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.

Gentle Rain: Levinas's Conversion to Catholicism, Justice, Jerusalem Sopra Athens

"The proximity of the other is the face's meaning, and it means from the

very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to

cover the face like a mask of their presence to perception. But always the

face shows through these forms . Prior to any particular expression and
beneath all particular expressions, which cover over and protect with an
immediately adopted face or countenance, there is the nakedness and destitution
of the expression as such, that is to say extreme exposure, defencelessness,
vulnerability itself".  Emmanuel Levinas, 'Ethics as First Philosophy'




Now that I have the reader's attention, allow me to disown the ridiculous assertion of Levinas's conversion. I abuse both 'conversion' and 'Catholicism' here (not to mention Levinas himself) to point to the interesting, fascinatingly gripping, dilemma Levinas articulates in his important essays, "Ethics as First Philosophy" (The Levinas Reader, S. Hand, ed., Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989; henceforth EFP), and "Peace and Proximity" (Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. A. Peperzak, et al., Bloomingtion: Indiana Univ. Pr., 1996; henceforth PP). Levinas employs Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for (among other things) the Hellenistic and Hebraic ethos, respectively, especially as he critiques the notions of Europe and Europeans, and the concept of the West. His 'conversion' is his embrace of a both/and posture, and a sophilology (my coinage and appropriation of 'Catholicism' in this context), the 'wisdom of love' (PP, 169), which always complements philosophy, the 'love of wisdom'. As Judith Butler has suggested in her Precarious Life (London:Verso, 2004, p.135f.), Levinas might very well be getting at a vision of Europe where Jerusalem surpasses Athens in vying for the very heart of the West.


"Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the skies drop it down" (Isaiah 45:8).


For Levinas, justice can only be the Derridean justice to come. "But the order of truth and knowledge has a role to play in the peace of proximity...the ethical order of human proximity...calls for the order of objectivity, truth and knowledge...the very sense of Europe: its biblical heritage implies the necessity of its Greek heritage." Levinas denies a "simple confluence of two cultural currents" which, he declares, "do better than converge." Europe is the "concreteness" where peace and proximity "demand a reason that thematizes, synchronizes and synthesizes...concepts necessary for the peace of humanity" (PP, 168). This gentlest of rain is "the first question of the interhuman."


The iconic (pace Jean-Luc Marion) face of the other means this proximity (EFP, 82). In fact, there can be no justice if such a justice traces itself back merely to truth and knowledge. We need to know just what brand of justice we are to embrace, to hope for, whose advent is always just on the horizon. We need, as Levinas asks, to know if such 'justice' comes from war (and the risk of perpetual war and conflict) and destruction and violence, or from "the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other" (PP, 169). Such responsibility is the claim of the Other upon me, a claim that does not 'lay claim' upon some deontological imperative, something I bring to the table, but a claim that comes only from absolute alterity:




"But, in its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness , separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business. It is as if that invisible death, ignored by the Other, whom already it concerns by the nakedness of its face, were already 'regarding' me prior to confronting me, and becoming the death that stares me in the face. The other man's death calls me into question, as if, by my possible future indifference, I had become the accomplice of the death to which the other, who cannot see it, is exposed; and as if, even before vowing myself to him, I had to answer for this death of the other, and to accompany the Other in his mortal solitude" (EFP, 83).



This is the face, in its iconic stature of the saturated phenomenon, in its 'regarding' of me, gazes upon me, even before I turn my gaze, and seizes me, positions me to see that the face is seen, that I recognize the condition of threat, the state of siege that the face of the other finds itself (Befindlichkeit). Perhaps a mutual illumination presents itself here,  the call of the spread body as coming from an elsewhere and an itself, a coming from the presentation of the spread body and the appresentation of the personhood of the itself. Levinas boldly appropriates Husserl's 'appresentation' as the 'epiphany' of 'the unicity and alterity of the unique' as 'concretely the face of the other human' (PP, 166). May I now be equally bold in appropriating the epiphany of the icon of the face, now as the voice, the call of my patient's body lying in her bed on the hospice care unit? Thou shalt not kill is the this is my body transposed into another key in the same symphonic motion of the Other's appearance before me. Both unconditional calls from the iconic face of the Other, one calls me to the movements of society and the polity of the 'one for the other'; the other calls me to the movement of my patient under siege, under the threat of death, of dissolution and expansion into oblivion, and the movement to healing.


These biblical warrants, the thou shalt not kill and the this is my body, make claims upon any "I" encountering any Other. For Levinas, the 'one for the other', the wisdom of love, tends to obviate any recourse to violence, would render a response of violence unintelligible. The hybridization of the Hellenic and the Hebraic would write into Europe itself the face of the Other and the one for the other. The wisdom of love, the both/and of the body and the human person (the recognition of a hybridization), plays out at the bedside of the suffering and dying as presentation and appresentation of the spread body and human person, respectively. Only in the peace and proximity of the face does the call of the spread body receive its voice.

Nostos: A Phenomenology of Baseball and the Play of Verticality

Just in case you missed it, Baseball is the Great American Pastime; if we didn't know it before, we certainly knew it after Ken Burns' Baseball.

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Just buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

The first person to ever 'steal home' was not even a ball player, though he would have made a great manager: Odysseus. It took him 20 years to get back home, only to find his home defended by the visiting team; and the only way he can finally get home, is to steal it back again. In the process he drives home at least 2 points, one through the ax-heads, the other through Antinous's  throat, the locus of his usurpations. For Odysseus, these are all ecological matters, but to return to baseball, it's just part of the game.

Baseball is based on home, based on home base, based on a diamond-shaped field of 3 other bases, which need to be traversed prior to arrival at home. Putting aside the adolescent sexual metaphor of getting to 'first base,' and Elaine Benes' warning Keith Hernandez that she's not 'waving him in,' or Woody Allen's classic schtick about thinking of baseball to defer the moment of ecstasy, we can safely say that, for the most part, baseball is not really, or at least not just, about sex. Baseball is about nostos, and it enacts the epic journey of the hero returning to where he started, through trials and tribulations; and, in its fanfare for the common man, provides structures and patterns of human experience.

Come to think of it, perhaps baseball really is about sex, but 'sex' as generation and generativity, about the navigation of homeworld and alienworld, and the constitution of the lifeworld. Baseball entails home teams and visiting teams, about playing 'at home' or 'on the road;'  about playing in one's 'own house' or at someone else's 'own house.' We root for the 'home team' and, presumably having left our own homes to get to the home field, the matter is so grave that we 'don't care if we ever get back' (something Odysseus could never say). Baseball is alienating for fans and players alike.

When a batter comes 'up to the plate' he stands very near home, oscillating over the base. The game invites him to leave the environing region of home through the trial of a 'pitch,' a projectile aimed at home but sometimes at the batter's head: baseball is a dangerous endeavor and being 'safe' is never guaranteed. If the batter gets the better part of the pitch, the battle is joined and the journey begins; if the pitch gets the better of the batter the batter is out, and retired to the dugout.

The home field is filled by 9 visitors, invaders really, who have pitched their tent for a few days, and who dedicate their play against the home team's desire to generate 'runs' or points that increase their score by crossing the threshold of home, home plate. Scoring is about reduplication, a generativity of returning home that increases the mass of home itself. Home is defended by increasing the home team's score and limiting the visitors' victories, their crossing the threshold of a home not their own. Each alien transgression of home is an assault, a diminution, an idolatrous delimitation of the home team, the home crowd, the homeworld.

Of course there would be no game were it not for competition, the engagement with the alien, the visitor[s]. Therein lies the threat to verticality: in baseball terms, the coming together of the team and the fans in the generativity of 'scoring' and 'winning.' There is no generativity apart from the creative tension between home and alien: teams can play all the 'practice games' they want, but growth in stature, fecundity in competitive and comparative standings, occurs only with respect to the alien. Sameness---intramural sport--- generates no real points, scores or statures. The threat to verticality is embedded in the inherent 'hospitality' of the game.  It is constitutive of baseball, as lifeworld, to play out on the co-constitutive and co-relative interface of the homeworld and alienworld. After all, in any game of baseball, the visitors come up to the plate as well.

When the NY Yankees host the Boston Red Sox, the pregnancy of hospitality starts the 'game' before the actual game begins. Sport-talk happens, on the parts of the players and the fans. In this example the Yankees are home, and the Red Sox are  'on the road.' Ya gotta love this 'on the road' business: everyone in baseball understands the metaphorical character of the phrase. No one familiar with the game thinks play will occur on some interstate highway. 'On the road' and 'away' euphemistically refer to a game to be played on alien territory. This state of affairs reminds us of the enemy attack on the homeland or homefront (to use a WWII expression) as I have recently discussed in Grendel's visits to Heorot. The Red Sox dedicate themselves to committing what Anthony Steinbock has dubbed 'idolatry' (as I alluded above), which manifests as the denial of the Yankees' achieving 'verticality': a fecundity of scoring, of generativity.

Baseball understands the centrality of the 'other' and its relation to the 'self,' or to use Steinbock's wonderful term, the Myself. Co-constitutive, co-relative play of the homeworld and alienworld makes baseball more than a game symbolic of the acquisition of private property, of adding someone else's home to 'my home;' that doesn't happen in baseball,  even if the standing of the Myself is competitively portrayed in scoring and statistics. For baseball, hospitality is always generative, 'for the love of the game.' The threat to verticality, played out as idolatry of competition, of defensive play, is constitutive of baseball, whose rules are laid down on the horizontal but played out always pointing to the vertical.

Beginning with Ken Burns' Baseball was no mere gratuitous reference. I began there because Burns' documentary, along with other kinds of films, such as Field of Dreams, The Natural, Pride of the Yankees, For the Love of the Game, underscores the importance of Baseball to the American imagination, its culture and values, and Baseball's reach into the experience of actual persons. The penetration of baseball-talk into everyday life speaks to the experience of Americans as Baseball itself has been woven into the fabric of Americana. Baseball language has legal ramifications, such as in the '3 strikes and you're out' rule; it has business ramifications as well, as when, after a boardroom meeting, Harry says to Sally, 'hey you really hit that one out of the park;' or when, after a business lunch Bill says to Susan, 'you really hit a homerun.' In business or politics people 'strike out' all the time, or something really comes 'out of left field.' Indeed, many people's failures are expressed as such persons being sent 'back to the bullpen.'

Baseball, in common parlance, bespeaks the navigations of the homeworld and alienworld, and traversals of territories. Threats to verticality---suppression or delimitation of any social, political, commercial, moral, ecological, religious orientation other than the status quo, the horizontal axis of monochromic, totalized closed-off existence---enter experience as perturbations in the co-constitution and co-relativity of home and alien. Moral and ecological phenomena, and other phenomena of home-coming, cut across the plane of the natural attitude, and point off the horizontal toward an intersecting plane at angles ever so acute, but always poised for vertical flight.