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.

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.

Emmanuel Falque's Spread Body: A Place Between the Extended and Lived Bodies

National Hospice Month enjoys celebrations across the U.S. in the month of November, and such celebrations have taken many forms. One such celebration took place in my own living room, and was reminiscent of the home seminars Heidegger conducted at Medard Boss's home in Zollikon.

On November 5th, a gorgeous fall day on Long Island, NY, Emmanuel Falque presented his paper, "Toward an Ethics of the Spread Body," to an attentive audience comprised of philosophers, physicians, psychologists, nurses and social workers in an afternoon that one can only describe as extraordinary. Falque, professor of philosophy in the Institut Catholique de Paris, addressed professors of philosophy and graduate students from local universities (Fordham and SUNY) and several of my colleagues from my own medical center, and entertained searching questions and comments generated by his thinking on the body. Notable seminar participant and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, Ed Casey (fondly known by many as the father of continental philosophy here in the U.S.), received Falque's presentation with a warm enthusiasm and provocative commentary. Indeed, the paper, the presentation and the ensuing discussion among engaged attendees illuminated an already well-lit room.

Falque's paper takes the next logical step in his explorations of the body, flesh and phenomenology that he had already articulated in his fascinating study, The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body and the Eucharist (New York: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2016; henceforth WF). His paper begins in Spinoza's Ethics, and moves through his poignant experience on a Palliative Care Unit, where he situates the notion of the 'spread body' as the middle term between the Cartesian 'extended body' (res extensa), and phenomenology's own 'lived body.' Describing the experiences of doctors, nurses, caregivers and patients who interact in the comings and goings in a hospice setting, the concept of the 'spread' body, the body expanded (epandu), splayed, poured out shapelessly, comes into sharp relief. Indeed, Falque speaks of

...the thing-like strangeness of my own body rather than solely reducing it to the lived body, the struggle for life or the power of the organic rather than simply welcoming suffering, all open up onto the concept of the “spread body,” caught between the “extended body” and the “lived body.” [T]he body ‘is spread out,’ more than it is extended or lived. To repenetrate one’s own being does not simply come down to being incorporated in a physical or objective body (Körper) or to be incarnated in a phenomenological or subjective flesh (Leib), instead it means to be embodied  in an organic flesh made up of nerves, muscles, digestion, secretion, respiration... things that can, like so much of ‘this is my body,’ remain foreign to me if I am not fully able to make them my own.


In these lines Falque addresses the inadequacy of the phenomenological 'flesh/body' binary that all too often accomplishes little more than rewriting the 'soul/body' distinction into post-modern terms (cf. his brief but crucial introduction to WF). Such a dualism disintegrates in the face of the 'spread' body.

In my reading of both WF and Falque's paper and his presentation of it, 2 important, if not completely novel notions arise: the notions of the 'my body' and the 'this is my body' as distinct phenomenological entities, that is, as distinct experiences. Though I am already appropriating these concepts for my own phenomenological dispositions of the phenomena of the body in medicine, the concepts trace their way indelibly into Falque's oeuvre. When he writes of the 'this is my body' in WF, the phrase is always italicized and linked to the Eucharist. "Eucharisticized eros," the 'this is my body' stands on the foundation of the incarnation: "Certainly, this is not, or not directly, a question of the eucharist, (this is my body), but rather of the Incarnation (the person of Jesus Christ)" [WF, 46]. In short, the 'this is my body' points already to the 'spread' body, yet a body nonetheless, however traced to ratification of the 'spread body' by the Incarnation.

When I think the 'my body' I think the human body I share with the body that appears before me; but as I experience it, the 'my body' has its limits in what it shares, or could possibly share, within a common humanity. The 'this is my body' is the body of my patient, spread out against the whiteness of clinical bed linens. My patient's body, characterized by its uniqueness impressed upon it by its very 'thisness', its 'haecceity', is completely other to me, and I cannot 'know' its excess, its surplus of being. Yet, this haecceity, the 'this is my body' initiates a call from its vulnerability, a call that calls unconditionally but without sovereignty from this middle place, middle-voiced (as it were, pace John Caputo), calling to get itself done: the very insistence of the spread body whose Levinasian imperative positions me, perhaps anamorphically (pace Jean-Luc Marion), and obligates me to a posture of presence before it. Where the 'my body' appears as a surface that I already know because of its metonymy with my own [my] body and its saturated reflection of me, the 'this is my body' has a gaze of its own which points to me, as only an other that is 'completely other' can. The 'this is my body' therefore is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones, yet it is irreducible to the 'my body'. I recognize it because its signification is given to me from a voice embodied in an organic flesh in a 'body language'  that I speak, but it is a self that is not me, whose power (conatus, the centripetal vector that tends to undo the centrifugal spreading of the body) commands my agency.

The insistence of the spread body calls for the release of the event that constitutes an ethos and an ethics of a place between the Cartesian 'extended body' and the Husserlian 'lived body'. As Falque so poignantly has experienced and described in his paper, every 'body' on the hospice unit also 'knows' this. Perhaps the distinctive experiences of the 'my body' and the 'this is my body' might further qualify Falque's description of the surgeon who prods the spread body toward the extended body, and the palliativist who prods it toward the lived body. Because the 'my body' and the 'this is my body' cannot simply lay atop the extended and spread bodies, respectively, the spread body always has the last word, and insists on keeping just who is doing the prodding anonymous.

Just what is this unconditional call, without sovereignty or agency, swallowed up by the whiteness of clinical linens? Perhaps  its voice calls not for a singular event, but a plurality of events, one of which is the brokenness of the world disclosed by the brokenness of the body---a brokenness of a body that can no longer do---now spread, poured out, emptied (kenotically?). It is a brokenness constitutive of the human body and the human predicament and calls for a proper formation of persons, relationships, and societies, a knitting of parts known to the Psalmist (139) of the knitter par-excellence.

Perhaps what appears as the spread body against the linens of the hospice recalls the reconfigured linens in the Johannine tomb, linens no longer configured for death, but reconfigured for and by a transformation. Poised between the res extensa and the 'lived body', the spread body whose finitude is laid bare before something new, enters into the incarnation itself, swallowed into a resurrection of God knows what. Nonetheless, "[t]here is a paradox here: the body finds itself all the more when it is lost...Or at least, we can say that the body is most present when it surrenders itself" (WF, 218). 

The spread body is what I am and what I shall become.



I should not be surprised at all to find Emmanuel Falque's work engaged on this blog. His work is refreshing and courageous and has moved me through the limits of theology and phenomenology, a movement that has occupied him in his Crossing the Rubicon. The transgression of circumscribed disciplines is quite at home in the daily practice of medicine. A question remains: just where does medicine pitch its tent on the frontiers and intersections of theology and philosophy?

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