in Blanchot’s own words: “always present and always absent … present in its absence.”

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the above re-reading of Levinas’s theory of entretemps through the lens of his own ethical temporality, as well as Blanchot’s ‘time without present’, allows the relationship between art and time to emerge in a new light and challenge Levinas’s critique of the ethical absence in the presence of the aesthetic. Even though for both philosophers’ aesthetic temporality negates the future, it is precisely the future that is the foremost time of ethics for Levinas. This leaves us with the task of either reconciling aesthetic temporality with the possibility of reaching out to the future or enabling the future to arrive by introducing a relationship that falls outside of pure temporality, in order to elevate art to the ethical standard at the heart of Levinas’s philosophy and introduce radical responsibility for the other to the artistic creation and reception.

This paper attempted to highlight the possibility to re-read time more broadly speaking, and the present in particular, by juxtaposing it to death and art in the philosophy and writing of Levinas and Blanchot. As we have seen, Levinas divides time into ethical and aesthetic temporality, in which the ethical ‘specious present’ contains radical alterity and responsibility, while the aesthetic ‘suspended instant’ is the time of dying and the horizon in which the present is without future. This division in Levinas’s philosophy illustrates that the aesthetic instant can only be freed from isolation through bringing it into closer contact with ethical temporality, thereby not only freeing the individual from isolation, but also freeing the artwork from destiny by raising it to its proper aesthetic status through elevating it by means of ethics. Blanchot, in line with Levinas, appears to only free the present of literature’s temporality from the constraints of the past and the future, so as to allow art to exist is its own right without a further ethical demand. Therefore, the question of the place of art has been brought into sharper focus, demanding a re-evaluation from scholars and a reconsideration of what an ethical-aesthetic framework would look like and can achieve in the light of life/death paradigm that has dominated our political and artistic landscape in the 21st century.