Five: Art's Inhumanity: “Reality and Its Shadow”

The face-à-face describes a non-intersubjective and nonviolent relation between the other and the self guaranteed by the straightforwardness of discourse that takes place on this side of pure being, the impersonal and anonymous il y a. The subject liberates itself from the il y a, without totally breaking away from it, except when the other faces him.¹Close Given that the il y a plays a central role both in Levinas's thinking as well as in his determination of the nonethical nature of the work of art, I now turn to its role within the context of the works predating Totality and Infinity. This enables me to assess the full extent of Levinas's condemnation of art in “Reality and Its Shadow.”

The il y a is an “experience” whose elaboration is common to both Levinas and Blanchot. Consequently, it shares many of the same characteristics: the presence of the absence of beings, its nocturnal provenance, its dissolution of the subject in the night, its horror, the return of being at the heart of every negative movement, and the reality of irreality.²Close For Blanchot, the presence of absence is felt as an expulsion outside of the world, in which the distinction between inside and outside collapses and with it, the subject of that experience. Levinas describes this collapse in analogous terms:

There is not determined being, anything can count for anything else. In this ambiguity the menace of pure and simple presence, of the there is(il y a), takes form. Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one's shell. One is exposed. The whole is open upon us. Instead of serving as our means of access to being, nocturnal space delivers us over to being. (

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In De l'évasion and Existence and Existents Levinas analyzes the dimension underlying the constitution of the world. A different order with its corresponding array of forms exists on the hither side of cognition, and the work of art gives access to this order that Levinas calls “existence without a world.” The first analysis that Levinas devotes to the work of art takes place under the heading of “Exotism,” the first chapter of the section titled “Existence without a World.” It is the work of art and the realm of aesthetics that makes it possible to specify the contents of one of his crucial concepts, the il y a. However, as we will see, the work of art not only provides contents for a determination of the il y a, even if this concept is by definition what is deprived of any content, but allows for a shift in the nature of the analysis. Levinas's position regarding the realm of aesthetics attenuates the implications of this shift.

What kind of imagination is at play here? Is this the “disengaged,” “evasive,” “irresponsible,” or “possessed” imagination that, according to Levinas, characterizes the poet? Or the more classical philosophical imagination that reconciles reality and unreality and thus accomplishes a mastery of what is unreal? Does this imagination belong to the level of “passivity” that Levinas discovers in the aesthetic realm or rather to the activity of a sovereign consciousness? In the answer to these questions lies the key to assessing whether Levinas's analysis of the work of art is ethical, in the Levinasian sense of the word, and whether his claims may be valid for an ethically informed literary critique. It is important to remember at this point that the work of art is part of a series of “experiences,” such as fatigue and insomnia. This means that it is one of the figures of desubjectivization and possesses negative connotations, since it still refers to the impossibility of fully breaking away from the impersonal and anonymous being.

Imagination thus comes to supplement and to alter the scene of phenomenology, and the element where the power of imagination unfolds is that of the materiality of aesthetic sensation:

The movement of art consists in leaving the level of perception so as to reinstate sensation, in detaching the quality from the object of reference. Instead of arriving at the object, the intention gets lost in the sensation itself, and it is this wandering about in sensation, in aisthesis, that produces the aesthetic effect. Sensation is not the way that leads to an object but the obstacle that keeps one from it, but it is not of the subjective order either: it is not the material of perception. In art, sensation figures as a new element. Or better, it returns to the impersonality of elements. (

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Two points are worth stressing here. First, Levinas isolates an aesthetic materiality, the “in itself” of sensation that he locates at the margins of the world—neither inside nor outside—and uses the term alterity in order to refer to what happens in this “in-between” (entre-deux).⁶Close The exoticism of the work of art has to do with its disengagement from the world; it points to an outside without reference to an inside, and this lack of correlation receives the name of alterity.

The second point that needs to be stressed regarding the materiality of aesthetic sensation concerns the obscure dimension of the il y a or neutrality that Levinas ties to the fate of the work of art and that allows him to claim that the fate of the work of art is Fate. It is possible to cipher the crux of Levinas's argument in this apparently tautological statement since it captures the ineluctable destiny of art, its pagan spatio-temporal schema which, unlike Heidegger's, is not the condition of possibility of truth, of the strife of the world and earth and the foundation of Dasein's dwelling.⁹Close In spite of the alterity that the aesthetic realm offers, as well as the structural similarities between the presentation of the “in itself” in the face and in the work of art, the realm of aesthetics is severed from the sobriety and seriousness of ethics.

In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas proposes a distinction between rational forms of cognition and the aesthetic realm, where knowledge is not at stake.¹⁰Close In order to ground this distinction, Levinas criticizes Sartre's doctrine of committed art (art engage´) but also Heidegger's conception of the work of art as the unconcealment of truth.¹¹Close Sartre's philosophy plays a central role at that time in France, and Levinas's essay appeared in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes alongside a curious note stating, “Sartre's ideas about literature's engagement are only partially examined.”¹²Close

Be that as it may, it is evident that Levinas endorses several Sartrean theses in order to argue just the opposite, that art is in fact disengaged and evasive. For example, Levinas subscribes to Sartre's analysis of the image and the imaginary, as well as to the thesis regarding the contiguity of art and dreams. However, while for Sartre a recuperation of the imaginary's negative dimension is possible, the realm of the image is not at the service of consciousness's freedom for Levinas. Art is mute, it is not a language, and if left to itself cannot affect reality in a positive way. Criticism must come to its rescue; it has to speak in its name and reintegrate it to the human order, given that art's temporality and spatiality are inhuman.

In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas questions some of the most cherished ideas on modern aesthetics. He also develops two other theses: the originary character of sensation, which he calls “resemblance,” and the exoticism of the work of art. Before evaluating the nature of Levinas's indictment of art, an analysis of the concepts of image and resemblance is in order. “Reality” refers to the natural presupposition of critical philosophy, whose fundament and purpose revolve around the notion of cognitive truth, while “shadow” refers to an image already exiled from the real: the sensible or sensation. Based on Husserl's thetic neutralization, Eugen Fink first introduced the concept of shadow by showing that in the image there is an element of “unreality” which depends upon and is given simultaneously with positional reality (the latter becoming the medium of “unreality”). The distance existing between both regions belongs to the same constitutive intentional act whose objectivity is appearance and not truth.¹³Close

Although coinciding with Fink's schema, Levinas disputes phenomenology's conception of the image's transparency. He is more interested in the opacity or shadow than in the luminosity of the image. For this reason, he endows the image with an allegorical function and with the capacity to alter the being of the absent object. It is precisely this function that distinguishes the “manifestation” proper to the face from that of the work of art, even if caricature is a structural possibility of the former:

A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image. The original gives itself as though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in a being delayed behind being. The consciousness of the absence of the object which characterizes an image is not equivalent to a simple neutralization of the thesis, as Husserl would have it, but is equivalent to an alteration of the very being of the object, where its essential form appears as a garb that it abandons in withdrawing. (RS 779/

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¹⁴Close 7)

As we saw in the previous chapter, for Levinas the fundamental determination of existence is not the relation with being (neither an “in itself,” nor a “for itself”) but rather the “for-the-other” (pour-l'autre), of which the face is its basic instantiation. It is a question of preserving the trace of transcendence of which the human face bears witness, a trace that does not belong to the economy of the same, to being or truth (alêtheia). Therefore, what is at issue for Levinas is revelation and whether the work of art is up to the task of preserving the trace of the infinite.

Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it. The subject is part of its own representation. It is so not even despite itself, for in rhythm there is no longer a oneself, but rather a sort of passage from oneself to anonymity. (RS 775/

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To the exoticism and anonymous immersion of poetic rhythm, Levinas opposes the uninterrupted contact of prose, to which he attributes the immediate expression of the face. Rhythmic repetition's rhetorical effect is alienating; it produces an encompassing same in which a departure from the face occurs. The poem's discontinuous expression substitutes the immediate expression of the face in speech; it is a constant rupture and beginning. The artwork's expression (an expression of itself) puts a mask or fac¸ade before the opening of presence, the “in itself” of the author or of his circumstance before the expressive urgency of the other. Further, it delays and leads the other's presence astray, as if writing itself were unable to respond to the other in a face-to-face.¹⁷Close

It is true that Levinas's opposition, as well as his negative evaluation of rhythm, make sense in light of his definition of sensibility's opaque image and of the il y a's rumbling. These two determinations characterize the delay of the classical (pagan) artwork.¹⁸Close The poetic rhythm Levinas has in mind is that of rhetorical, formulaic poetry. However, he does not consider the possibility that beyond its uniform resonance, rhythm may be both intermittent and discontinuous. In this essay at least, Levinas refers to a concept of rhythm that belongs to a tradition for which perception and the restricted phenomenon of poetic rhythm are the starting points of a much broader investigation. This is a tradition in which the association of rhythm and movement is de rigueur and thus repeats Plato's inaugural assimilation in Laws.

By correcting this Platonic assimilation, Emile Benveniste showed that rhythm should not be confused with periodicity, regularity and repetition, but that it is rather a form in time, which makes the separation of order and movement impossible.¹⁹Close Benveniste's reassessment paved the way for a series of approaches that go beyond the framework of a restricted poetic understanding of rhythm and beyond the empiricist attachments at play in more semiotic theories of the sign.

For Meschonic, for example, rhythm becomes force and energy, a principle of disruption of the linguistic sign, signifyingness, the organization of signification in discourse.²⁰Close While for Court, rhythm refers to the cobelonging of corporeality and temporalization: “l‘élan, c'est le bond en avant, la dimension de l'avenir, le projet.”²¹Close The ictus, the moment when the thesis becomes the starting point of a new arsis, of a new leap forward, becomes something other than a dead time (temps mort); it is a contact, a relation (liaison), or “le principe ordinateur du temps [qui] engendre l'ordre du temps, [qui] produit le temps.”²²Close In the interval of the ictus both a caesura and an articulation occur, and the experience of time itself unfolds. Not unlike the drives that, according to psychoanalysis, animate psychic life, this experience of time is founded on the fundamental rhythmic kernel of tension and relaxation, awaiting and remembrance.

Although the more rigid opposition between speech and writing that underwrites Levinas's conception of rhythm suggests solidarity with a metaphysics of presence, it does not sufficiently explain why Levinas brackets some of the elements that would suggest a more dynamic conception of rhythm and implements them at a different register. The opposition between speech and writing, however, becomes harder to sustain in light of the ethical performative writing that Levinas claims to have produced in Otherwise than Being.²³Close

One has to wait until Otherwise than Being to see this schema of rhythm at play not only at the level of its own textual mechanism (exasperation, style “en vrille”), but also at the level of the ethical tropes par excellence: substitution, psychosis, breathing. In other words, rhythm is no longer an ontological trope, but becomes an ethical one. In “La Transcendance des mots” (1949), however, there are some indications that will help us think through a different relation between the voice of the other and the space of writing. But before engaging in a reading of this essay, we will focus on the image.²⁴Close

SARTRE's WAY OUT OF FASCINATION. It is time to fully assess Levinas's approach to the image by situating his analysis within the context of contemporary phenomenological analyses of the imaginary, the most influential of which, in the French context, is Jean-Paul Sartre's L'Imaginaire (1940).²⁵Close Basing his analysis on Husserl's formulations of the quasi-reality of the imaginary, Sartre emphasizes the negative character of imagination when compared to perception. The image refers back to consciousness's “fonction irréalisante” :

The characteristic of the intentional object of the imaginative consciousness is that the object is not present and is posited as such, or that it does not exist and is posited as not existing, or that it is not posited at all…. However lively, appealing or strong the image is, it presents its object as not being. (I 25–26/

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The imaginary object is the shadow of an object that is also endowed with a shadow of space and of time, and consciousness can only enter this world by becoming unreal itself. As the shadow of reality, the imaginary seems to imply a correlative shadow of consciousness. However, Sartre does not grant a positive value to this modality of consciousness. This situation becomes clear when, after analyzing a series of disquieting features of the imaginary world, Sartre dismisses them by appealing to the fundamental spontaneity of consciousness in general and of the imagining consciousness in particular. The integrity of consciousness is systematically opposed to the void evoked by the image.

Sartre's main concern is what features to confer on a consciousness endowed with imagination and the ability to produce images. This ability that goes beyond reality is the condition of possibility of a free consciousness. And, since this unreal outside-the-world is the product of a free consciousness that remains in the world, the negative dimension of the imagination quickly reverses into a positive one. The apparent passivity of consciousness when facing the image yields to the freedom and activity of the imagining consciousness, whose goal is to master both the represented object and the imaginary world to which it accedes through images.

LEVINAS: IMAGE AND IDOLATRY. Levinas's image shares many of Sartre's characteristics: its negative character, its dimension of absence, its closed familiarity with shadow and resemblance, its fundamental ambiguity, and captivating force. However, while Sartre bridges the gap between the imaginary and the real and preserves the unity of consciousness, Levinas stresses a hiatus in the very structure of being. Unlike Sartre, in Levinas the image excludes the concept and its effective grasp of the object. Contesting many of the received ideas of modern aesthetics (art as revelation, creation, disinterest and freedom), Levinas claims that the proper dimension of art is obscurity or non-truth and that the production of images entails a form of magic. The artist is a possessed individual whose irresponsibility, disengagement, and evasion are dangerously contagious.

Levinas's way of understanding the relationship between image and resemblance is not Platonic in principle since no degree of essence is involved in the distinction between image and copy (resemblance). However, since Levinas's interpretation of the image issues from the biblical condemnation of representation, it enters into a resilient and lasting alliance with the Platonic critique of the degraded nature of the image as copy and simulacrum. His view of the image as erasure of the infinite thus preserves some Platonic features. Levinas's indictment of art, even if its language is that of a “philosophy of art,” is situated in the space of revelation: “la proscription des images est véritablement le suprême commandement du monothéisme, d'une doctrine qui surmonte le destin—cette creation et cette révélationàrebours” (RO 776), that is, from the perspective of the biblical prohibition concerning the representation of images (Ex 20:4; Dt 5:7) and whose most important antecedents in the Jewish anti-iconic tradition are Maimonides and Rosenzweig.²⁷Close

The Bible denounces sculptures and images as instigators of idolatrous practices: “their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, nostrils, but cannot smell,” the psalmist sings (Ps 115:4–6). However, what seems to be the target of the biblical text is a certain type of image: one whose configuration takes the form of a self-subsistent, closed presence in itself; a complete image in itself open to nothing, unreceptive, unresponsive, deaf and mute: “dumb.” The prophets (Ez 7:22; Mi 1:7; Na 1:14) teach that when coming across an idol one must turn the face (panim) the other way, since the God who speaks to the Hebrew people at Sinai should not be confused with an image or sculpture of human proportions. This confusion entails the risk of losing the meaning of their true vocation: to stand fast in facing the invisible, to listen and respond to it. What is at stake in this condemnation is not the image in itself, so much as the look that one brings to it.

The idol (pésel) is a man-made God and not the representation of a God; its inauthenticity consists in its being fashioned by men. Moreover, the idol is an image (témouna) that posits its value as issuing from itself and not from the object that it represents; it is an image that is itself a divine presence (which explains why it is usually made of lasting and precious materials). In the Bible the idol is, for the most part, a carved form (a pillar, a stele, a burning bush), a category of man-made objects whose names cover a very broad semantic field; all of which have been translated into Greek as eidolon, without necessarily belonging exclusively to the field of vision or visibility.²⁸Close Although Levinas takes as strict an attitude against images as the biblical prophets, the interpretations of the Jewish law (Halakha) and the discussions among the sages tend to indicate that the meaning of the prohibition falls upon the sculpting or carving of the human face, since there is a risk of forgetting the invisible source animating the human face. The idol's danger consists in misleading men to believe that they can approach the invisible through the sensible.²⁹Close

Issuing from an anti-iconic tradition best represented by Maimonides and Rosenzweig, Levinas's interpretation of the image as idol stresses its pernicious effects: its saturation of the visible, its hiding and suppressing of the visible and, most importantly, of what withdraws from it: that whose occurrence belongs neither to the realm of entities nor being. The idol's opacity is pernicious because it arrests the light's descent.³⁰Close The god of paganism can be conceived as adequate to the idea because it bestows full visibility without shadow.

The idol thus refers to a mute immanence that leads to an irreversible ontological solitude. The proximity of the idol and the image and the degrading of the image into an idol bear witness to the mute immanence that the beautiful is, to the danger it entails. When the rhythmic incantation of the beautiful image or icon isolates us in lonely satisfaction, its opacity or shadow can pass for the light of revelation. At issue is the mute, dispossessing satisfaction that blocks our disposition for the coming of an “idea of God” beyond the visible, a God that from an unrepresentable, invisible, and immemorial past, fills our desire without ever satisfying it. We are compelled to envisage responsibility in the face (visage) of the other, to renounce the mute satisfaction of the beautiful and finally to speak. Speaking here entails saying “me voici” to the concrete and singular human being, while the idol-image erases the withdrawal from which responsibility proceeds.

The plasticity of the image, the statuesque perfection of its rhythm in the idol leads to a pernicious time: a time of dispossession of the self— “the meanwhile” (entre-temps). Image, idol and “the meanwhile” are systematically tied to the pagan destiny of art:

The fact that humanity could have provided itself with art reveals in time the uncertainty of time's continuation and something like a death doubling the impulse of life. The petrification of the instant in the heart of duration—Niobe's punishment—the insecurity of a being which has a presentiment of fate, is the great obsession of the artist's world, the pagan world…. Here we leave the limited problem of art. This presentiment of fate in death subsists, as paganism subsists. (RS 786/

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In the artwork, we face the fate of paganism, as well as its pernicious survival. Levinas's indictment of art is fundamentally shaped in terms of Rosenzweig's critique of paganism.³¹Close This may also explain why he subsumes the concepts of image and rhythm under Lévy-Bruhl's evolutionist category of participation, a type of belief-structure proper to primitive societies.³²Close Levinas's is a religious indictment of art even if he claims that with this type of condemnation “we leave the limited problem of art.” Indeed we do leave it, because what is really at play here is a condemnation of the “ontological use” of art and, therefore, the essay is much more than a religious argument. The “meanwhile” of the work of art is the “irreversible time” of a present in which “there lies the tragedy of the irremovability of a past that cannot be erased and that condemns any initiative to being just a continuation” (RS 65). This is the conception of “reality and destiny” that underlies the “philosophy of Hitlerism,” as well as Heidegger's ontology.

In chapter 3 we saw that for Heidegger the sense of the everyday, the meaning of a pair of shoes, issues from the work of art; the essence of the thing is made visible by the work of art in an eminent way as a common presence with the earth. The call of the earth, of which the painting is a silent echo, restores the shoes to the earth's belonging and shelters them in the peasant woman's world.³³Close The essence of the thing thus comes from further away, and it is the Greek temple that gives sense to the earth as soil on which the peasant woman's world rests. Heidegger defines the temple as the setting forth of a human world in its strife with the earth. The temple is envisioned as human installation which, in letting the thing come into the world, also brings the earth to its own; with the temple Heidegger introduces the reciprocal play of the earth and world. The aspect of the thing that the work of art brings into play originates beyond its usage, in a signification that subtracts itself from the essence of technology understood as the dominant mode of unconcealment: the appropriation of the earth, dwelling or poîesis.

If in the case of criticism the work cannot enter into a dialogue (the idol turns its face against language, it is a radical indifference to language, a pure opacity), it can nevertheless be reintegrated to the human order by the language of “philosophical criticism.” This type of criticism gives life to the work of art. Does this rendering of mythos into lógos not entail a form of theoretical and cognitive violence? Can the simple reference to “the perspective of the relation with the other” be enough to justify a distinction between mere criticism and a philosophical (ethical?) exegesis of the work of art?

The nonimplementation of a philosophical approach to art in “Reality and Its Shadow” does not lie in the impossibility of introducing “the perspective of the relation with the other.” Indeed, all the major elements of this “perspective” could have been explicitly introduced in the argument, since they were either outlined or developed in Existence and Existents and in Time and the Other, before their more systematic elaboration in Totality and Infinity. However, what is truly missing in the argument is an understanding of language that would have allowed some potentialities of the work of art to be conceived in their own right. It is not by chance that in Otherwise than Being Levinas nuances his position when he claims that:

To fail to recognize the said properly so-called (le Dit proprement dit) (relative as it may be) in the predicative propositions which every artwork—plastic, sonorous or poetic—awakens and makes resound in the form of exegesis is to show oneself to be as profoundly deaf as in the deafness of hearing only nouns in language. (AE 71/

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In the realm of art the distinction between the said and saying becomes relevant, on the one hand, only when Levinas manages to find a place for being in the general economy of the “otherwise than being,” and on the other, when his critique of Heidegger is attenuated and the work of art ceases to be the privileged terrain on which to wage war against “fundamental ontology.”³⁴Close Only at that moment does the work of art become not only a pure said, able to speak of and against the violence of the order of discourse, but perhaps something else. We know by now that the statuesque (plastic) temporality of “the meanwhile” ought to be transformed into discourse. It needs to be put at the service of the order of time in the same way that in Sartre the anomalies of imagination serve the autonomous self. At this stage, it may be risky to assimilate this transformation with what Levinas calls the unsaying of the said in Otherwise than Being.

Levinas must still bridge the distance between a religious indictment of the work of art in “Reality and Its Shadow” and the ethical exegesis of the given-word (parole donnée) he develops in Otherwise than Being. “Reality and Its Shadow” is a remarkable multilayered essay. If read alongside “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” one finds at one level a dismantling of the myth of art and of the cobelonging of myth and art.

At another level of “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas attempts to reintegrate the work of art into the human realm and thus preserve traces of a classic moral conception of art. The work of art continues to be, if not a major obstacle, at least something that keeps disrupting the space of ethics. One can find a different approach to writing and, more implicitly, to rhythm in “La Transcendance des mots,” an essay Levinas wrote in 1949 on Michel Leiris's Biffures. In this essay it is possible to detect some indications of how an ethical writing might look, of how the “otherwise than being,” in which transcendence indicates itself and, at the same time, hides and shelters itself from manifestation, can signify without congealing into an image or idol. This writing of the other must unfold as a clandestine intrigue, able to render the manner in which the “otherwise” than being leaves its traces.

The critical need is thus a response to the completeness of the work of art, to its immobilization of time, to the violent immanent holding of its plastic rhythmic schema and erasure of the absolute, even if Levinas claims that Leiris's text belongs to a regime of incompleteness (a post-modern and even a post-beautiful regime). By “peace of the beautiful” we by now know that Levinas means a violent indifference to the other. The aesthetic delectation of the work of art leads us to an “en dec¸a” without hope of redemption, a world already closed and finished in itself.

As in Totality and Infinity, the spoken word (parole proferée) plays the role of a transcendent origination of meaning; it is the real presence of the other that matters, a situation

The work does not speak, it is mute, its beauty guards this silence; no address, no message stems from it. One cannot retrieve a fable of the origins, a “poem before the poem,” as in Heidegger, nor hear the grounding attunement as mourning that issues from the departure of the ancient gods and the awaiting the coming of the new gods. By being restricted to the il y a, the absence of a world, the work plunges us into horror, trapping us in an existence without a world.

As I have shown, the Levinasian critique of the image's hold points to a ghostly temporality, a mute and inhuman dimension, “the meanwhile,” which strictly speaking belongs neither to presence nor to absence. Nevertheless, Levinas conceives this negative dimension in terms of the idol, a figure which suggests a form of full-fledged presence, albeit a mute one.

The ghostly temporality of the “meanwhile,” the fact that the “meanwhile” is, becomes the statuesque glow of the idol in which no ambiguity survives. The “meanwhile” belongs to il y a's “elementary materiality” that must be surpassed by the approach of the other human being whose face bears the trace of transcendence.

One of the names of this experience of the night is, of course, the il y a. While Levinas assimilates the il y a to the category of being, Blanchot approaches its negative dimension as what is on the hither side of being and ontology: neither being nor nonbeing. If for Levinas the ethical reduction of being's neutrality and anonymity energizes itself from a writing that bears witness to the trace of the other, writing in Blanchot marks a “step not beyond” (pas au-delà). It is a perpetual errancy faced with an inhospitable other that one must welcome in the absence of any dwelling place and independently of its inhuman character. Levinas's other (autrui) is a human other whose face bears witness to the trace of transcendence; it is the immanent site of transcendence. But Blanchot's other is prehuman and conceived in terms of the structure of difference, although the human dimension does appear years later in The Infinite Conversation.³⁹Close

We are not far here from the imagination's “fonction irréalisante” (Sartre) and from the halting of the instant that Levinas isolates in classical art, but that he interprets as the plasticity of art in general. However, in Sartre the image's “fonction irréalisante” is relative; the image accomplishes the object's negation but preserves the world as its background. Against Sartre and more in line with Levinas, Blanchot relates the space of the image's negation with an “elementary materiality” that he calls the neuter (neutre). It is important here to emphasize the commonality between Levinas's il y a and Blanchot's neuter, as well as to stress that it is a commonality on which they also part ways. One should not forget that in Levinas the il y a's “elementary materiality” must be surmounted, and that this can only occur by the approach of the other. This is not the case with Blanchot, who aims to preserve the neuter. However, since the terms neuter and neutrality are the site of friendly although contentious exchanges between them, we must pay some heed to how Blanchot determines this crucial “concept.”