edith wyschogrod
9 Language and alterity in the
thought of Levinas
A workof literary translation, says Walter Benjamin, exists as though
stationed outside of a forest it cannot enter and as calling into ‘the
wooded ridge’ in order to receive an echo that gives backin its own
language that which reverberates in the alien one.
1
The workof
Levinas is such an invocation, an effort at translating incommen-
surables, a troping of that which cannot be troped, an unassimil-
able excess that resists apprehension in propositional discourse. This
‘more’ that remains beyond spoken or written language is the other-
ness of the other person, an otherness that cannot be configured as a
content of consciousness but that issues an imperative that obliges
me to assume responsibility for the other.
Like the otherness of another human being, the more of the infinite
overflows the idea that attempts to contain it, its superabundance
both traduced and expressed in acts of translation into the language
of philosophy. The other human being in the sanctity of her or his
manifestation as a human face and the infinite as an ideatum whose
excessiveness goes beyond any idea we can have of it can only be
the objects of an insatiable desire. Any translation (always already
merely putative) demands a contraction of this content so that on
the one hand it is communicated and on
the other retains its ethical
authority, the exteriority from which it derives. In order for there to
be translation, there must be a pre-existent store of concepts, a spec-
ulative language without which translation could not come about,
yet one that is disrupted by the more, the exorbitance, of an alterity
that is beyond it.

hubris of philosophical rationality. The mandate of absolute alterity
condensed for him in the synecdoche ‘Hebrew’ calls into question
the self-satisfaction of philosophy that penetrates even philosophy’s
moments of incertitude. Despite his critical appraisal of philosophy
as the conceptual language of ontology and of Being’s potential for
violence, Levinas never reneges on his allegiance to the rationality
of Western thought without which the ethical could not be brought
within human purview. The essential taskof language is not to ex-
press what cannot be expressed,
the excess that lies beyond being.
Rather thought that betrays as it exposes this excess can be regarded
as envisaging a certain difference, as a thinking of the ligature be-
tween philosophy and that which transcends it, that separates as it
unites them.
In what follows, I shall discuss the multiplicity of meanings at-
tributed to language in Levinas’s thought. I shall turn first to the
ways in which sensibility, the infra-cognitive world of sensation
and enjoyment, and totality, the historical whole, cultural, politi-
cal and economic as constituted by thought, may be disrupted. In
this context, I focus upon the face of the other who is beyond the
190 the cambridge companion to levinas
totality, the other who is seen as elevated and without history and
who insinuates her/himself into my world as my interlocutor. Al-
ways already language, the face of the other intrudes into the totality
that has been historically constituted and issues a call to responsi-
bility. Understood in Hegelian terms, ‘the face breaks the system’
(
en
34).
Next, I shall consider language as gift, as a bestowal of significa-

totality designates a whole, such that ‘a multiplicity of objects ...
or in a homogeneous continuum, a multiplicity of points or of ele-
ments [that] form a unity, or come without remainder under a sole
act of thought’ (
at
39).
5
Levinas points to the danger of a thought
so encompassing that the intellectual act that intends the whole
loses touch with the world in its concreteness and is left with the
pure form of the thinkable thus returning to the Kantian problem of
Language and alterity 191
the transcendental unity of apperception (
at
41). Hegel, he argues,
understands this dichotomization and tries to breach the real and
the rational by organizing the parts heuristically into a system, a
system of history. ‘The true function of totalizing thought does not
consist in looking at being, but in determining it by organizing it’
(
at
47).
6
For Levinas, such organization or totalization is an expres-
sion of freedom, one that is intrinsically time tied, so that
total-
ity’s historical dimension is not merely incidental but integral to it:
history is totalization itself (
at
47).

which self and other are absolutely asymmetrical. Levinas contends
that ‘the presentation of the face is not true, for the true refers to
the non-true, its eternal contemporary ...The presentation of being
in the face does not leave any logical place for its contradictory’
(
ti
201).
7
In sum, the depiction of alterity seems to thematize the
other, but language is always already an address to and from the other
who cannot be contained within a common genus as an essence of
192 the cambridge companion to levinas
human being. Discourse is the experience of absolute exteriority, an
otherness that is foreign, ‘a traumatism of astonishment’ (
ti
73).
alterity and the universal
Could it not be argued that even if the other commands me in a rela-
tion to which I alone can respond that the other finds her- or himself
in a comparable situation so that each one becomes a self in so far as
she/he is solicited by another? In that case, each other is like every
other other and ethics is in fact grounded in the universal.
8
Otherness
in the absence of individual specificity would then become a vacuous
concept, an otherness common to all or as one critic would have it:
‘To respect the other in his non-objective subjectivity ...means only
to respect first the general community which is bound together by [a]
generalized otherness’, that Levinas, however, means to surmount.
9

heterology.
12
At the same time, if the homonyms are read tautologously, the
sentence can be glossed as a swallowing up of the other, an interpre-
tation that could be seen as an entering wedge into a Kierkegaardian
reading. On this view, Derrida claims, the other does not disappear
but introduces into a hetero-tautological dimension, the altogether
other who is God. To be sure, Kierkegaard attributes homogeneity
to human others – the ethical is the universal – whereas God is the
altogether other. But in the hope of rescuing human singularity by
seeing every human other as other than every other other, Levinas
cannot, as he would wish, distinguish between human others and the
infinite other. Derrida concludes that no line could then be drawn
between the ethical and the religious.
13
This conclusion is borne out
by Levinas’s remark: ‘If the word religion is ...to indicate that the re-
lation between men, irreducible to understanding ...in human faces
joins the infinite – I accept that ethical resonance of the word with
all its Kantian reverberations’ (
en
8).
the gift of discourse
The meaning of gift made thematic in French thought from Marcel
Mauss to Georges Bataille is seen by Derrida as a key motif
that wends its way through Levinas’s understanding of alterity. For
Levinas death is the gift that can be given to the other. In his cri-
tique of Heidegger’s account of mortality, Levinas faults Heidegger
for seeing death as one’s ownmost possibility and for the additional
claim that the call of responsibility is first heard in the Jemeinigkeit

(
ti
176).
16
Bought, sold and interpreted by others, works no longer
express the I of my interiority. What is true for me holds also for the
works of others.
Workderives from a self that lives in a home, departs from and
returns to it. It is as habitation, as home, that a space is opened that
enables one to represent things and from which the face
of another
may be encountered, another who calls the self that has emerged
as a separated being into question and who ‘paralyzes possession’.
By disengaging the self from objects, language contests relations of
possession, the realm of economy understood in terms of money,
ownership and exchange. ‘The calling in question of the I, coexten-
sive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language’
(
ti
171), Levinas avers.
Far from reflecting the fall of a primordial speech, language as ac-
tual discourse is not the regrettable traducing of alterity, a violation
of transcendence, but a gift, an offering of that which is thematized
to the other. ‘To thematize is to offer the world to the other in speech’
(
ti
209), to manifest beings through representation and concept,
to say what they are. Knowledge is the correlation between in-
tending acts of consciousness, a consciousness that posits itself as
self-identity, and the objects intended. In its relation with what is