Of People and Persons

After more than thirty years as a physician in general medicine, geriatrics, and hospice and palliative medicine, I find myself retired from clinical work and dedicating increasing amounts of time to understanding more deeply what was taking place in the care of patients, especially those living with serious illness and approaching the end of life.

Over those years, I was fortunate to work with medical residents and interdisciplinary teams of nurses, social workers, psychologists, chaplains, and other clinicians. In those settings, I sometimes drew upon the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas as resources for thinking about illness, vulnerability, care, and responsibility. While our team always knew the stakes were high, my own appreciation for those stakes has deepened with the distance afforded by retirement.

Medicine, however, is not uniquely situated to address the question of personhood. The question belongs no more to medicine than to philosophy, literature, religion, or ordinary life. Yet years spent caring for people confronting serious illness, decline, and death made certain features of human experience difficult to overlook.

At first, I assumed these features belonged primarily to the circumstances themselves—to the gravity of illness, the proximity of death, or the ethical complexity of clinical care. With time, however, I began to suspect that something else was being disclosed. What appeared with particular clarity in the clinic seemed also to appear elsewhere: in ordinary conversations, fleeting encounters, family relationships, and moments that initially seemed too minor to merit much attention.

The bedside, I eventually came to think, did not reveal a special category of experience. It revealed something already present throughout ordinary life. This discussion grows out of that realization. It follows a line of experience that begins in ordinary life and asks what it may reveal about the significance of our encounters with others. Rather than offering a "theory" of personhood in the usual sense, I shall stay close to the experience of the other person itself and see what becomes visible there. What emerges will not be a definition so much as a way of seeing—one that begins, as many such reflections do, with something small and easily overlooked.

 

I. The Moment That Lingers

Late in the day, small moments tend to return.

Not the dramatic ones—the meetings that ran long or the conversations that went well—but the unfinished ones. A message left unanswered. A look held a second too long. A brief encounter that seemed, at the time, too minor to register and yet refuses, hours later, to disappear.

Nothing decisive happened. We broke no rules. If asked, we could explain ourselves easily enough. We were tired, we were distracted, we had somewhere to be. All of that is true. And yet the moment lingers.

We encounter this kind of residue often, though we rarely dwell on it. It shows up in passing interactions—with strangers, colleagues, family members, even those we barely notice until something in their presence arrests us. The feeling is not dramatic. It does not announce itself as guilt or obligation. It is quieter than that, and harder to name: a sense that something was asked of us before we had decided what, if anything, we were prepared to give.

Consider a familiar scene. A cashier says something as she hands back a receipt. We smile automatically and nod, already thinking about the next item on the day’s agenda. The exchange lasts only a few seconds. Nothing seems unusual about it. Hours later, however, the moment returns. Not because we believe we did anything wrong, but because we realize we never quite registered the person who was there. The encounter feels unfinished, though it is difficult to say why. What was it exactly she said, and was it meant for me in particular, and did she expect a response?

How about that conversation with a colleague, perhaps one nearing retirement. In the middle of an otherwise ordinary exchange, she pauses for a moment, searching for a word. We help them find it and continue talking. Only later does her hesitation return to us. What lingers is not the missing word itself but something glimpsed in that brief interruption—something about vulnerability, finitude, or simply the reality of another life unfolding alongside our own, one perhaps in which a lacuna in speech reflects a lacuna of mind.

The language we usually reach for in such moments tends to fall into two camps: explanation and obligation. We explain ourselves in terms of circumstances—what was possible, what was reasonable, what could be expected. Or we shift, just as quickly, into the language of obligation—what we should have done, what was owed, what would have been right. Both registers seem necessary. Neither one alone seems sufficient.

To say “I couldn’t” is often accurate, but it does not quite settle the matter. To say “I should have” introduces a different kind of discomfort, as if the demand exceeds anything we could realistically sustain. Between explanation and obligation, something remains unsettled.

This unsettled space is not confined to private life. It surfaces in public as well—in the way we respond to need, to vulnerability, to strangers whose lives intersect with ours briefly but decisively. We build systems to manage these encounters—rules, institutions, procedures designed to distribute responsibility fairly. And yet even when those systems function as intended, something can slip through them: a sense that the person in front of us mattered in a way no system could fully account.

We might or might not call this a matter of “personhood.” The problematic term belongs to legal debates, medical ethics, and political arguments. It appears when questions of rights or recognition become urgent enough to demand definition. But before it becomes a concept, personhood is something we experience—something that presses on us in moments that resist clean explanation.

Let’s begin our consideration from those moments, not to resolve them, but to understand why they fall upon us the way they do.

Why does explanation fail to settle them?
Why does obligation feel both undeniable and excessive?
And what, if anything, do these small, persistent encounters reveal about what it means to be a person among others?

II. The World That Already Matters

If those lingering moments are difficult to explain, it is not because they are obscure or extraordinary. It is because they arise out of something so constant we rarely notice it at all: the fact that the world already matters to us.

From the moment we wake, we are oriented. The room is not a neutral space but a place to move through. The phone is not an object but something to check. The day ahead is not an abstraction but a series of concerns already pressing—meetings, errands, conversations anticipated or avoided. Even before we begin to think about what to do, things are already at stake.

We often imagine that meaning is something we add to the world through reflection. First there is a neutral reality, and then we interpret it. But ordinary experience suggests something different. We do not wake into a collection of objects awaiting significance. We wake into concerns: The coffee is already too cold. The appointment is already approaching. The text message is already waiting for a reply. The book on the desk is already something we have been meaning to finish. Before reflection begins, the world is already organized around what matters.

This basic condition of being involved in a meaningful world was described, with unusual precision, by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In perhaps his most impactful work, Being and Time, Heidegger argued that we do not first encounter a collection of neutral objects and then assign them significance. Significance comes first. We find ourselves in a world where things already matter—where they show up as useful, urgent, frustrating, or irrelevant depending on the situation. This is one of Heidegger’s most enduring insights. Meaning is not primarily something we produce. It is the medium within which we already live.

A door is something to open. A delay is something that disrupts. A message is something that calls for a reply. Even indifference depends on this background of significance; it is a way of pushing something aside that already presses in.

Heidegger gave this condition a simple, yet easily misunderstood name: care. By “care,” he did not mean compassion or concern in the ordinary sense. He meant the structure of our involvement—the way our lives are always oriented toward something, even when we are tired, distracted, or withdrawn. To exist, on this view, is to be caught up in a field of meaning that we neither created nor can fully escape.

This snippet of Heidegger’s ontology helps explain why the small moments described earlier have any weight at all. They are not isolated events. They occur within a web of ongoing concerns—schedules, relationships, expectations—that give them their shape. The unanswered message matters because communication already matters. The passing encounter matters because we are already attuned to the presence of others, even when we do not consciously register it.

It also explains why explanation comes so naturally to us. When something lingers, we reach for the context that made it what it was. We reconstruct the situation: what we knew, what we didn’t know, what we could reasonably have done. These explanations are not evasions. They are attempts to situate the moment within the larger pattern of a life that is always already underway.

We find a kind of relief in all this. We are not isolated agents facing each situation from scratch. We are participants in a world that gives us bearings, even when those bearings are unstable. The pressure we feel in moments of uncertainty is not evidence of failure; it is a sign that something matters within a network of concerns we cannot simply step outside of.

Heidegger extended this insight to our relations with others. We are never alone in the world we inhabit; we are always already with others. Even when we are physically by ourselves, the structures of our lives—language, norms, expectations—are shared. We speak in words we did not invent. We follow conventions and patterns we did not design. Much of what we do each day unfolds without deliberate decision, guided by an implicit sense of what one does in situations like this.

This shared dimension of life is often comforting. It allows us to move through the world without having to deliberate at every step. But it can also flatten experience. We fall into routines. We respond as expected. We rely on scripts that carry us forward without requiring much reflection.

And in most cases, this is enough.

We answer messages when we can. We help when it is reasonable. We move on when something does not clearly concern us. Our actions make sense within the situations we inhabit, and for the most part, that sense is sufficient.

But not always.

There are moments—like the ones that linger—when this background of meaning does not quite hold. The situation still makes sense. We can still explain what happened. And yet something in the moment seems to exceed the explanation, as if the very framework that allows us to understand what we did cannot fully account for why it still troubles us.

Heidegger’s account brings us to the edge of that difficulty. It shows us why the world matters, why situations press on us, why explanation is both necessary and, in most cases, adequate. What that account does not yet show is why, at times, adequacy is not enough. Questions remain.

Heidegger’s thinking helps us understand why situations matter. It explains why we feel pressure, why our decisions have weight, and why we naturally seek explanations when something continues to trouble us. We are situated beings, and our actions become intelligible through the situations in which they occur. But if Heidegger’s account is sufficient, why do certain moments resist resolution even after we have understood them?

Suppose we reconstruct the situation completely. We were exhausted. We were preoccupied. We lacked the information we would have needed. Nothing more could reasonably have been expected. Sometimes these explanations genuinely settle the matter. Sometimes they do not.

The persistence of the moment cannot be explained simply by incomplete understanding. We understand perfectly well what happened. What remains unsettled is something else. It is as though the situation has been accounted for while the person has not.

The world still makes sense. The explanation remains true. Yet another dimension of the encounter continues to press upon us, one that seems strangely resistant to the very framework that otherwise illuminates so much of our experience.

It is here that another phenomenological possibility begins to emerge.

 

IV. The Other Who Interrupts

There is a point at which description gives way to something else—not because it fails, but because what it encounters no longer presents itself simply as something to be understood.

A woman stands at a bus stop, speaking quietly into her phone. Her tone is controlled, but strained. As we pass, we catch a fragment of the conversation—enough to register distress, not enough to grasp the details. We keep walking. There is nothing to do, no clear role to play. And yet, for a moment, her presence presses on us, as if we had been addressed without being spoken to.

The experience is peculiar because nothing has actually been requested of us. The woman does not ask for help. She may never even notice that we were there. We continue walking, and the practical situation remains unchanged. Yet the encounter leaves behind a faint sense of exposure. For a moment, another person’s reality has impressed itself upon us without our invitation. We did not seek the encounter, and we may not know what to do with it. Nevertheless, it remains.

Experiences like this are easy to dismiss. They are fleeting, indeterminate, easily absorbed into the background of the day. But they point to something difficult to ignore: the sense that another person can matter to us in a way that does not depend on our plans, our interpretations, or even our willingness to engage.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas took this sense as his starting point.

Levinas did not begin, as Heidegger did, with the structure of our involvement in the world. He began with the encounter with another person—not as an object of perception, but as a presence that resists being reduced to the situation in which it appears. For Levinas, the significance of the other is not something we assign or discover through reflection. It is something that confronts us.

In his great work, Totality and Infinity (and perhaps more concisely in his Ethics and Infinity), Levinas gave a name to this encounter: the face. The term is misleading if taken too literally. Levinas did not mean the visible features of a person, nor an expression to be read or interpreted. He meant the way another person presents themselves as irreducible—as someone who cannot be fully grasped, explained, or incorporated into the frameworks we rely on to make sense of the world.

The face, in this sense, is not simply seen. It is encountered. This can sound mysterious until we notice how often it occurs in ordinary life. We may know a great deal about someone—their profession, age, history, social role, even their personality—and still feel that none of these descriptions quite exhaust who they are. The person remains more than what we know about them.

Levinas uses the language of the face to name this excess. Not an excess of information, but an excess of significance. Another person continually exceeds the categories through which we understand them. And in that encounter with the face of the other, something happens that is difficult to describe in the language of meaning or interpretation. The other person does not simply appear as part of a situation. They appear as someone to whom we are, in some way, answerable.

This answerability does not arrive as a clear instruction. It does not tell us what to do, and it does not guarantee that we will respond. It can be ignored, resisted, or rationalized away. But it has a distinctive character: it feels less like a possibility we consider and more like a demand we discover ourselves already under. This is what Levinas meant when he described responsibility as prior to choice.

Ordinarily, we think of responsibility as something we take on. We agree to help, we commit, we assume obligations. Levinas reverses this order. Before we decide anything, before we weigh options or consider consequences, we find ourselves already implicated in the presence of another person. Responsibility, in this sense, is not the result of a decision. It is what makes decision meaningful at all.

This claim can sound extreme. It seems to ask too much—to suggest that we are responsible in situations where we have neither the capacity nor the clarity to respond adequately. Levinas was aware of this tension. He did not deny the limits that structure our lives. He did not propose that we could meet every demand placed upon us.

What he insisted on was something narrower and more unsettling: that the demand itself does not originate with us, and does not disappear simply because we cannot fulfill it.

This is what gives the moments described earlier their peculiar force. The lingering unease is not just a failure of explanation. It is a trace of having been addressed—of having encountered someone whose significance exceeds the role they play in our situation.

Levinas described this relation as “asymmetrical.” The other’s claim on me does not depend on a reciprocal claim I can make on them. It does not wait to be negotiated or justified. It arrives uninvited, and it remains even when I turn away.

This does not mean that every encounter becomes ethically overwhelming. Most of the time, life proceeds as it must. We move within the limits of what we can do. We rely on systems, roles, and expectations to guide our actions. Without these structures, responsibility would be impossible to live.

But Levinas’s point is that these structures do not exhaust what happens when we encounter another person. There remains, within and alongside them, a dimension of experience in which the other appears not simply as part of the world, but as someone who places that world into question. To take that dimension seriously is not to reject the world we inhabit. It is to recognize that, within it, something can occur that is not fully contained by it.

 

V. Between Explanation and Obligation

If Heidegger shows us that we are always already in a world that matters, and Levinas shows us that others can matter in a way that unsettles that world, the question becomes how these two insights belong together. It is tempting to resolve the tension quickly. One might say that responsibility is simply one concern among others, to be weighed against competing demands. Or one might say that responsibility overrides all such considerations, that the presence of another person cancels the limits within which we live. Neither option quite captures the experience.

The first option risks diminishing what is most distinctive about those moments that linger—the sense that something more was at stake than a set of competing priorities. The second risks ignoring the conditions that make any response possible at all—the fact that we are finite, situated, and bound by constraints we cannot wish away. What is needed is not a resolution, but a way of holding both pressures at once.

The world we inhabit does not disappear when we encounter another person. Time does not stop. Other obligations do not vanish. The structures that guide our actions—professional roles, social norms, institutional frameworks—remain in place. Heidegger’s account makes clear that these are not superficial constraints. They are the conditions under which anything like action, understanding, or response can occur.

And yet, within those conditions, something can happen that is not reducible to them. The presence of another person can introduce a claim that does not arise from the situation as we understand it, and cannot be fully absorbed into it. This claim does not provide clear guidance. It does not tell us how to act in every case. But it changes the meaning of what we do, and of what we fail to do.

One way to describe this is to say that the world provides the space in which responsibility becomes possible, while the encounter with another person gives that space a direction it does not generate on its own. We are able to respond because we are already involved, already capable of being affected. But what calls for response—the sense that someone matters in a way that is not negotiable—does not originate in that involvement. It arrives within it.

This is why explanation and obligation coexist uneasily. Explanation situates us within the world we inhabit. It clarifies what was possible, what was reasonable, what could be expected. Obligation, by contrast, exposes the limits of that clarification. It does not negate explanation, but it refuses to let it close the matter.

To live as a person, on this view, is to inhabit that tension. Consider the following episode from clinical medicine:

A physician leaves the hospital after an unexpectedly long rounds. Every decision made that day can be justified. Resources were limited. Time was short. Other patients required attention. Yet one encounter returns unexpectedly during the drive home—a patient whose fear could not be fully addressed before the next obligation intervened.

The physician may have done everything that could reasonably have been done. Explanation is not the problem. The lingering quality of the encounter arises precisely because explanation and answerability do not coincide completely. The situation makes sense. The person still matters.

Living in the middle ground between explanation and obligation is to move through a world structured by limits, while remaining exposed to moments that exceed those limits. It is to explain oneself without expecting explanation to absolve, and to respond without believing that one’s response will ever be complete.

This is not a comfortable position. It leaves us without the reassurance that we have done enough, or that we could ever do enough. But it also resists a different kind of simplification—the idea that our responsibilities can be fully specified in advance or discharged once and for all. Instead, personhood appears as an ongoing condition of answerability. Not a status we achieve or a role we perform, but a way of being in which we are repeatedly called upon, in ways we cannot fully anticipate, by people whose significance we do not control.

The moments that linger begin to look different in this light. They are not simply failures to act, or instances of indecision. They are traces of encounters in which something more was at stake than could be settled at the time. They persist because they register a dimension of experience that resists closure—a sense that another person mattered in a way that exceeded the situation we found ourselves in.

We do not need to resolve that excess in order to recognize it. It is enough, perhaps, to remain responsive to it—to resist the impulse to explain it away too quickly, or to convert it into a rule that can be followed without remainder.

Near the end of the day, those small moments return. Not to accuse, exactly, but to remind. We are not the authors of the claims placed upon us. But we are, nonetheless, their bearers.

 

Conclusion

A day unfolds. Most of it passes without incident, carried by routines that work well enough. Then something small interrupts—a glance, a question, a moment that doesn’t quite fit. We register it, or we don’t. We respond, or we move on. Either way, it leaves a trace.

It would be easy to treat these traces as noise, the residue of a life lived under pressure. There are, after all, good reasons for what we do. Time is limited. Attention is finite. No one can answer every call that presents itself. The world would be unlivable if we tried. And yet the traces persist.

These traces do not arrive with instructions. They do not tell us what we should have done, or what we must do next time. They simply remain, as a kind of quiet counterpoint to the explanations that otherwise make sense of the day. We might notice them in retrospect, when the pace slows. Or in the middle of something else, when a fragment returns without warning. A face we cannot place. A question we did not answer. A moment when we sensed, briefly, that more was at stake than we could manage at the time.

Nothing about this moment requires a theory. It does not depend on having read philosophy, or on accepting any particular account of what a person is. It is part of the ordinary texture of life among others.

But if we mull over that moment, something begins to come into view. The world we move through is not neutral. It already matters, in ways that guide us before we begin to think. Our actions make sense within that world, and for the most part, that sense is enough. We explain ourselves, and the explanations hold. Until they don’t.

When they don’t, it is not because they are false or utterly self-serving. It is because something else has entered the situation—something that cannot be fully accounted for by the roles we occupy or the limits we face. Another person appears, not only as part of the scene, but as someone whose significance exceeds it. The cashier whose words we barely heard. The stranger at the bus stop. The patient remembered long after the shift has ended. None of these encounters may require dramatic action. Nothing may come of them at all.

Yet they linger because they disclose something easy to overlook: that another person’s significance is never fully contained by the situation in which we meet them. We do not choose that excess. We encounter it. What follows from that encounter is not a rule, or a program for how to live. It is something less definite and more demanding: the recognition that our lives are not entirely our own to explain.

This recognition does not cancel the constraints we live under. It does not free us from the need to decide, to prioritize, to move on. We will continue to act as we must, within the limits that shape every day. But it may change how those limits are held.

To explain oneself is still necessary. It situates what we do within the realities we cannot ignore. But explanation no longer closes the matter. It remains open to something it cannot fully contain—a sense that, in the presence of others, there is always more at stake than can be settled.

That “more” is not an abstraction. It is what gives the smallest encounters their weight. It is what lingers when everything else has been accounted for. If there is a conclusion to draw, it may be this: not as a claim to defend, but as something to recognize.

We live among others in a way that continually exposes us to demands we did not create and cannot fully meet. We respond as we can. We explain ourselves, and often we are right to do so. And still, something remains. Not to accuse, and not to resolve, but to keep open the space in which another person can matter beyond what we can manage. By the time we notice it, we may already be there—pausing, reconsidering, feeling the slight hesitation before we move on.

It is not much. But it may be enough to begin.

Toward the Dignity and Justice of Being

The way of thinking proposed here does not fail to recognize being or treat it, ridiculously and pretentiously, with disdain, as the fall from a higher order or disorder. On the contrary, it is on the basis of proximity that being takes on its just meaning. In the indirect ways of illeity, in the anarchical provocation which ordains me to the other, is imposed the way which leads to thematization, and to an act of consciousness.


---Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence (trans. A Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Pr., 1981)








The entry into being does not entail a fall into absolute moral indifference, or even corruption. While Levinas could criticize Heidegger for the paucity of morality in Being and Time, no phenomenology of ontological difference necessarily leads, by its very method, to a disregard of the other as completely other. In the passage above, Levinas sets up his case against a philosophy that 'reduces, by an abuse of language, saying to the said and all sense to interest' (Otherwise Than Being, OTB,16). Already in Existents and Existence, Levinas poses the metaphysical problem of just what takes place prior to an existent's insertion into being, the reluctance if not refusal to enter into a cont[r]act with being under the conditions of insomnia, fatigue, indolence. Speculatively, Levinas posits these structures of pre-phenomenality, of pre-consciousness, where passivity holds sway. Taking a stand before being, what Levinas has named hypostasis, provides the liminality encountering an existent, which is always just out of phase with existence (being).


For Levinas, an existent and existence do not coincide precisely; a lag presents itself. A diachrony characterizes the interface of an existent with existence, where the encounter with the other in proximity occurs and seizes what, for the existent, has not yet become a self realized into being. So in this metaphysical frame (which potentially gives being its dignity and justice) the other who holds me hostage and for whom the 'I' takes full responsibility---and the responsibility even of the other's own responsibility---in substitution, provides the locus of ethics. As Levinas summarizes, he has interpreted 'the subject as a hostage and the subjectivity of the subject as a substitution breaking with being's essence' (OTB, 184).


Levinas, whose allegiance to Husserl is palpable, finds limitations in classical phenomenology, and in order to locate transcendence in its proper frame, opens upon a metaphysics, a first philosophy, of ethics. By placing the ethical moment prior even to ontology,  Levinas introduces a 'morality clause' into the contract with being. Because the other and the approach to the other, the encounter with alterity and illeity, is prior to the self of the subject-in-the- making, ethics shapes the posture of the hypostasis, or what I have dubbed the 'hypostatic union' of the existent with existence. Being is therefore extricated from the problematics of Heideggerian phenomenology, ontology and its existentialist demeanor, in which Dasein's being in the world flirts with the Volk, permitting, in the darker corners of Dasein's moods, all kinds of savagery.


Ultimately, though, Levinas never really parts ways with phenomenology, or at least the spirit of phenomenology. He will eventually come to say that what he was doing through OTB, was phenomenology all along. His approach to the problem of ethics could not fit within the scope of the phenomenology of his day, or at least the orthodoxy of its method. His metaphysics of ethics speculates upon the very nature of phenomenality and therefore of givenness. Because such a metaphysics is embedded within consciousness itself, I am comfortable describing it more along the lines of a radical phenomenology, one that is still thinking the given and therefore within the purview of phenomenology itself. A phenomenology of givenness provides the logical step from Levinassian ethics as first philosophy, yet retains the phenomenological posture. I attribute Jean-Luc Marion's debt to Levinas, at least in part, to this tacit acknowledgment.


Marion's argument with Heidegger is not primarily ethical, though its commitment to the given certainly has ethical if not moral implications; and the inadequacy of the reduction to being or ontology compels Marion to explore just how far down the reduction can go, hence his 'third reduction' to givenness. That a radical phenomenology quests for the end of metaphysics by no means spells the end of speculative thinking; the quest simply critiques the limits of any metaphysics bent on determining the validity of all kinds of phenomena. To privilege givenness does not hold being with disdain or in contempt. Rather, the privilege rescues phenomena from the hegemony of metaphysics, of ontology and ontological difference, of any positivism, and in particular from their tendencies to determine what any kind of knowledge can and cannot be.


Nihilism, too often the final face of existentialism and the positivistic stamp on rationality, impugns all of reality and makes something very small of being. Nihilism opposes any dignity and justice of being. The antidote to nihilism is thinking the thing from itself as it gives itself, as the antidote to mere being is life. As Agamben has convincingly shown, bare life, zoe, is already stripped of dignity and justice, and thematized life, bios, is at least poised for them. For Levinas and Marion, there is no state of exception, no state of being (or givenness) unworthy of dignity and justice. It remains part of my project to locate the origins and locations of dignity and justice in this thing called being, and in part, it attempts this move by asking just what is this thing called love.

No Greater Love: A Reflection on the Triduum

For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son...






οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον




(Please note an afterword below)

The gift of the Son defies any notion of giving on the side of being. Within being, the gift is wrapped as a ransom, a human sacrifice, a gift with all the strings that being can attach. The gift, what Christians call the Incarnation, does not unfold, finally, in being, in any ontological difference, in any fundamental or regional ontology. The aporia of the gift, this gift, can only unfold within the horizon of its givenness: love. Love bears the same structures of phenomenality as the gift. Love, like the gift, is an 'all or nothing' phenomenon. One does not love a 'little bit', partially, conditionally; whatever strong feeling of desire, affection or attraction might fall under the categories of love in a metaphysical system of prefabricated concepts, styles or fads, what we call here 'love' is nothing like such systems that pass for love in other contexts. The same holds for the gift: what is a gift if wrapped as a promissory note? The love we speak of here, the love of God, enjoys utter anteriority to being itself; love answers to its own givenness, prior to being.

The Incarnation---the Christ-event---by which we mean the nativity of Jesus, his life and ministry, his trials and tribulations, his judgment by the world, the way of the Cross and the Resurrection, while certainly historical and real, does not manifest itself in any fullness in justice within being. What on earth can the death of God mean in the rationality of metaphysics? Or for that matter, what does the impossibility of a God-Man, a Word-made-flesh, of any notion of a 'greater love', do within being if they do not first quicken in the priority of love, and its logic and rationality?

Try as we may, the Cross will always get twisted when we force it into ontology, into any metaphysics of presence, however rarefied a presence we can construct within systematic metaphysics. No rationale for the Cross plays out satisfactorily within the categories of being. No effort, however noble, or rational, or analogical gets us much past onto-theology's bugaboo: theodicy (0r at best, the onto-theological god that fell to his death off Nietzsche's tightrope). We have visited the notion of a theodicy without theodicy recently, and nothing seems to happen on the planes of theodical thinking; vectors of thought point outside such structures, but cannot escape them.

To begin to enter the logic of love, the unfolding of the erotic reduction and the release of the erotic phenomenon, all appeals to causality, empirical reasoning, and being itself must collapse; for love to appear categories and concepts must yield their place of honor in pure reason: the first critique has left the building. In the instance of this love we speak about now, we must allow the Father and the Son to appear, not within frameworks we have constructed for them, but as they appear to each other in the logic of love that can unfold in a practical reason. In the Johannine tradition "God is love". For God so loved the world, the logos gives up his life for a friend. Here begins the logic of love, and it provides the only lens through which to envisage the Father and Son in their face-off at the Cross. Only then can the gift of the Father and the Son manifest as the gift to the 'gifted', or the recipient---in short, to us.

What kind of fatherly love is this that allows the son to die? Why does the father not extricate the son, certainly a small task for the causa sui? The impotence of the verb 'to be' and references to causality underscore that what goes on in the Cross---the event harbored in the Cross---has nothing to do with being, and everything to do with what is prior to being: God loves before he is, and he so loved the world that only the release of absolute holiness through death and resurrection could ratify once and for all love's anteriority to all things related to being. Only the absolute abandon of the self without reservation, with absolute totality of self-emptying can the logic of love, in this case, the logic of the Cross, declare itself from itself, completely and irrevocably. The gift that gives its self, gives itself fully and with abandon to the recipient of the gift, the 'gifted', she who believes in order to see and to hear, she who receives kenotically, with an accommodating self-emptying, a making room for the gift. What is faith, what is belief if not a willingness to open oneself to the possible, to vacate a prejudice to make room for the truth?

This absolute abandon unites love and the gift. Love...gift. This is not really a sequence, for language does not allow representation of equality (or better, identity) here: love and the gift are not separate: they are the same, and as such they belie the differences among philos, eros and agape: for they are one and the same kenosis, the same event of kenosis. This is not the kenosis of Caputo or Altizer---the emptying of transcendence into immanence once and for all in the singular death of God. This is the kenosis of the univocity of love. The one and only univocal term---God loves as we love. We receive the gift in the same love in which it is given. We receive love, when it manifests against a screen of the structures of love.

Who is this friend, this beneficiary of no greater love than this? It is the other, the face of the other, the icon. The face that has me before I am even a self, before I am, in the elemental place that is otherwise than being. Are we helpless before the other? Is this even the right question? Can we then not also ask, is God helpless before the Cross? If these are the right questions, then they come from the seedbed of ontological difference, from being, as if being were absolutely prior, even prior to the nothing, prior even to the matrix from which the self is pulled by the horizon of being. But these are not the right questions, for this is the language of theodicy, theology's dead end and cause of death. To ask these questions is to force the uncontainable into a container.

Before God is before the Cross, the Father loves the Son. How does being fare before the absolute gift? If God is love, then this univocal love appears not merely as a love for the world but the selfsame love of the perichoresis within the immanent life of the Trinity. Being therefore has no standing before love, before the gift, before the kenotic movement that goes by the name, 'love'.

If faint strains of Jean-Luc Marion or Emmanuel Levinas echo in this little Lenten reflection it is because their work has entered my thinking, my seeing and hearing, through their signature ideas of the saturated phenomenon, the face of the other, alterity and the self-as-hostage, as these ideas gel across the shadow of the Cross (In another piece, I shall substantiate my gratitude to these thinkers in the more conventional form of citation). Catholic thinking places no premium on human suffering, a torturous death, or reciprocity of the gift. Instead, it offers its Tradition as a gift, and understands that gift within the absoluteness, the all-or-nothing, of love. What, ultimately, can this gift be, if not Christ himself?


*********************************************************

Afterword


I have heard, quite literally, from the four corners of the earth about the abysmal failure of this Lenten reflection. Perhaps in my haste to put something 'up for Easter' I have perpetrated both religious and philosophical sins. The gist of the critique runs something like this: the piece is too religious for something so 'phenomenological', and too phenomenological for something so 'religious'. Moreover, both the religion and phenomenology are suspect. I am grateful for the loyal readership and loyal opposition, and I should have exercised, in retrospect, better judgment in 'going ahead' with the piece. I will leave the piece up (it crossed my mind to delete it) for continued target practice, not that it didn't have enough holes in it already. I will chalk it up to a pitiful 'at bat', a strikeout, as it were.

We have all chosen to live and stay in the world, and so we exist with a ineradicable bond with existence itself. This piece was a distinctly wrong place to think existents and existence apart from one another. A logic of love and a propositional logic are not mutually exclusive; I do think it's difficult to think them simultaneously. To say that for one to appear the other must disappear misleads. To think the logic of love does not mean to leave one's brains at the door; the logic of love is no fantasy land.


Comments for this blogpost are closed.

Spirit and Body: Levinas on the Cusp of an Awakening of Religion

To arrive where you are, to get to where you are not,

You must go by a way, wherein there is no ecstasy.

---T.S. Eliot, 'East Coker'

Whether on the roads to Marion's Damascus of the saturated phenomenon or Falque's metamorphosis of finitude and the spread body, Levinas's ghostly philosophy lurks in the shadows of forethought. It sometimes seems that all contemporary French phenomenology seeks its origins in Descartes' cogito, the ego that constitutes the world, the ego that thinks its therefore and finds being. Certainly Marion begins here, as does Husserl, the one discovering the straw that breaks the backs of noema and noesis, the other discovering a more pristine and powerful intentionality. Falque, of course, does phenomenology, but bends it toward his own wits, a phenomenology even splintered and splayed open to a post-metaphysical metaphysics, thereby releasing the event of just what goes on between the Cartesian res extensa and the phenomenological 'lived body'.  Levinas, on the other hand, remains skeptical of ontology and intentionality, and his eyes and ears are drawn less to the therefore, and far more intently to the fore-there.  

Il y a. The Levinassian there is. The 'there' prior to the there that is indeed there, the fore-there, where therefore is not even a forethought, where Prometheus sleeps. Such is what comes to Levinas's mind. Levinas's is a ghostly thinking, not quite ghastly, yet open to horror, the night that crutches the insomniac's watch, the creepy indolence that paralyzes before being, and the instinct to retreat into alter[ed]-states of consciousness. Walpole and Shelly have nothing on Levinas. The gothic shades of dark that recede in the Levinassian landscape give proof through this night that Heideggerian ecstasy is a little late to the party of being: there is a hauntology prior to ontology, some more fundamental difference anterior to ontological difference. There is a haunting.

Before the ethics of Levinas's signature work, before the stark alterity and priority of the Other, this remarkable thinker has given us a preliminary study of his concerns, and certainly a critique of Being and Time. As a critique of ontological difference, Existence & Existents ( trans., A. Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne, 1978, henceforth EE; page numbers in parentheses refer to this translation of the work 1st published in 1947 unless otherwise stated) stamps an indelible ethos upon what will later follow in his masterworks, Totality and Infinity, and Otherwise than Being. EE does not present a full-blown theory of the body, or a fleshed-out spirituality; but it certainly outlines an anatomy of consciousness, even a physiology of consciousness, that thinks the fore-there---that hypostasis precedes ecstasis, that position precedes being-in-the-world, that Being itself precedes beings. Do not ask what is it; let us go and make our visit.

Levinas makes haste to describe the there is (il y a going forward to honor the term's untranslatability, unless it appears as there is in Lingis's translation) as the thing unresolved by death, the irreducible term that remains insoluble in the liquidation of finitude. Il y a comprises the locus where subjective and objective existence merge and blur in the event of being (4-5). Indeed, "ontology...affirms that what is essential in human spirituality...is determined by a relationship...with...the nakedness of this bare fact" of Being (3), which "harbors something tragic" (5). The human spirit is always already encountering a tragedy. The merging of existents with existence takes place within the il y a, an otherwise than being that seizes us by the throat.

The maternal wellspring from which an existent gets itself born, or from which birth yanks an existent into existence, is not sufficiently anterior for Levinas; he searches more deeply into that nook, to "that event of birth in phenomena which are prior to reflection" upon any regional ontology (11). He thinks the matrix from which a maternal wellspring might spring. In this regard, he analyzes 'fatigue' and 'indolence', not as mere mental contents, but as modes of a relationship with being, and cleaving of (to?) being. These mental contents express a 'weariness' before existence, and mark the mode of 'refusal' or balking at the contractual terms binding an existent with existence; yet such a refusal marks not a reflection upon such terms, but a pre-reflective, unthematic encounter with, engagement of, immediate response to, a generic document, whose lines remain unread, but remains a threat nonetheless (11-12).

The markers of refusal, though placeholders of retreat or evasion, point to an engagement with being. To engage being, to commit to a contact and contract with being, comprises the act through which an existent enters existence: "If the present is thus constituted by the taking charge of the present, if the time-lag of fatigue creates the interval in which the event of the present can occur, and if this event is equivalent to the upsurge of an existent for which to be means to take up being, the existence of an existent is by essence an activity" (25). This upsurge goes by the name of hypostasis, and the contractual contact of an existent with existence forms a hypostatic union threatened only by time, by another present which can put the union asunder. The hypostatic union, a term Levinas never uses, creates the locus of spirit, of the event of spirituality, though he never formulates this event in quite this manner. Regardless, here, in the hic et nunc of taking a position from which hypostasis becomes an upsurge into Being, time coalesces into the sacrality of a most vulnerable moment.

Though a less reckless strategy would visit the preliminary ideas of EE upon Levinas's later work, the risk of visiting Levinas's more mature elements upon EE, at least with respect to vulnerability, and even the Other, might reward; for the heart of Levinas's philosophical 'spirituality' rests in the structures thought here in EE.  Only in the fore-there of reflection, in the unthematic arena of the pre-ontological structures of consciousness, can we find the disclosure of vulnerability prone to insomnia and horror that hypostasis is heir to. True, for the most part, the Other appearing in EE is a thematic Other, one already clothed, one whose nudity finds itself clothed by form (30). This nudity, already thematic, conceals the body, and only in a relationship with nudity itself do we experience the alterity of the Other (31).

The nudity prior to nudity, the fore-there of an 'undressed being' (31), begins the entry into the il y a, the consummation of being in the experience of night (52), where the 'rustling of the there is...is horror" (55) ushering in the vigil of the insomniac so passive that the night itself 'watches' (63). Only in such utter passivity can the unthematic contents of consciousness (69) take position, a stance from which an upsurge into being poises itself as hypostasis. From such states, such stases, such static asymmetry,  a 'base', a 'place', "makes the body the very advent of consciousness", unconcealed in the vulnerability of an unthematic version of nudity. The body locates consciousness as an "irruption of anonymous being" and "is position itself" (70). The spirituality of the body is the event of its position, and the moment of its present, the sacred time of the hypostatic union, where Being and being, existence and the existent, contract a merger, "a pure event of being" (71). "Position is the very event of the instant as a present" (70).

The event of being harbored in the hypostasis, the hypostatic union, "signifies the suspension of the anonymous there is," for "on the ground of the there is, a being arises...By hypostasis anonymous being loses its there is character" (83). Truly this is sacred ground consecrated by human spirituality through the posture of the body, the body taking its position in the instant of its present, and there is no time like the present, yet is "not the future above all the resurrection of the present?" (94). Though there can be no redemption of pain, "the movement of the caress" of the consoler transports suffering " 'elsewhere' " (93). Hope should not be spent on wiping away every tear or avenging every death, for the wages of pain simply move into an instant that follows an instant; rather the object of hope should be the future itself, where every instant of every present receives salvation.

Hypostasis is anterior to, prior to, more essential than any ecstasy leaping into an already thematic being-in-the-world. It makes its upsurge from a matrix otherwise than being, and, for the visually minded, it is the photo-negative of Heideggerian ecstasis, the mold into which such ecstasy pours itself into the world. The unthematic contents of consciousness create the vulnerability that only an unthematic Other whose utter vulnerability can transgress---as the Other in the Same; not that alterity of the Other homogenizes within such sameness, but as the disruption,  the roiling of the waters in the pool of the Same; the other is totally other, despite a family resemblance. The Other in the Same provides the site of an uncontainable human spirit, a spirit that only "the gravest sin" attempts to put on the clock,  in the time of trains and the sun (101). Though Levinas can think the coalescence, a congealment, of time, any reification of the spirit within the timebound shuts down the instant, desecrates the preciousness of the present that must be cherished, and positioned for resurrection.

Theodicy without Theodicy

Derrida captures both the imagination and the critical faculties with his theme of 'religion without religion'. Perhaps his greatest expositor, John D. Caputo, has ridden that horse all the way to the bank, if philosophers get to take anything to the bank, as it were. In his 'weak theology', Caputo offers his reading of Derrida's late writings, not to mention the various seminars in which these ideas play out on a stage of phenomenology, post-phenomenology and even a God without being. Caputo describes the deconstruction of confessional religions, and discovers the 'unconditional without sovereignty' which he identifies as the 'weak force of God'.

A religion without religion contains within it the deconstruction of classical theodicy, and perhaps points to a theodicy without theodicy. I might make the case that a religion without religion does not recognize anything that looks like a theodicy, whether with or without theodicy. Be that as it may, a theodicy without theodicy might take as its point of departure the power structure Caputo attributes to God in the metaphysical attitude: the problem does seem to boil down to power, its expression and its non-expression, its deployment in the world and its non-deployment.

I share with Caputo his disgust with theodicy as it usually plays out, as a means of explaining or justifying the misery, suffering and injustice visited upon the world, particularly upon the innocent. To drop 'mystery', a 'greater good' at the doorstep of horror and unspeakable suffering mocks God and the world, and constitutes the definition of obscenity.

Any reasonable person would think that, after the horrors of the 20th century (indeed the horrors of history), the 'end of theodicy' would have been a decisive one. Surely religion and theodicy would have died a permanent death by now, certainly by now; yet theodicy, like religion, lives on: what good is the death of God if theodicy and religion always rise again? 

Caputo's The Weakness of God dots its argument for the 'unconditional without sovereignty' with such occasions of the meaning and presence of the Omni-God against the weakness of God. But what of theodicy's corollary, the request (if not a demand) for an explanation or justification, the quality of which determines reason's permissibility of God? Playing out on the horizon of being, this crucial flip-side of theodicy allows God into, or disqualifies God from, the horizon of knowledge (albeit a certain kind of knowledge) and of being. God lives and dies by the swords of all kinds of positivisms, regardless of the side they take in the classic version of the great debate.

In a recent discussion on the 'priority of love' with a philosopher and friend, my interlocutor equated such priority with a 'theodicy without theodicy', and so I began this piece with the analogy of a religion without religion. His critique, which burns with concern for 'needless, unnecessary suffering of catastrophic proportions', runs adjacent to a critique of the Johannine Lazarus texts, and formulates its argument thus: Jesus, alive then and now, can call Lazarus or anyone else, then and now from death, but he doesn't. Now certainly the lingua franca of this critique is power itself, but also power within a will. The question asks, with all seriousness, why anyone ever suffers and dies, while a Jesus, very much alive and sporting a track record of doing nifty stuff, stands idly by and simply withholds miraculous power.

The question itself pokes at divine power and justice, but I do not think this question exhausts its theodical gesture by interrogating power. Its gesture also calls into question the various claims of religion for God and Jesus, in particular, Christian claims. So where do we start, start again? In other words, how is the priority of love, that God loves before he is, a theodicy without theodicy? Is it simply a fait accompli that a God who loves before he is, is a God who does not deploy power analogically (in terms of the human deployment of power), or deals in the structures of power at all? What is the difference between love and power when God does the loving? If Creation itself is an act of love, and not of sheer power, does a univocity of love put us in a position to create---is the power of love as intelligible as the love of power?

The problem gets even more complicated. How does one account for the urgency of the theodical gesture, and its logical aftermath---atheism---on the part of the positivist, when the theist finds this question oddly less than urgent? Can such urgency reduce to the desire to declare God nonsense under the scrutiny of sharply defined criteria for and of evidence? Do all theists secretly subscribe to Caputo's weak theology, acknowledging the obscenity of the theodical reply to the theodical question, yet somehow resolve to retain a faith in thematic religion (religion with religion), such as Catholicism? Are we all, deep down, Caputo's radical theologians? Do we radical theologians argue for an evidence invisible to the various positivisms in all sincerity? Is there any other place to go for a 'theology of the event'?

For the sake of this preliminary sketch of a theodicy without theodicy, we might speculate that God has as much use for theodicy as he does for religion: God has no use for what passes for religion---What are your vain sacrifices to me? 'Vain' sacrifice, the religious gesture with a gargantuan injection of religion. Is sacrifice always a gesture of power? Religiously speaking, the only sacrifice that God ever asks is the one he asks of himself, and the one ostensibly carried out on Calvary. A sacrifice of God for humanity. That sacrifice is the only possible sacrifice that completely absents vanity. This is not to say that the unconditional call of the event of God asks nothing of us; it simply does not ask us to sacrifice because of its inherent vanity. Even Abraham doesn't get to sacrifice, not even in the most famous sacrificial near-miss of all time.

So, then, the urgency of the question: a power than declines its exercise --- a will that wills not the 'good', where the very existence and meaning of that power hangs in the balance---no exercise, no being. Is it here, I wonder, where a theodicy without theodicy finds itself and its answer: if being is denied by empirical establishment of a lack of evidence, does that lack locate God beyond essence, otherwise than being---does positivism then give credence to a God without being, or does it relegate the whole matter to the ever-growing heap of nonsense? If willing the good for the other passes for love, then it is a strange love indeed that does not always and forever will the good for all of creation. What has happened to an appeal to the univocity of love?

But not so fast. The urgency of this theodical question also interrogates the lack of urgency on the part of those for whom the concrete players are not held to what must assuredly be a responsibility to their power. A theodicy with theodicy has no other recourse but to conclude irrational obstinacy, an embrace of a studied naïve magical realism. Presumably a theodicy without theodicy would have richer choices. Indeed, in any hypothetical theodicy without theodicy, doubt plays out very differently than in the classical theodicy with theodicy. So, then, which do we doubt, 'love' or 'the good'?

Emmanuel Levinas once suggested that Judaism is a religion for adults. It goes without saying (and this is perhaps why thinkers like Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque do not say it explicitly) that Christianity is also a religion for adults. One of the ways, it seems to me, Christianity enjoys a status similar to Judaism, is its rhythm of cataphasis and apophasis. Meister Ekhart asks God to free him from God. We ask in faith for God to help our poor faith. It also goes without saying that any responsible faith, any adult religion, would be constituted by doubt. This is not the destructive doubt of paralysis and positivism, but more akin, ironically, to Descartes' reduction to doubt, which, with its corrosive edges, tears down everything to the bare bones of an encounter with the infinite. Doubt begins the expedition to the discovery of a new world of contradiction and paradox, a world of Yeatsian 'terrible beauty', a world both beautiful and treacherous.

A theodicy without theodicy interrogates power itself, and empowers doubt to be its examiner. The 'doubting Thomas' of the Johannine tradition does not earn condemnation, even if that tradition does find him a bit comical, taking himself, as he does, just too seriously. No, not condemnation, but instead, this most adult of the apostles receives a gift; Thomas utters the highest Christology in the Gospel tradition: my Lord and my God.  Such belief anchored by doubt has always been offered by the Christian tradition as authentic over and against any brand of fideism. Doubt is the business end of reason; its drive toward a mature faith and authenticity leads not to postivism's dead ends and nonsense, but to think again. If not being, or a version of being, or of ontological difference, then toward what does declarative prayer direct itself?

It simply cannot be that the question of a Jesus, a God, who can but doesn't, ends the matter. That's just another way to say Roma locuta, causa finita est---we are trying to get beyond such positivisms. The theist and the atheist stand on different, not opposite, ends of the same question. But on what do they stand when they angle their stands at the same question? Is it the very 'ground of being' which some believe to 'be' God? No, I think not; a 'ground' is no place to stand if the question is being. A ground of being is just a being upon which being stands. That's simply the infinite regress of more of the same---classical theodicy in a slightly different light. What would a theodicy without theodicy stand on; what does a religion without religion stand on?

In such a preliminary piece, I must do a little damage control, and ask a more modest question. The fact is this, good people, atheist and theist alike, positivist and other-than-positivist alike, stand together in this world. 'Where do they stand?' is another way of asking 'how are things between them?' They stand before each other across the same abysmal question. If each encounters the face of the other, then they must stand on that which is before being itself. They stand, in short, on the love that is prior to being, on the claims made upon them before they are even 'selves'. This is the threshold upon a theodicy without theodicy, properly recognized and pronounced by someone who does not even believe such anteriority is either possible, or that it matters even if it were possible. His pronouncement accuses me, as his atheism calls my theism into question. What matters, at least at this point, is our standing; and we stand before the same voice, the same call from what is harbored in the name of God. How we hear it, and where doubt leads us, and what urgency moves us, makes all the difference in the world, even if we can share that world, even if the discovery of joy or crushing sadness awaits us in this shared world. Events are like that.

Altered States

If the Lacanian register of the Imaginary bears wakefulness and the panorama of images that appear before consciousness, and the register of the Symbolic bears the sleep where images and themes dance their dreams across the stage of the unconscious, then surely the register of the Real comprises the topos where dreams dream their dreams. Lacan does not by accident locate the divine within the precincts of the Real: God does not first appear in a bush burning in un-consuming flame, or the nightmare of a bloody Cross, but in the trace of these that points to the very heart of the Real, the place with sound but no sense, with melody but no logos, the place without an urge to grasp or otherwise conceptualize, the place before thought, the place where intentionality is not even a dream, a consciousness that is not conscious of something, but where, instead, waits to be born, where awareness waits for a theme.

The register of the Real contains the moment Levinas has described as insomnia. The cite of 'saying', the Real refuses thematization, the prison and ownership of language and image; it harbors the trace of the 'said', but prior to the being of the word.  An eerie place that awaits the things that go bump in the night, insomnia declares a wordless discourse of the infinite, the Cartesian 'infinite in me', an infinite not of me, but nonetheless found there: what Levinas names the il y a---there is.  To maintain the discourse of God beyond essence, to defer the meaning of God and therefore his entry into being, Levinas locates God's transcendence in the non-thematizable space of a wakefulness without a watching, a vigilance that does not already know what it keeps vigil for (or vigilant of), an insomnia that is interruptible, but without the trappings of, or tools for, naming God. For Levinas, once consciousness is a consciousness of something, that something is already dressed in the garb of being and outside the register of the Real. Levinas wants it the other way around: he wants transcendence to 'dress' consciousness in the garb of the 'otherwise than being'.

Levinas opens a space for the discourse of the divine, or transcendence, and that space subverts what he calls the moment of the Other within the Same, that which disturbs the empty---unthematic---wakefulness of insomnia. He names this place without terminus (ad quo/ad quem) 'Infinity' ("The God of Philosophy", in Basic Philosophical Writings, 133), which shakes up insomnia, making the "I" aware that the other is before it. Indeed, the very 'character of insomnia: the Other within the same who does not alienate the Same, but who awakens him" ("In Praise of Insomnia," in God, Death, and Time, Stanford Univ. Pr., Stanford, 2000; 209), puts this wakeful emptiness in the position for an irruption---always on the verge of an encounter.

Levinas's insomnia is not the 'insomnia' encountered commonly in medical offices throughout the world. This insomnia, this awareness of the difficulty in falling asleep, has many therapies, and many avenues for further diagnostics. Rather, Levinassian insomnia has its physiological reflection in the devastating medical entity known as the persistent vegetative state (PVS). Medically defined as 'wakeful unawareness', PVS evokes the infamous cases of Karen Ann Quinlan, and more recently, Terry Schiavo, and the 'right to death' movement. The particulars of these cases notwithstanding, certain things come to mind. Does the Other who is not merely unconscious, but beyond either the unconscious or consciousness, make the same claim on me, participate in the same ethos, as the Other whose awareness precedes itself or me? What ethics comes to the fore when the Other's mind and body are divided? How shall I respond to the 'Infinity' Levinas has posited in the structure of consciousness when the Other remains trapped in the insomnia of wakeful expectation, even if nothing is to be expected---has not the mode of expecting?

Joseph J. Fins, in his Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics and the Struggle for Consciousness (NY: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2015), presents the compelling cases of patients and their families confronting PVS and the newly recognized diagnosis of the Minimally Conscious State (MCS), a state of profound impairment of consciousness, but a consciousness with demonstrable awareness, that which is absent from those with PVS. Fins, a physician and medical ethicist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, bears his own historical consciousness here, and draws upon civil rights history to point to the civil rights of mind, of consciousness. His call for absolute diagnostic precision in assessing these cases is poignant and powerful. His ethical sense derives not only from medical integrity in diagnosis and treatment, but also from the identification of the presence of consciousness itself, obscured by horrible injury and brain malfunction. The medicine and technology behind what drives Fins to defend the rights of mind, while fascinating, do not command me here; what commands me is the patient before me who cannot be reduced to mind.

The Other who appears before me appears to me as the human other, and when the Other appears to me suffering or perhaps dying from devastating disease, appears as the spread body whose call is this is my body, or with a Levinassian tenor, thou shalt not kill. Both phrases intone the unconditional now pressed upon me. In medicine, we imagine we see PVS frequently, but in reality, PVS might be rarer than that. Perhaps, as Fins has suggested, we are better than 40 percent wrong about PVS, and what we are really seeing is MCS; much uncertainty informs the actual state of affairs. Because of the prognostic implications of either diagnosis, medicine simply has to 'get it right'. For Fins, the ethical imperatives drive 'getting it right' so that consciousness can be nurtured and healed, and a person can come home to a family in waiting. This is impossible for Fins: to be aware of the world when the world judges unawareness, and acts this judgement out. It is simply impossible to miss the presence of consciousness; missing it is not an option.

The ethics of the spread body, in the instance of PVS, the separation of mind and body, a wakefulness unaware of its embodiedness, calls from this body decisively: this is my body and thou shalt not kill. There is no greater vulnerability than this; it is equal to the vulnerability and precarity of the consciousness thought to be absent. The space Levinas has opened for Infinity is the mode of existence of the spread body in PVS. It is the physiological equivalent of the pre-phenomenality of insomnia, unaware that is expecting the arrival of consciousness---the disruption of insomnia by consciousness---the moment of transition from PVS to MCS. This place of Infinity, the distance between mind and body, the seeming impossibility of traversal within the vegetative state, the moment of the unthematic Real, bears the trace of the divine, the infinite, the otherness of the other, and opens and announces a sacred place.


Patients in PVS bear the posture of Infinity, which has locked them within itself. Perhaps what has divided here is not simply the mind from the body, but even the mind from mind, the non-intentional consciousness pointing aimlessly toward itself. In this sense, the patient with PVS remains within an infinite circuit whose centripetal vector points to what Levinas sometimes calls "God". This trace of the divine glows perhaps a bit brighter, inscribes its line perhaps a bit bolder, in the face of this other whose eyes move, yet trace no line, whose body moves, yet traces no direction. This is absolute vulnerability whose unconditional call calls me relentlessly: this is my body. This is a vulnerability that claims its right not to be killed, and compels me to be responsible for it unconditionally.