Table of Contents

    The City and the Stars: Politics and Alterity in Heidegger, Levinas and Blanchot

    Lars Iyer
    University of Newcastle upon Tyne

    The disaster: break with the star, break with every form of totality … (Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 75)

    In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger claims that there are two arguments in particular that foster the belief in the gods – the antiquity and divinity of the soul and the order of the heavens under the control of reason. No one who has contemplated the heavenly bodies carefully could suppose that celestial events happen by necessity rather than divine intention (Laws 966d). And indeed, the stranger maintains, no one can govern the polis who does not understand that the stars are steered by a divine will and exist in harmony with customs and law [nomos] (Laws 968). But what happens when this contemplation reveals neither the order of the soul nor the order of the heavens? What happens with the awareness that the disarray of the universe mirrors the disarray of the soul and it is no longer possible to harmonize the affairs of state according to a nomos that encompasses heaven and earth? The polis is cast adrift and our condition becomes, in John Caputo’s word, disastrous, since the stars, astres, have fallen (*Against Ethics *6). One can discern a desire to address this fallenness in the search for a lost moral unity, with the cohesion and solidarity of a society founded on hard work and co-operation. One can also find it in the attempt to revive a threatened spiritual unity by seeking, for example, a new embodiment of the early Christian community or the Muslim caliphate. But these attempts to re-harmonize individual, familial and societal responsibilities occur amidst the reign of efficiency and optimization, where the hegemony of the marketplace threatens to overturn old models of being-together. We cannot simply restore the missing nomos, placing the stars back in the sky. Indeed, we are no longer sure whether we know who ‘we’ are – consumers? citizens? subjects? As Caputo reflects, “It is not a question of knowing what to put in their place, but of just getting along without such a place, of conceding that things are just ‘decentered’, ‘disseminated’, ‘disastered’. I would say that we are in a fix, except that even to say ‘we’ is to get into a still deeper fix. We are in the fix that we cannot say ‘we’” (*Against Ethics *6). How then can we endure this “disastronomic, disastrological, deconstructive setback” without the model of a stellar nomos, a stellar logos that could serve as the image of the loftiness of the law? (*Against Ethics *6)

    I

    We are too late for the gods and too / Early for Being, Being’s poem / Just begun, is man. // To head toward a star – this only. // To think is to confine yourself to a / single thought that one day stands / still like a star in the world’s sky (“The Thinker as Poet,” 4)

    > In all the temples of the gods and in all sites of human habitation, this fire has its secure locale and, as this locale, gathers around it all that properly occurs [sich ereignet] and is bestowed. Through this fire, the hearth is the enduring ground and determinative middle – the site of all sites, as it were, the homestead pure and simple, toward which everything presences alongside and together with everything else and thus first is (Ister 105).

    > Heidegger would have us attend to the upsurge of the unhomely in this burning, that is, the illumination and brightness that permits the homely to appear. This emerging and arising grants the opening of the polis; it is the origin that does not cease springing forth, surpasses the ordinary, familiar, “homely” conception of beings. The hearth is a kind of event, an Ereignis, a happening that properly occurs [sich ereignet], as the middle, gathering everything around it and bestowing a home, a site to all beings.

    > it could also be that the Germans – granted that they learn to use freely what is their own and do not evade the conditions required for such learning – might, in what is foreign to them […] come to excel what is proper to the Greeks. If, that is, they have become more open, so that “what illuminates” (the heavens’ is “open to our open view” […] It could be that a “guest-house” and establishment might be founded and build for the gods, one that the Greek temples can no longer approach (Ister 124).

    If it is impossible simply to reproduce Greece, to build temples to welcome the return of the Greek gods, or to open new hearths in the homes, how might dwelling become possible for the Germans? How can the hearth restore the relation to the sky and the earth?

    > the dif-ference does not mediate after the fact by connecting world and things through a middle added on to them. Being the middle, it first determines world and things in their presence, i.e. in their being toward one another, whose unity carries out. (On the Way to Language 202)

    > In the sense in which Heidegger uses the word, Dichtung refers to a certain creative invention, a projective saying [entwerfende Sagen] that determines the forms of possible experience for a people, throwing it forward into the unhomely. Dichtung refers to something much more than poetry. To claim that language “is Dichtung in the essential sense” (“The Origin of the Work of Art” 61/199), is to link language to a saying [die Sage] or a showing [die Zeige] of what is possible for a people. It is even linked, Heidegger suggests, to saga and legends [die Sagen] (On the Way to Language 252/122). Language, as Dichtung, grants the co-belonging of gods, mortals, world and earth, the fourfold in which a people can make a habitation.

    II

    Modern humanist man is a man in a State. Such a man is not merely vulgar; he is religion’s true antagonist within the State of Israel itself […] It is obvious that Israel asserts itself in a different way. Like an empire on which the sun never sets, a religious history extends the size of its modest territory, even to the point where it absorbs a breath-taking past. But, contrary to national histories, this past, like an ancient civilization, places itself above nations, like a fixed star. And yet we are the living ladder that reaches up to the sky. (“Difficult Freedom” 260)

    > Heidegger, with the whole of Western history, takes the relation with the Other as enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth. Possession is pre-eminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine (Totality and Infinity 46).

    > For Heidegger, the Greeks build and thereby take possession of the earth, but the hearth remains cannot be so possessed. What is extraordinary about the Greeks for Heidegger is the way in which they maintain the unhomely at the center of all relations.[1] In this sense, the Greeks belong to the polis because they do not seek to determine the hearth. Likewise, it is this that allowed them to experience the polis in a sense radically different to the politics of today as it answers to the canonical meditations of Plato and Aristotle. But what is questionable about Heidegger’s exemplification of the Greeks, for Levinas, is the subordination he continues to maintain regarding the relation to the Other:

    > Heideggerian ontology, which subordinates the relationship with the Other to the relation with Being in general, remains under obedience to the anonymous, and leads inevitably to another power, to imperialist domination, to tyranny. (Totality and Infinity 47-48)

    Levinas does not dispute the fact that the polis provides a certain unity to the relations of the people who belong to it: it does indeed gather and bestow a unity upon the relation to the gods, to festivals, to sacrifice and battle, honor and glory, the relationship between master and slave. But it does not answer to the relation to the Other as Autrui; nor does it include the relation to the Levinasian God. The articulation of its unity is repressive; it constitutes an immanence or totality, closing itself off from the relation to which Levinas would attend. But might it be possible to answer this relation?

    > man is […] the irruption of God within Being, or the bursting out of Being towards God; man is the fracture in Being which produces the act of giving, with hands which are full, in place of fighting and pillaging. This is where the idea of being chosen comes from, an idea which can deteriorate into pride, but originally expresses the awareness of an appointment which cannot be called into question; an appointment which is the basis of ethics and which, through its indisputability, isolates the person in his responsibility. (“Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” 202)

    These dense sentences recapitulate the arguments of other texts, of the irruption into the order of being that receives, Levinas claims, its classic elaboration in Descartes’ account of the idea of the infinite.[2] Unlike Descartes, Levinas does not suppose the idea of the infinite to refer to a being so perfect that it must exist, but opens beyond the totality of being. It is to this he alludes a few pages later:

    > The worry is induced by man by God’s Infinity, which he can never contain, but which inspires him – inspiration being the original mode of worry, the inspiration of man by God constituting man’s humanity; and the “within” of this “disproportionate within the finite” only becomes possible through the “here I am” of the man welcoming his neighbor. Listening to the Muse dictating one’s songs is not the original form of inspiration; instead, it lies in obedience to the Most High by way of the ethical relationship with the Other. (“Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” 207)

    Why does Heidegger heed the poetic Muse rather than the word of God?

    III

    It is the dark disaster that brings the light. (Writing of the Disaster, 7)

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alistair Hamilton. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1973.

    Bernasconi, Robert. “Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Levinas’ Political Messianism.” Research in Phenomenology 19 (1988), 41-58.

    Bestegui, Miguel. Heidegger and the Political. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

    Blanchot, Maurice. Aminadab. Paris: Gallimard, 1942.

    _____. Death Sentence. Trans. Robert Lamberton. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Fiction and Literary Essays. Barrytown: Station Hill, 1999.

    _____. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

    _____. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988.

    _____. “Waiting.” Trans. Michael Holland. The Blanchot Reader. Ed. Michael Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

    _____. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

    Caputo, John D. Against Ethics. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993.

    de Waelhens, Alphonse. Le philosophie de Martin Heidegger. Louvain: Editions Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1942.

    Derrida, Jacques. Adieu. To Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

    _____. “Violence and Metaphysics.” Trans. Alan Bass. *Writing and Difference. *Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

    _____. “At this very Moment in this text, here I am.” Re-reading Levinas. Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1991.

    _____. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso Books, 1995.

    Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Basic Writings second edition. Trans. and edited by David F. Krell. London: Routledge, 1993.

    _____. “The Self Asserion of the German University.” Trans. William S. Lewis. The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader. Ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

    _____. “The Thinker as Poet.” Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

    _____. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York, Harper & Row, 1962.

    _____. Contributions to Philosophy. From Enowning. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Indiana University Press, 1999.

    _____. Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

    _____. Hölderlin’s Hymn The Ister. Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Trans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

    _____. Hölderlin’s Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” Ed. Suzanne Ziegler. Frankfurt am Main. Vittorio Klostermann, 1980.

    _____. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

    Inwood, Michael. A Heidegger Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

    Iyer, Lars. “The Birth of Philosophy in Poetry. Blanchot, Char, Heraclitus,” Janus Head, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Continental Philosophy, Literature, Phenomenological Psychology and the Arts, vol.4, no.2, pp. 358-383.

    _____. “The Sphinx’s Gaze. Art, Friendship and Philosophical in Blanchot and Levinas,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, fall 2001, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 189-206.

    _____. “Cave Paintings and Wall Writings. Blanchot’s Signature,” Angelaki, Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6.3, Dec 2001.

    Levinas, Emmanuel. “The Idea of the Infinite in us.” Entre Nous. On Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: Athelone, 1998.

    _____. “The Truth of Disclosure and the Truth of Testimony.” Trans. Iain MacDonald. Basic Philosophical Writings. Eds. Adrian Peperzaak et. al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,1996.

    _____. Difficult Freedom. Trans. Sean Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990.

    _____. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A Cohen. Pittsburgh: Penn: Duquesne University Press, 1985.

    _____. Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Penn: Duquesne University Press, 2001.

    _____. *God, Death and Time. *Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

    _____. Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dodrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.

    _____. Proper Names. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, Ca: Stanford, 1996.

    _____. “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition.” The Levinas Reader. Trans. and ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

    _____. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1969.

    _____. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987.

    Nancy, Jean-Luc. *The Inoperative Community. *Trans. Peter Connor *et. al. *Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

    Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Trans. Martin Turnell. London: Harvill Press, 1962.

    Peperzak. Beyond. The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1997.

    Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. C. J. Rowe. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1986.

    Various. Early Greek Philosophy. Edited and Trans. by Jonathan Barnes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987.

    Lars Iyer teaches philosophy in the Centre for Knowledge, Science and Society at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, and has published many articles on contemporary European philosophy. He has a special interest in the notion of community.

    © 2002 Lars Iyer. All rights reserved.
    Updated 08/31/02.

    1. Philolaus writes, “the first thing to have been connected, the one, in the middle of the sphere is called the hearth” (Early Greek Philosophy 218); Heidegger comments, “being is the hearth. For the essence of being for the Greeks is phusis – that illumination that emerges of its own accord and is mediated by nothing else, but is itself the middle. This middle is that which remains as commencement, that which gathers everything around it – that wherein all beings have their site and are at home as beings” (Ister 112-113). The hearth is the self-illumination of phusis, nature, the upsurge of a force that continues to gather the things around it, granting them a proper measure and place. ↩︎

    2. Descartes’ third Meditation is invoked many times in Levinas’s writings (see God, Death and Time 213-218, “The Idea of the Infinite in us”, passim). ↩︎

    3. The literature on Heidegger’s Nazism is massive. Relevant for the present essay is Bestigui’s Heidegger and the Political, particularly as it explores the function of the readings of Sophocles’s Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics and Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” reflecting on the relationship between the Greeks and Hölderlin. ↩︎

    4. As Levinas himself asserts, “It is the position of an armed and dominant State, one of the great military powers of the Mediterranean basin facing the unarmed Palestinian people whose very existence Israel refuses to recognise! But is that the true state of affairs? Is not Israel, in its very real strength, also one of the most fragile and vulnerable things in the world, posed in the midst of unopposed nations, who are rich in natural allies, and surrounded by their lands?” (“Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” 282) ↩︎

    5. Levinasian eschatology is not linked to any argument about Judaism in his philosophical works, not indeed any particular religion or dogmatics. Not the eschatology of the last judgement … but an interruption of the present, in his words, “the judgement of all the instants in time, when the living are judged” (Totality and Infinity 23). It is associated with “the judgement of God” and not the “virile judgement of history” (Totality and Infinity 243) and with the ethics that antedates, outlasts and judges any politics. All three of Derrida’s major essays on Levinas (“Violence and Metaphysics”, “At this very Moment in this work here I am” and Adieu) explore the notion of eschatology in Levinas. See also Bernasconi’s “Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Levinas’ Political Messianism”. ↩︎

    6. Interestingly, Levinas, in a manner analogous to Heidegger, links the il y a to the middle: “neither nothingness nor being, I sometimes use the expression: the excluded middle” (Ethics and Infinity 48). ↩︎

    7. In Time and the Other, Levinas points to Blanchot’s Aminadab (itself named after one of Levinas’s younger brothers who died in the camps) for an account of the relationship with the “I” and its own existence (see 56, 83). He also invokes Blanchot’s Death Sentence in Ethics and Infinity and identifies the il y a as the subject of The Writing of the Disaster: “In his last book, Blanchot called this ‘disaster,’ which signifies neither death nor an accident, but as a piece of being, from its reference to a star, from all cosmological existence, a dis-aster” (50). ↩︎

    8. On the importance of these basic words of Greek philosophy to contemporary thought, see Iyer’s “The Birth of Philosophy in Poetry. Blanchot, Char, Heraclitus”. ↩︎

    9. Hölderlin is evoked alongside Char and Van Gogh (The Space of Literature 224) in order to explain the obscurity that is bound up with the working of the work of art. A longer discussion of Hölderlin appears in The Work of Fire. ↩︎

    10. See The Space of Literature 224. Blanchot quotes Char, “shifting earth, horrible, exquisite”, Rilke, “earth, is this not what you want, to be reborn invisible in us?” and Van Gogh, “I am attached to the earth” (224). But these pages of The Space of Literature are close to Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, which, although not in print at the time of the time of the composition of this part of Blanchot’s text, would have been familiar to him from de Waelhens’s Le philosophie de Martin Heidegger. ↩︎

    11. This is why Levinas can write, “the literary space into which Blanchot […] leads us has nothing in common with the Heideggerian world that art renders inhabitable. Art, according to Blanchot, far from elucidating the world, exposes the desolate, lightless substratum underlying it, and restores to our sojourn its exotic essence – and, to the wonders of our architecture, their function of makeshift desert shelters” (Proper Names 137). ↩︎

    12. That is to say, harmonised in a manner perhaps parallel to harmonising relationship between the stars and the polis in Plato. ↩︎

    13. But as Levinas also notes, Blanchot “abstains from ethical preoccupations, at least in explicit form” (Proper Names 137). Towards the end of Totality and Infinity, Levinas invokes Blanchot’s writings in a curious remark: “We have thus the conviction of having broken with the philosophy of the Neuter: with the Heideggerian being of the existent [l’être de l’étant] whose impersonal neutrality the critical work of Blanchot has so much contributed to bring out” (332). Is it the case that, for Levinas, Blanchot merely prepared us for the thought of the Other, for the infinite? It does seem that, for Levinas, Blanchot would have exposed Heidegger – and, in so doing, the whole of Western culture — to a critique that Levinas would complete and reveal in its true significance by disclosing the infinitude that always and already invested the “impersonal fecundity” of being (Totality and Infinity 37-38). See, on this point, Iyer’s “The Sphinx’s Gaze”. ↩︎

    14. What differs in Blanchot and Heidegger is ultimately the determination of what Bataille might call the general economy of being. ↩︎

    15. See Bataille, Literature and Evil. Bataille, indeed, is the third author alongside Levinas and Heidegger Blanchot claims in The Writing of the Disaster as a thinker of the gift (see 108-111). The enigmatic pages that the names of the three authors who most influenced Blanchot are brought together demand close attention. For Blanchot, Bataille and Levinas share a notion of the gift “as the inexhaustible (the infinite) demand of the other and of others, a demand that calls for nothing less than impossible loss: the gift of interiority”; Heidegger also allows the questions “Who gives? What is given?” to resound without determining an answer (110). In all three thinkers, “these are questions which no formulation suits, and which resound in language without receiving any answer than language itself, the gift of language” (110). In Levinas, the gift is thought both in terms of the relation to the Other and as the il y a; in Heidegger, in the alleged generosity of the es gibt linked to the truth of being and in Bataille, at least in Literature and Evil, to evil. For Blanchot these stagings of donation converge in a certain determination of language in all three thinkers. But is it not, precisely, Blanchot who carries through in the most rigorous and intractable way this mediation on language? Unlike Levinas, he opens up the question of language in terms of the il y a, of existence in general, both in his novels and in his theoretical writings. Unlike Heidegger, he retreats from positing a homeostatis between world and earth such that a historical community could come into being. What, then, is the relation between Bataille and Blanchot? I cannot examine this question here; see Iyer’s “Born With the Dead.” Is the gift a name for the witnessing? Is witnessing in all the thinkers under discussion, albeit in differing ways, the gift of interiority? ↩︎

    16. Here, one might recall a passage from The Unavowable Community where Blanchot remembers the “people of Paris,” that is, those thousands of individuals who came together to remember those killed at the Charonne Metro Station as part of the movement against French colonialism in Algeria (33). “Inert, immobile, less a gathering than the always imminent dispersal of a presence momentarily occupying the whole space and nevertheless without a place (utopia), a kind of messianism announcing nothing but its autonomy and its worklessness (on the condition that it be left to itself, or else it will change immediately and become a network of forces ready to break loose): thus are mankind’s people whom it is permissible to consider as the bastardized imitation of God’s people (rather similar to what could have been the gathering of the children of Israel in view of the Exodus if they had gathered while at the same time forgetting to leave …” (33). No, the call in question is not linked with any particular people – but it can be linked nonetheless to a Jewish bearing witness of a certain kind. ↩︎

    17. On Blanchot’s notion of community, see his The Unavowable Community, part of which was written in response to an essay by Nancy later included in The Inoperative Community which itself responds to Blanchot’s response. The notion of community, Blanchot insists, cannot be translated as Volk, which is to say, into the language of “The Origin of the Work of Art” and, finally, “The Self Assertion of the German University”. ↩︎

    18. See, in this connection, “Waiting”, reprinted in The Blanchot Reader, originally published in a festschrift for Heidegger. ↩︎