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Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas and Derrida
*Chloi Taylor *
/ University of Toronto/
chloe.taylor@utoronto.ca
(c) 2006 Chloi Taylor.
All rights reserved.
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1. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas opposes the Greek
interest in aesthetics, luminosity, and the plastic form to the
rejection of the image in Hebraic philosophy and ethics.
Christianity, in making the Word flesh, repeats the Greek desire
for the visible, the artistically manifested need to /see/ God, in
contradistinction to Judaism, in which God is heard rather than
seen, manifesting Himself in language, both aural and written,
rather than in form. Levinas thus follows the Hebraic tradition in
describing the ethical relation as taking place in a face-to-face
encounter with the other which is nevertheless a "manifestation of
the face over and beyond form," occurring in language rather than
in sight (Totality and Infinity 61 [66]).[1 <#foot1>] Levinas
explains: "Form--incessantly betraying its own manifestation,
congealing into plastic form, for it is adequate to the
same--alienates the exteriority of the other" (Totality and
Infinity 61 [66]). To encounter the other as a face is to
encounter her in her absolute alterity from myself, to be faced by
her as unthematizable, escaping all my attempts to understand and
thus to assimilate her. The face makes it impossible for me to
reduce the other to myself, to my ideas of her, to my theories,
categories, and knowledge. Since form betrays the other, for
Levinas, the face of ethics is not the face whose form we take in
with our eyes. On the contrary, the way we look at (and also
touch[2 <#foot2>]) faces is said to foreclose ethics: "The face is
present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be
comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor
touched--for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I
envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a
content" (Totality and Infinity 211 [194]).
2. In works such as "Violence and Metaphysics" and "The Principle of
Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," Jacques
Derrida, like Levinas, frequently associates vision with an
imposition of sameness on the other, and thus as violent in terms
of the philosophy of difference which he shares with Levinas and
feminist writers such as Hilhne Cixous.[3 <#foot3>] This essay
argues that blindness becomes a trope for Levinasian ethicality in
works by Derrida such as Memoirs of the Blind and Specters of
Marx. On the one hand, therefore, this essay explores the ways in
which Levinas and Derrida take up a similarly negative
understanding of the relationship between visuality and ethics,
giving rise to an ethics of blindness. On the other hand, it
argues that vision is not entirely rejected by either philosopher,
but that a recognition of other, less violent ways of seeing, and
a more positive conception of the ethical potential of vision,
co-exist with Levinas's and Derrida's more explicit critiques of
vision. Finally, this essay expands upon the latter, more positive
conception of vision to be found in the writings of both Levinas
and Derrida, or the possibilities of a visionary ethics.
The Violence of Vision
3. The "face" of ethics, according to Levinas, occurs in discourse
rather than in visual form. While seeing the other entails
enveloping her into the same, language "slices" through this
knowledge that vision imposes: "Speech cuts across vision" (/"La
parole tranche sur la vision"/) (Totality and Infinity 212 [195]).
The slicing of language divides or differentiates the other from
me. Discourse, like vision, may /try/ to thematize the other, but
while vision succeeds, the other can always evade the
categorizations of language, slip behind the Said, remain a
Saying, even in silence: "Words are said, be it only by the
silence kept, whose weight acknowledges this evasion of the Other"
(Totality and Infinity 212 [195]). The other, an interlocutor, can
engage with me in language, while she cannot respond in a similar
way to having been seen. While being seen is simply an absorption
of the other to which she cannot answer, she may always avoid
similar absorption in the case of discourse. According to Levinas,
in language the self and other enter into a relation in which
difference is established and cannot be overcome, even if only
because of the weight of the other's silence upon me.
4. In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida focuses on Levinas's
critique of the visual metaphor in Greco-Christian philosophy.
Specifically, Derrida draws out the manners in which Levinas
describes the interconnected concepts of vision, sun, light, and
truth as functioning to abolish the otherness of the face-to-face
or ethical relation in the works of philosophers from Plato to
Heidegger. Derrida describes Levinas's first book, Thiorie de
l'intuition dans la phinominologie de Husserl, as a first attempt
at developing "a philosophical discourse against light" (126
[85]), and against the pre-determining gaze which this light
allows. In this work, "the imperialism of /theoria/ already
bothered Levinas. More than any other philosophy, phenomenology,
in the wake of Plato, was to be struck with light" (126 [85]). In
phenomenological philosophy, for Levinas, vision pre-determines
the other who is seen, not allowing her to appear in her otherness
as she may do in language. As Derrida observes, Levinas raises an
even stronger critique later against Heidegger, who is described
as continuing to write within "a Greco-Platonic tradition under
the surveillance of the agency of the glance and the metaphor of
light . . . light, unveiling, comprehension or precomprehension"
("Violence and Metaphysics" 131 [88]). Vision already assumes an
understanding of the other, for Levinas, and this
pre-understanding prior to the visual encounter is forced onto the
other in a violent unveiling within the clearing of light. The
critique which Derrida describes Levinas as directing at the
history of philosophy, and at Husserl and Heidegger in particular,
is that through its search for the light of Being and of
phenomena, it abolishes difference and imposes the One and the
Same on the other. Greco-phenomenological philosophy creates
a world of light and of unity, a "philosophy of a world of
light, a world without time." In this heliopolitics, "the
social ideal will be sought in an ideal of fusion . . . the
subject . . . losing himself in a collective representation,
in a common ideal . . . . It is the collectivity which says
"us," and which, turned toward the intelligible sun, toward
the truth, experience, the other at his side and not face to
face with him . . . . /Miteinandersein/ also remains the
collectivity of the with." ("Violence and Metaphysics" 134 [90])
In his final summation of Levinas's critique of visuality and of
heliological philosophy, Derrida writes
therefore, there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude of
light. Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the
other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of
violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in
its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause with
oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. The
ancient clandestine friendship between light and power, the
ancient complicity between theoretical objectivity and
technico-political possession . . . . To see and to know, to
have and to will, unfold only within the oppressive and
luminous identity of the same. ("Violence and Metaphysics" 136
[91-2])
In contrast, in Totality and Infinity, as Derrida describes this
work, Levinas theorizes the face as "appearing" in language and
not only to vision, as a "certain non-light" which counteracts the
violence of visuality ("Violence and Metaphysics" 126 [85]).
5. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Filix Guattari discuss
faces and faciality as neutralizing and de-individualizing rather
than as other and unique: "Faces are not basically individual;
they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a field
that neutralizes in advance any expressions or connections
unamenable to the appropriate significations" (168). According to
Deleuze and Guattari, the "abstract machine of faciality" produces
faces, and these faces are not encountered in their alterity but
are rather always in a dichotomized relation to the same. The face
"is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black
hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typical
European" (176). The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the face
of the average white European man, and this face is taken as the
standard from which to measure deviation within a racist system:
"If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average
ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first
divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the
second or third category . . . . They must be Christianized, in
other words, facialized" (178). While for Levinas the face is
exteriority and alterity, for Deleuze and Guattari facialization
never abides alterity (it's a Jew, it's an Arab, it's a negro,
it's a lunatic . . . ). From the viewpoint of racism, there is
no exterior, there are no people on the outside . . . Racism
never detects the particles of the other; it propagates waves
of sameness until those who resist identification have been
wiped out. (178)
6. Despite the striking differences in the manners in which Levinas
and Deleuze and Guattari understand the face, Levinas might in
fact agree with Deleuze and Guattari in so far as the latter are
discussing a visualized face. While Levinas emphasizes that the
face of which he is writing is not the physiognomic or visually
encountered face, facialization for Deleuze and Guattari functions
through vision: the Christ-face, for instance, is said to have
been "exploited" through visual art, through the paintings of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. For Deleuze and Guattari, this
neutral "Bunker-face," which has been reproduced in visual media
and is encountered with the eyes, must be "destroyed, dismantled"
and "escape[d]," and, citing Henry Miller, this can be done by
cutting off vision, shutting the eyes: "I no longer look into the
eyes of the woman I hold in my arms . . . My eyes are useless, for
they render back only the image of the known . . . /Therefore I
close my ears, my eyes, my mouth/" (A Thousand Plateaus 171). In
so far as this is a material, visually encountered face, and not
the face of transcendence, Levinas might agree that it needs to be
escaped since, for Levinas, when it is the eyes which encounter
the other's face, Miller is apt in saying that "they render back
only the image of the known," that is a representation of the
same, the expected, the pre-understood, allowing no surprise or
alterity. The face which Levinas is describing, in contrast, is a
face which will always allow for surprise. This face is an
encounter with the Other /as/ other, and, as described in Totality
and Infinity, it is not discovered through the eyes, and is not
mediated through visuality or through visual art.
7. Despite this negative account of the role of vision in our meeting
the other, Levinas has chosen "the face" to encapsulate a great
deal of his ethical philosophy, and it seems that it functions
well for this purpose precisely because it corresponds to the way
we frequently experience faces through vision, encountering with
our eyes the expressiveness and difference of faces, perceiving
them not only as objects of our own gazes but as the site of /the
other's eyes/. Faces strike and evade us, frustrate us with their
secrets, are unthematizably complex, inaccessible beneath our
gaze. As Sartre notes in his discussion of the other's gaze, faces
disconcert us, decentralize and alienate the world from us,
precisely because they make us recognize the independence and
inaccessibility of the other's subjectivity. Faces make us aware
of our inability to grasp the other, the impossibility of knowing
what she thinks of us, of knowing what the familiar--now
unfamiliar--world (and we in it) is /for her/. Although there have
been tragic and violent attempts throughout history to categorize
individuals by facial as well as body types, and although Deleuze
and Guattari are correct that the visually-encountered,
physiognomic face is submitted to dichotomizing norms, it is also
true that we are fascinated by looking at faces in their
singularity, and it is often the sight of faces that arrests us,
haunts us, moves us to ethical action, pity, compassion,
forgiveness, aid, and love. This must at least partly explain why
Levinas chooses the face as the shorthand term for his complex
understanding of alterity, and why it can convince others of his
claims. It would seem, then, that Levinas takes advantage of the
compellingness of the visual metaphor of the face, the meaning it
holds for us as such, and yet denies that it functions in vision
in fact.
8. Although I will complexify this reading below, it appears--and has
been widely accepted--that Levinas equates seeing and knowing
(sa/voir), "knowledge or vision" (Totality and Infinity 212
[195]), and, as Derrida points out, also equates /savoir/ and
/voir/ with /avoir/, with a possessing or pre-possessing of the
other such that she is subsumed within the grasp of the knowing or
seeing subject. According to such a reading, it would follow that
for Levinas we never see without knowing, never look in wonder. We
are never spellbound, fascinated, bewildered, paralyzed or
surprised by that upon which we gaze. We are never absorbed by
what we look at rather than engaged in the absorption of it. We
never respond to what we see rather than imposing our knowledge on
it. We never have our expectations thwarted by sight. We never see
difference, we only see the same, the same as ourselves or the
same as our expectations of the other, which is thus allowed to be
no other. It is never the seen, therefore, which is active upon
our sight, or sight is never passive before the one looked upon,
who never acts upon our eyes.
9. With respect to Levinas's alternative to vision, language, it
seems that although Levinas is right in acknowledging silence as
discursive, in Totality and Infinity he too readily accepts
silence as response enough, or too hastily assumes that difference
will always be able to interrupt the relation between subject and
other through discourse. We may question whether it is sufficient
to say that the other can always respond in such a way that she
will be responded to in language, since silence itself is a
response that weighs on her interlocutor, or whether we need more
of an account of the functionings of power in discourse, the
distribution of access to language, the effects of this
distribution such that certain others can respond in language
proper while others may only respond in silence. There are no
forms of discourse explored by Levinas to which the other /cannot/
respond, to which the possibility of an other response is
foreclosed by the discourse itself.[4 <#foot4>] Silence is
presumed to be heard, is thought to always weigh on me as an
evasion of my themes, and Levinas does not theorize the manners in
which I can all too easily not hear the other's silence, or can
interpret her silence as submission to or agreement with what I
have said, that she may be forgotten in her quietude, and thus
that silence may not function as an interruption of the Said. We
may ask, therefore, whether this is enough of an account of the
ways that silence may all too easily be taken as agreement with
and adhesion to the same. Indeed, we need an account of how both
language and silence may cut (/tranche/) to do violence, to
silence, and not only to divide into an ethics of alterity.
Levinas appears to have too readily dismissed vision as an
imposition of knowledge on the other, while language has been too
hastily accepted as evading such inflictions, as always permitting
response. In fact, both vision and discourse function in some
cases as impositions of knowledge, power, and sameness on the
other, but both may function otherwise, as when the other's speech
or silence is heard and responded to, or when sight absorbs,
surprises, awes and bewilders the seeing subject, rather than
simply absorbing what she sees and hears.
10. Whatever the limitations of this discussion of language, Levinas's
understanding of vision is, at least, more complex than his most
definitive statements on the subject would lead us to believe. In
a late interview, "On Obliteration," Levinas again discusses the
face in terms of vision, but now in positive terms. He is
responding to a series of sculptures by Sacha Sosno, several of
which represent heads with the faces "obliterated" by geometrical
shapes. Here Levinas says that
there are different ways of being a face. Without mouth, eyes
or nose, an arm or a hand by Rodin is already a face. But the
napes of the necks of those people who wait in line at the
entrance gate of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow--in order to
deliver letters or packages to parents or friends arrested by
the GPU, as we find in Vasily Grossman's Life and
Destiny--those napes which still express anguish, anxiety and
tears to the people who see them, are obliterated faces,
though in a very different manner. (38)
It is clear from his example of the line-ups outside the Lubyanka
prison that Levinas is here willing to consider the ethical
experience of the face in visual terms--"those napes which still
express anguish, anxiety and tears to the people who /see/
them"--and to acknowledge more than one form of vision. From the
example of Rodin's sculpted hands, it is also clear that, despite
his earlier consignment of art to the Said, Levinas is willing to
think about works of visual art as having a face, a face that we
see. In a way that is interesting in terms of the discussion of
weeping below, Levinas also describes the face, in this case the
nape of the neck, as expressing tears.
11. David Michael Levin has repeatedly considered Levinas's complex
understanding of vision, most exhaustively in The Philosopher's
Gaze. Taking a very different stance towards "blindness" and the
narrowing of our human, lidded eyes than, as shall be seen,
Derrida does in Memoirs of the Blind, Levin dedicates this book to
the "remembrance of centuries of victims brought by inhumanity and
cultural blindness, by eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, and
hate, into depths of pain and suffering--or to even darker
cruelties engraved in dust and ashes." Like Derrida, Levin takes
an interest in Diderot's writing on blindness, but cites a very
different passage: while Derrida will focus on Diderot's writing
of a love letter blind (Memoirs 101), Levin cites Diderot's
suspicion that those who do not see may consequently be impaired
in their abilities to feel:
What difference is there to a blind person between a man
urinating and a man bleeding to death without speaking? Do we
ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the
smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack
of sight does on the blind? Thus do all our virtues depend on
our way of apprehending things and on the degree to which
external objects affect us . . . . I feel quite sure that were
it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer
qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no
larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their
own hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in pain
though we can crush an ant without a second thought, are these
actions not governed by the same principle? (Philosopher's
Gaze 4-5)
However dubious Diderot's generalizations about the capacity for
compassion in blind persons,[5 <#foot5>] this passage may have
something to say to us today, at a moment when we have available
to us ways of killing and enforcing poverty "blindly," or upon
vast numbers of sentient beings at a great distance, thus avoiding
looking upon the sufferings that we cause: we now place
slaughterhouses outside of our cities,[6 <#foot6>] we exploit
child and adult laborers in poverty-stricken countries, and we
engage in modern forms of warfare that do not require soldiers to
see the people they kill. Violence today is facilitated by our
blindness, by our no longer needing to meet our victims
face-to-face. Significantly, if we resist denying the relevance of
visuality in the face-to-face encounter, we can fruitfully use a
Levinasian theory of ethics to consider the grounds of possibility
of modern forms of violence.
12. In citing Diderot, and throughout his writings on vision, Levin is
arguing for vision's significance to our humanity and to our
capacity for compassion and ethics. If we are to speak of
compassion in the philosophy of Levinas, it is necessary to
understand it as a passive suffering for the other without
identification, a substitution which would not entail
understanding or being-with, which is not /Miteinandersein/.
Compassion, for Levinas, must be a response to the other's
suffering as other than one's own, a suffering-for and not a
suffering-with, or a passivity which avoids subsuming the other
into the same. Levinas writes, "the extreme passivity of
'incarnation'--being exposed to illness, suffering, to death is to
be exposed to compassion" (Otherwise than Being 139n12 [195n12]).
Following Levin, I would thus be arguing that one may be passively
exposed to the other's suffering through the visual encounter, and
as such be exposed to compassion as an encounter with alterity.
Compassionate substitution as such would not abolish the other's
otherness, and would not claim to actively grasp that suffering or
to understand, but would be a passive ethical response.
13. Levin notes that the philosopher has long been a figure who does
not look and who thus avoids this form of compassionate suffering.
The philosopher is one who talks and writes, turns his eyes
towards his books and thoughts, closes his eyes to contemplate,
shutting them upon the anguish around him. Even philosophers such
as Plato who have emphasized vision most often spoke of the "eye
of the intellect" rather than of the seeing eye, and Democritus
put out the latter to "see" with the former. At first glance,
then, Derrida and Levinas, in their preference for language over
and against vision, may not be novel in their philosophical
approach to vision, nor even particularly Hebraic, but rather
follow a tradition of philosophers averting their eyes. Yet Levin
finds many passages in which Levinas depends on vision for his
understanding of ethics, and argues that Levinas's understanding
that the visuality of his language is merely metaphoric is not,
cannot, and /should not/ be consistently maintained. Noting that
Levinas argues that the face "is not a form offered to serene
perception," Levin asks, "why must perception be understood as
serene, or contemplative?" and notes that it is not so in the
phenomenologies of Heidegger and of Merleau-Ponty (Philosopher's
Gaze 267). Questioning whether vision must also be active, an
imposition upon or absorption of the other, Levin finds moments in
Levinas's philosophy in which vision is understood as "passive"
and as "subjection,"[7 <#foot7>] and notes that in the "Preface"
to Totality and Infinity ethics is described as an "optics"
(Philosopher's Gaze 50, 259). Levin argues further that the
consistent decisions on Levinas's part to use visual metaphors to
describe the encounter with the other--the "shimmer of infinity,"
for instance--are diminished if they are not understood visually.
Levin asks: "does Levinas risk more than paradox, more than he
supposes, when he withdraws infinity absolutely from the
visible--when, for the sake of the ethical relation, he takes the
'metaphysical' experience of the other entirely out of the
visible, out of sight, rather than extending it from the visible
into the invisible?" (Philosopher's Gaze 259). Later he asks: "but
doesn't this withdrawal of the face from visibility and sight also
risk withdrawing from ethics all that might have been gained for
it by introducing the face and the face-to-face relation into the
discussion?" (265).
14. Levin suggests that Levinas sometimes recognizes that vision
functions ethically, otherwise than as philosophers, including
Levinas himself, have frequently assumed. For Levin, it is these
other ways of seeing that need to be further developed, and not
sight that must be rejected /tout court/. He cites T. S. Eliot's
confession, "I see the eyes but not the tears/ This is my
affliction," and it seems that this distinction may capture for
Levin the two manners of seeing in question: a seeing that does
not see tears, and a seeing that sees tears, and that perhaps sees
/through/ or /in/ tears as well. Levinas has most often assumed
the seeing eye that does not see tears, and that would not shed
tears in response to what it sees, that imposes and absorbs rather
than being passively struck by the other and her suffering. At
other moments, however, and in his consistent use of visual
metaphors to describe the ethical encounter, Levinas is developing
new ways of thinking about seeing, and thus new ways of seeing in
language and in history, ones that depend on an understanding of
the second way of seeing, an ethically responsive seeing, a seeing
of tears.
15. Returning to "Violence and Metaphysics," it is important to note
that even while drawing out Levinas's critique of heliological
philosophy, Derrida stresses the manner in which vision itself is
given to us through language, and thus that the problematic
features of vision are problems not intrinsic to the sense of
sight but rather embedded in metaphysical discourse. It is not so
simple a matter, therefore, as positing language as an ethical
alternative to seeing, for sight only comes to us through its
discursive constructions. As such, if we wish to change the
violent ways in which we see, we must first change the language of
vision. In particular, Derrida highlights the metaphorical sense
in which Levinas is speaking of vision and light, or the manner in
which the seeing that Levinas describes as violent is not
characteristic of the sense of sight per se, nor even of sight as
we need necessarily experience it, but is rather the manner in
which sight as we practice and think it has been given to us by
the Greek metaphysical tradition. As such, Derrida makes clear
that it is "the heliological /metaphor/" which is in question (136
[92]). This metaphor has functioned as an "alibi," Derrida argues,
or, in so far as we believe in the literalness of the metaphor, we
"innocentize" oppression, we "turn our gazes away" from the
violence, and thus, in a sense, the metaphor of light allows us to
not see, or prevents us from seeing otherwise than as the metaphor
allows: this light in language blinds us and prevents us from
seeing the other as she is and from responding to her oppression.
As such, Derrida argues that Levinas is not really advocating
blindness rather than sight, but is "denouncing the blindness of
theoretism" as a metaphysically constructed way of seeing which
does not allow us to see the other ("Violence and Metaphysics" 130
[87]). Levinas does not describe a natural history of a sensation,
but the history of an experience mediated by language.
16. Nevertheless, as Derrida goes on to say, there is no history
except that which occurs through language, and Borges is right
when he says that "perhaps universal history is but the history of
several metaphors," metaphors amongst which the example of light
is predominant and inescapable. Indeed, Derrida notes that Levinas
himself does not escape the use of this metaphor: "Who will ever
dominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without first
being pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? How,
for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany of
the other free itself of light?" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 137
[92]). The nudity of the other is itself described by Levinas in
terms of visuality and manifestation, as epiphany, or, as Levin
has noted, as the "shimmer of infinity." As Derrida describes it,
"the nudity of the face of the other--this epiphany of a certain
non-light before which all violence is to be quieted and
disarmed--will still have to be exposed to a certain
enlightenment" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 126 [85]).
17. There is hence no escaping the metaphors of vision, light,
enlightenment, and manifestation, and it must therefore be a
transformation of that metaphor which Levinas would enact in his
writing, or the first steps towards the theorization of other ways
of seeing which he is taking, even if by all appearances, or in a
more self-conscious way, he seems to be rejecting vision and light
altogether. As such, on this more nuanced reading, which may or
may not have been Levinas's own, it is not non-vision which would
be sought by Levinas, for, in Derrida's words, "light perhaps has
no opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night" ("Violence and
Metaphysics" 137 [92]). It cannot be darkness and blindness that
Levinas would prefer to vision and light, but, as Derrida
stresses, a form of seeing which is other than that which the
Greco-Christian tradition of philosophy has inscribed in language
and history, what Levin calls a "postmetaphysical vision."[8
<#foot8>]
18. While Derrida makes it clear, then, that the vision in question is
metaphorical, that it is but a "technico-political" alibi, as we
have seen he suggests that this metaphor is never entirely
escapable in its determination of how we see and understand sight.
If this is an inescapable metaphor, the only solution to its
violence is to transform it, "modifying only the same metaphor and
choosing the best light." Derrida cites Borges again: "perhaps
universal history is but the history of the diverse /intonations/
of several metaphors" (137 [92]). One is tempted to think that a
transformed metaphor that rethinks without escaping light could be
moonlight, a gentler, more obscure and mysterious light than the
penetrating rays of the philosopher's sun which expose, burn, and
may blind the eyes, preventing real seeing. For Derrida, whatever
form of light this may be, it is
not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue,
but a community anterior to Platonic light . . . . Only the
other, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is
before the shared truth, within a certain nonmanifestation and
a certain absence. ("Violence and Metaphysics" 135 [91])
Not escaping the language of light, Levinas, in his use of words
such as "epiphany" and "shimmering," is choosing the best light,
is modifying the metaphor to render it less violent and more
ethical. For Levinas it is precisely through language that we can
escape the violence of vision as language has produced it, and
thus, according to a Levinasian reading of vision that Levinas
himself may or may not have intended, it is through language that
the experience of light will be, not avoided, but transformed.
19. Despite this more nuanced account of vision in Levinas to be found
in Levin's work and in Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics," as
shall be seen in the following section, it is the more explicit
account of sight that is most often taken as Levinas's final word
on vision, and that, it would seem, has at times "guided" or at
least been repeated by Derrida in his self-avowed blindness.[9
<#foot9>] Despite his careful reading of Levinas, Derrida will at
times himself suggest a voluntary blinding, a closing and turning
away of the eyes in order to avoid the vicissitudes of vision that
he and Levinas describe. Although in "Violence and Metaphysics"
Derrida argues that the solution to the violence of light cannot
be a simple rejection of vision for language, in later works he
states that we need to shut our eyes in order to open our ears.
An Ethics of Blindness and an Ethics of Tears
20. Because the face, for Levinas, at least on the most obvious
reading, is not seen, and the face-to-face encounter occurs
otherwise than through the gaze, it is immediately appropriate
that Derrida would see the blindman as an ethical figure, for all
of the blindman's encounters with others must occur without seeing
their form.[10 <#foot10>] In Specters of Marx and Memoirs of the
Blind, Derrida considers positions of blindness in terms that, for
Levinas, describe ethical relations. A particular form of
blindness described in Specters of Marx and Echographies of
television is the "visor effect," the situation in which "we do
not see who looks at us" (Specters 7). For Derrida, the most
dramatic example of such a scenerio of a-reciprocal vision occurs
in hauntings:
The specter is not simply this visible invisible that I can
see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without any
possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I
am blind, blind by situation. The specter enjoys the right of
absolute inspection. He is the right of inspection itself.
(Echographies 137 [121])
The "right of inspection" ("/droit de regard/") is described
earlier in Echographies as "the right to control and surveillance"
(42 [34]). This right to see, control, and survey is evoked as a
specifically masculine form of power: "the right to /penetrate/ a
'public' or 'private' space, the right to 'introduce' the eye and
all these optical prostheses . . . into the 'home' of the other
[/il s'agisse du droit de pinitrer dans un espace 'public' ou
'privi', d'y faire 'entrer,' dans le 'chez-soi' de l'autre/]"
(Echographies 42 [34]). This phallic vision infiltrates into the
intimate spaces of others either through the use of the eye itself
or through prosthetic devices such as surveillance cameras, and,
as shall be seen, Derrida describes the feminized, blind, and
a-reciprocal submission to this masculine gaze in ethical terms.
21. In Specters of Marx Derrida uses the example of the ghost of
Hamlet's father to describe the "visor effect," for the Danish
specter wears a helmet through which he can see those whom he
haunts without their being able to see him. The visor
lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level of
the head and beneath the visor, it permits the
so-called-father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut into
it and adjusted so as to permit him to see without being seen,
but to speak in order to be heard. The helmet, like the visor,
did not merely offer protection: it topped off the coat of
arms and indicated the chief's authority, like the blazon of
his nobility. (Specters 8)
The masculine, a-reciprocal penetration of the "right of
inspection" is described by Derrida as paternal, indicative of the
specter's authority, his right to speak and to be heard. Specters
are presented by Derrida as having (and indeed as /being/) the
"droit de regard" in so far as they see us, haunt us, even while
we cannot look back, with an optical right which entails all other
rights (Echographies 42).
22. As Derrida describes it, we sense specters, feel them, feel their
gazes, and even to some degree see them through this sensation of
touch, while they remain intangible, ungraspable, and invisible.
This "furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible" is
presented by Derrida as
the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but
still the body of some/one/ as some/one other/. And of
some/one other/ that we will not hasten to determine as self,
subject, person, consciousness, spirit, and so forth . . . .
This spectral /someone other looks at us/, we feel ourselves
being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before
and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute
anteriority . . . and asymmetry, according to an absolutely
unmasterable disproportion . . . . To feel ourselves seen by a
look which it will always be impossible to cross, that is the
/visor effect/ . . . . Since we do not see the one who sees
us, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction . . .
we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on
its voice. An essentially blind submission to his secret.
(Specters 7)
In Totality and Infinity, as we have seen, Levinas writes that in
the ethical encounter the other is neither seen nor touched (211).
In Derrida's description of being haunted by a specter, of this
"blind submission to his secret," the other is once again neither
seen nor touched, although we sense the visual relation, that we
are being seen, not through our own vision but through feeling,
"we /feel/ ourselves seen," even while the other remains
ungraspable and intangible. Unable to grasp or to see the other,
in the spectral encounter as in the ethical encounter for Levinas,
we respond to the ghost without being able to abolish his
alterity. We realize that the ghost is other without "hasten[ing]
to determine" him. We are unable even to categorize him as a self
or as a subject, as a consciousness or person, and as such he
remains radically unthematizable. As with the Levinasian ethical
relation, the haunting of a specter is also asymmetrical in power,
for the ghost has the power to penetrate ocularly and bodily into
our private spaces, to see and to speak and to be heard and to
command, even as we cannot see or grasp this bodily form, and must
answer blindly. We are thus asymmetrically submitted to the other,
we are vulnerable and exposed, and this submission takes place in
language: with specters, according to Derrida, we submit to the
other's voice. We must learn to speak to ghosts, which is not to
command them--Derrida notes Horatio's inability to speak to ghosts
when he "imperiously" "charges" and "conjures" the specter of
Hamlet's father. Derrida writes, "as theoreticians or witnesses,
spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that
looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most
competent position to do what is necessary: speak to the specter"
(Specters 11). Looking is once more opposed to language or to
speaking, and it is the blind submission to language which is
required in the ethical relation, and the absence of sight on the
subject's part which gives rise to its possibility.
23. In multiple ways we have seen that Derrida chooses to explore the
haunting of the self in terms that evoke the ethical relation in
Levinas, a relation in which the face-to-face encounter is an
a-reciprocal response to an elevated other whose alterity I cannot
subsume or grasp, which I cannot reduce through vision, touch, or
knowledge, and which takes place in language and commands me, in
response to which I must listen and speak. The feminized position
of being blind in the presence of masculinized and authoritative
other, of being unable to return a specifically patriarchal and
"male gaze," of being forced to respond to another through
language even while the linguistic exchange must take place on the
other's terms--which Sartre and a quite a few feminists might
describe as a hell of other people (if we were only able to
thematize the ghost as such)--is thus presented by Derrida as the
condition under which an encounter with alterity--a feminized
ethics, for Levinas--may occur.
24. In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida presents an even more sustained
discussion of the blindman as an ethical figure in Levinasian
terms. Derrida describes the blindman as necessarily "exposed,
naked, offered up to the gaze and to the hand, indeed to the
manipulations of the other--he is also a subject deceived . . . .
The other can take advantage of him [/L'autre peut abuser de
lui/]" (97 [94]). This emphasis on the blindman's openness to
potential abuse is similar to Levinas's description of the self's
exposure, her nudity before the other, and of the suffering she
undergoes at the other's hands. As Levinas acknowledges, "I can be
exploited" (Otherwise than Being 93 [55]). Similarly, while
Levinas describes the self as a prisoner in his own skin, unable
to get out of the skin to identify with the other, Derrida
emphasizes the manner in which blindness is experienced as a
"walling in" or being walled [/murie/] into one's own body, cut
off from others and the world (Memoirs 45-6, 120). This is not
"the bad solitude of solidity and self-identity" that represses
ethical transcendence, or the solitude that "does not appear to
itself to be solitude, because it is the solitude of totality and
opacity" of which Derrida writes in "Violence and Metaphysics"
(135 [91]), but the solitude of unfulfillable obsession for the
other, of substitution without identification, of love without
possession or knowledge. Levinas writes of the subject as
strangled within the restriction of its own epidermal barrier as
it longs for the other: "accused in its skin, too tight for its
skin," "as it were stuffed with itself, suffocating under itself,
insufficiently open," suffering "constriction in one's skin",
"backed up against itself, in itself because without any recourse
in anything, in itself like in its skin . . . and obsessed by the
others" (Otherwise than Being 106, 110-112). This subject's heart
is "beating dully against the walls of [its own] skin," but unable
to break free. For Derrida, the blindman's very eyes, like the
skin for Levinas, become similarly isolating prison walls: "The
confinement of the blind man can thus isolate him behind . . .
hard walls," "these leaden walls" (46 [40]). Derrida cites Rilke's
Die Blinde, who says, "/Ich bin von allem verlassen--/ Ich bin
eine Insel/" and "/Ich bin eine Insel und allein/," while
Derrida's own mother, dying with cataracts "veiling" her eyes is,
like /die Blinde/, described by Derrida as having "eyes walled up
[/vermauerten Augen/] [/les// yeux emmuris/]" (Memoirs 45-6 [40]).
25. While the blindman's vulnerability and exposure to abuse from the
other, as well as his "walled-in" state which severs him in pain
from the other, place him initially in the role (in Levinasian
terms) of the self, Derrida also describes the vulnerability of
the blindman in terms that situate him as the other. He is
described, for instance, as evoking an ethical response /from/ the
self, in his imploration for a guiding hand. Derrida writes that
"the theme of drawings of the blind is, before all else, the hand"
(Memoirs 12 [4]). The blindman is almost inevitably represented in
art with arms outstretched, his hand preceding him tentatively,
imploringly, as he is obliged to venture in the world, exposed and
at risk. The outstretched hands, Derrida writes, "do not seek
anything in particular; they implore the other, the other hand,
the helping or charitable hand, the hand of the other who promises
them sight" (Memoirs 12 [6]). In the autobiographical essay,
"Savoir," upon which Derrida would comment at length in the
co-authored Veils, Hilhne Cixous describes her own "blindness" or
myopia in similarly ethical terms. In a manner which Derrida
appreciates, Cixous mourns the loss of her blindness through laser
surgery. Like Derrida, who sees the blindman's step as hesitant,
while the seeing person is too sure, too certain, or too knowing,
imposing his vision on the world, Cixous associates myopia or
blindness with hesitation--"I shall always hesitate. I shall not
leave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see"
("Savoir" 13)--and thus relates sight, like Derrida, to an all too
certain step, to an irresponsible knowing.
26. In the final pages of Memoirs, Derrida describes weeping as a form
of blindness which is the "truth" of the eyes, its most human
function.[11 <#foot11>] He writes,
now if tears /come to the eyes/, if they /well up in them/,
and if they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the
very course of experience, in this coursing of water, an
essence of the eye, of man's eye, in any case, the eye
understood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacred
allegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be
destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they
veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. And
what they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there where
the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would be
nothing less than /al_theia/, the /truth/ of the eyes, whose
ultimate destination they would thereby reveal: to have
imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer,
love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or gaze. Even before
it illuminates, revelation is the moment of the "tears of
joy."(Memoirs 125 [126])
Weeping, as opposed to seeing, is the supreme function of human
eyes for Derrida because, while other animals can see, only humans
cry with their eyes (of course, while Derrida does not note this,
other animals do cry and respond to the suffering of human and
animal others /vocally/).[12 <#foot12>] As Derrida also observes,
while not all humans can see, all humans, including the blind, can
weep. Derrida notes that in representation it is most often women
who weep, as in the representations of Mary and other women at the
cross[13 <#foot13>], and so exemplary blindness, like that of the
subject encountering the "visor effect" or the a-reciprocal gaze,
is thus culturally feminine, as is ethics for Levinas. In Totality
and Infinity, the feminine is related to the receptive or
welcoming domesticity of ethics, while in Otherwise than Being or
Beyond Essence ethics is associated with maternity. We may think
once more of Mary's tears.
27. Some years before Memoirs of the Blind, in "The Principle of
Reason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," Derrida
compares human eyes to those of animals, recalling Aristotle's
distinction between animals with "hard, dry eyes" and those with
eyelids. Hard, dry eyes, can never shut but must always see, while
lidded eyes can blink, close, retreat from vision. In this essay
Derrida argues that sight or knowledge (sa/voir) is insufficient,
and that we, and the institute of the university in particular,
need to privilege not (or not only) the eye, but also the ear, and
thus to "shut our eyes in order to be better listeners" (4). As we
have seen, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx that scholars are
the least well equipped to speak with specters, because they rely
excessively on seeing/knowing (sa/voir); in "The Principle of
Reason" Derrida once more characterizes the university as
predominantly ocular. It is imperative, therefore, that scholars
learn to take advantage of being the sorts of animals with lidded
eyes, in order not merely to see and know, but to listen and
learn: "Opening the eyes to know, closing them--or at least
listening--in order to know how to learn and to learn how to know"
(5). Derrida asks if, figuratively speaking, the university, that
institute of knowledge, must not "close its eyes or narrow its
outlook . . . . Shutting off sight in order to learn," and insists
that the university must not be a dry-eyed or sclerophthalmic
animal. Of such animals he writes, "what is terrifying about an
animal with hard eyes and a dry glance is that it always sees"
(5). He describes the sclerophthalmic animal as "endowed" with
"hard eyes permanently open to a nature that he is to dominate, to
rape if necessary, by fixing it in front of himself, or by
swooping down on it like a bird of prey" (10). A human being, on
the other hand, "can lower the sheath, adjust the diaphragm,
narrow his sight, the better to listen, remember, and learn" (10)
Derrida associates knowing with seeing, while learning requires
hearing, and a figurative or literal shutting of the eyes. Here
again the assumptions arise that vision can only be violent and
never responsive, can only be about knowledge, an imposition of
knowledge on the other, a swooping down like a bird of prey, a
rape, rather than a way to learn, a way in which pre-conceived
knowledge is confounded, and an imposition on us to which we
unwillingly respond. We may pause and recall here, however,
Levin's dedication to The Philosopher's Gaze, in which he refers
to "eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, and hate" and to "cultural
blindness," and thus think twice about Derrida's account of the
virtues of the lids of human eyes.
28. Strangely, this discussion of hard, dry eyes foreshadows Derrida's
own medical experience, a few years later, as he describes it in
Memoirs, in which a facial paralysis prevented him from shutting
his eye, and hence from attending his first scheduled appointment
at the Louvre. Derrida suddenly found himself a sclerophthalmic
animal, the terrifying "bird of prey" he had described in his
earlier essay. He portrays himself in this period: "the left side
of the face stiffened, the left eye transfixed and horrible to
behold in a mirror . . . the eyelid no longer closing normally: a
loss of the 'wink' or 'blink,' therefore, this moment of blindness
that ensures sight its breath" (Memoirs 38 [32]). It was when
Derrida could blink again that, grateful to have once more the
respite of blindness, he went to the Louvre and chose to organize
his exhibition around the theme of the closed eye. Like his friend
and sometimes co-author Hilhne Cixous, who has said "I am always
trying to write with my eyes closed" ("Appendix" 146), Derrida
emphasizes that he wrote sections of Memoirs of the Blind blindly,
in the dark or looking away from the page. Although he does not
raise again the discussion of hard and /dry/-eyed animals, animals
that are never blind, it is of interest that he now discusses
blindness in terms of tears, of eyes wet and soft with sorrow.
29. Derrida concludes his book on blindness with the citation of
Marvell's poem, "Eyes and Tears," the concluding line of which is
"these weeping eyes, those seeing tears." Derrida's interlocutor
asks, "tears that see . . . . Do you believe?" and Derrida
answers, "I don't know, one has to believe" (129). Here, Derrida's
"step" is hesitant, like that of the blindman or the myopic
Cixous; he does not know, and he considers tears that /see/, and
wishes to believe in this /vision/. Yet, unlike Marvell, Derrida's
discussion of tears has not been of tears that see, nor of eyes in
tears which see, but of tears which blind, and of other forms of
blindness, of eyes which do not see. It is significant that wet,
soft eyes are /not/ blind eyes, and that we can see through tears,
and see tears. We see while in tears, and see others in tears, and
cry because of what we see. Vision is not blinded by tears, but
rather may respond in tears, tears which blur without fully
obscuring, veil with transparent matter. Seeing in tears is thus
an example of the way in which sight may be confused, unknowing,
and thus not always an imposition of knowledge on the object of
the gaze. Because we cry at what we see, and cry involuntarily,
crying is an instance of sight which is passive, a response to the
object of the gaze acting upon the eyes, an example of another way
of seeing other than that which has dominated Western metaphysics.
30. Derrida illustrates his discussion of tears with an image of a
woman at the cross who, weeping, covers her eyes with her hands in
the gesture of the blindman, and yet we may think of ways of
weeping in which the eyes are not covered, closed, or blinded.
Levin, in a chapter of The Opening of Vision entitled "Crying for
a Vision," conceives of seeing, and seeing in tears specifically,
not as a form of knowing but of learning. His aim is to "to
reintegrate the perceptivity of crying into the larger process of
vision, letting it show itself as a moment of extremely important
learning." Unlike Derrida, he sees tears not as blinding the eyes,
but as enabling them to see in an ethical manner. He elaborates:
"With the crying, I began to see, briefly, and with pain. Only
with the crying, only then, does vision begin" (Opening of Vision
172):
our eyes are not only articulate organs of sight; they are
also the emotionally expressive organs of crying . . . . Is it
merely an accidental or contingent fact that the eyes are
capable of crying as well as seeing? Or is crying in the most
intimate, most closely touching relationship to seeing? . . .
What is the ontological significance of crying as a mode of
visionary being? (PAGE ##?)
Like Derrida, Levin notes that only human beings cry with their
eyes, and thus that crying may well be what makes our eyes
specifically human. Unlike Derrida, however, for Levin crying is
also what makes our /vision/ human, rather than blinding that
vision. Here it is not a matter of "imploration rather than
vision" (Memoirs 125 [126]), but of vision which implores and
responds to imploration. Levin argues that crying may "ennoble"
vision in the human sphere, the sphere of ethics, and that the
absence of the ability to shed tears may be what "marks off the
inhuman." This inability describes the Nazi commandant and his
victim, neither of whom could cry, having been dehumanized in very
different ways. Levin writes:
by the "inhuman" I mean the monstrous and the inwardly dead:
the Nazi commandant, for example, and his victim, the Jew,
locked into a dance of death, neither one, curiously, able to
shed a tear: for different reasons, their eyes are dry, empty,
hollow. What we have seen, we who are alive today, of human
cruelty and evil demands that we give thought to this capacity
for crying and examine, looking into ourselves, the nature--or
character--of its relation to vision. What does this capacity
make visible? What is its truth? What is the truth it sees?
What does it know as a "speech" of our nature? How does it
guide our vision? (PAGE ##)
31. The comparison of tears to speech is interesting in that we are
able to think of the eyes (and eyes in tears) as ears, and also as
mouths, as speaking to the other in "words" that oral language may
not contain or allow, and as a way of responding, of hearing and
answering, which is again both extra-linguistic and an /other/
form of speech. Levinas, once more, is thus too quick in his
opposition of vision and language, of vision as an imposition of
sameness and speech as an opening to alterity, because tears can
be words, words spoken, words responding to, and also, like
writing, words /seen/.
32. While, unlike Derrida, Levin does not elaborate on the cultural or
stereotypical femininity of tears, he notes that seeing
objectively, objectifyingly, with wide, dry eyes, in the manner
which philosophy (and feminism) has almost always conceived of
vision, with the "right of inspection" or "droit de regard," is
perhaps to see, and to see vision, through "masculine" eyes.[14
<#foot14>] Arguably this talk of "masculinity" and "femininity" in
Levinas, Derrida, and Levin raises problems from a feminist
perspective,[15 <#foot15>] but if I am to follow Levinas, Derrida,
and Levin for a moment, I would argue that if there can be a
transformation of the metaphor of vision and light, if we can
conceive of a more "feminine" visuality, then it would be a
mistake to separate vision from ethics entirely, or to give vision
only to the other in the ethical relation (as in the visor
effect). This, however, is what Levinas and Derrida seem at least
frequently to have done. Despite some ambivalence, and some
self-consciousness of the metaphorical status of what is being
rejected, they nevertheless hastily accept vision as an
exclusively "masculine" sense organ and deficient as such from the
perspective of a "feminine" ethics, rather than explicitly
exploring the possibilities of new light-metaphors, of a
"feminine" vision--a "feminine" vision which, in fact, like its
exemplary capacity to cry, is simply human. Ethical vision as I am
here theorizing it is not therefore opposed to the sight of men,
but to the hard, dry-eyed sight of Derrida's sclerophthalmic
animals. One way of thinking about this ethical vision is through
a consideration of the capacity of human eyes to cry.
Conclusions: Looking Away and Looking Again
33. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida discusses Edgar Allan Poe's "The
Oval Portrait," in which an artist is so intent on knowing his
wife that he keeps her in a room for days to examine her and
reproduce exactly what he sees (Memoirs 41). He grasps her form,
captures her image, and hence possesses her with literally
breath-taking lifelikeness on canvas. This intense being
gazed-upon causes the sitter to fall dead at the moment her
husband completes her portrait. Indeed, she has been quietly dying
with each of her husband's glances. Despite his intense looking,
the artist had not /noticed/ his wife's growing pallor, the manner
in which her face had been slowly robbed of its color as he placed
it on canvas. The artist had gazed upon his wife knowingly, but
without visually encountering the alterity of her from his
knowledge, of encroaching death. The wife ceases to exist as a
separate person from her husband and his art at the moment he has
known the last detail of her, and thus her alterity is
extinguished through his scrutinizing gaze. Although Derrida does
not note this, it is remarkable that when the eyes of the narrator
of "The Oval Portrait" first fall upon this violent picture, his
reaction is to close his eyes. Such is the understanding of vision
most often assumed by Levinas and Derrida, in which /voir/ is
/savoir/ and /avoir/, and /s/a/voir/ is violence, and what we
ought to do is shut our eyes. I have suggested, however, that
perhaps this way of seeing is not /sa/-voir, but /son/-voir, or
rather /sans/-voir, a "masculine" seeing which goes without
seeing, without allowing to see and to be seen, and without
responding to the seen. An /other/ way of seeing, however, a less
culturally "masculine," less active, less violent seeing, a
moonlit-seeing perhaps, is suggested by Derrida's own reading of
Levinas's critique of vision when he suggests that Levinas is not
arguing for "a community without light, not a blindfolded
synagogue," but for a non-neutral, non-Platonic light, and a new
way of seeing in the light of which "the totally other . . . can
be manifested as what it is" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 135
[91]). As Levin notes, and as Derrida comes /close/ to seeing in
Memoirs, this would be a culturally "feminine" but in fact
specifically /human/ way of seeing, a seeing in tears.[16 <#foot16>]
34. Interestingly, just as Levinas's explicit rejection of vision from
ethical relations can and has been nuanced to show an
understanding of the manners in which vision may in fact respond
to the other, or can give rise to an ethical encounter rather than
abolish its possibility, on a few occasions in his writings,
beyond realizing that the language of vision can be transformed,
Derrida goes so far as to attribute to vision as we already
experience it a more positive and ethical function, and theorizes
"voir et savoir" as "incommensurables" (Echographies 131).[17
<#foot17>] It is with these moments in Derrida's work that I would
like to conclude.
35. First, it can be noted that in his description of the ethical
response to the blindman, Derrida assumes that I respond to the
blindman's outstretched hand because I see the sight of him which
moves me, and thus respond, am responsible for the Other, through
vision. Similarly, in Echographies of Television, Derrida
describes another situation in which vision called spectators to
ethical and political responsibility, to respond against the
violence done to others, and in which sight was passive. In the
passage in question, Derrida describes the visual witnessing by
television spectators of the police brutality against Rodney King.
He writes,
for the scene was, unfortunately, banal. Other, much worse
scenes happen, alas, here and there, every day. Only there it
was, this scene was filmed and shown to the entire nation. No
one could look the other way, away from what had, as it were,
been put right before his eyes, and even forced into his
consciousness or onto his conscience, apparently without
intervention, without mediator. And all of a sudden this
became intolerable, the scene seemed unbearable, the
collective or delegated responsibility proved to be too much.
(Echographies 105 [91-2])
In this case, Derrida describes the manner in which vision gave
rise to an ethical response as language arguably could not: while
Americans /knew/ that there were instances of racial profiling and
brutality against visible minorities by the police force every
day--and knew this based on having /heard/ and /read/ of such
cases--they could (and by and large did) avoid responding to this
knowledge, and it was only when confronted with one such scene
/visually/ that a collective ethical response immediately
occurred. In this case, both the sight of the beating and the
ethical response to which it gave rise were "imposed" on the
viewers, and thus vision, and the spectator's response to what was
seen, are described as passive: a sight is forced upon one's eyes
and one cannot help but respond. Although, as Derrida notes, such
scenes as the Rodney King beating occur every day, with the
televisation of the filming of this particular incident "no one
could look the other way" ("/personne ne pouvait plus ditourner
les yeux/"). Unlike the narrator's response in "The Oval
Portrait," in Derrida's discussion of the Rodney King video it is
ethically crucial that one /not/ turn one's eyes away from the
violence one sees. Moreover, one /cannot/ turn away from this
sight or shut one's eyes to it, for vision is already passively
captivated by what has "been put right before his eyes," to which
one responds "all of a sudden": one is already responding to what
has been taken in before one has the choice to look away.
Response, the realization that an intolerable situation is
occurring and must be responded to, happens all of a sudden
through vision, as may not be the case with language. In this
discussion we see that, contrary to the other instances in which
vision is theorized as active and violent in Derrida's writing,
here vision is theorized as the passive imposition of ethical
responsibility upon a subject.
36. What these examples show is that, as Derrida argues in "Violence
and Metaphysics," the theory of vision and light as violent is but
a metaphor, even if it is one of the fundamental metaphors which
has shaped our history, experience, and thought, and which has
served too often as an alibi for real violence. Nonetheless, I
have argued that Levinas's persistent use of visual metaphors
throughout his work despite his own critique of visuality shows
not only that this metaphor is, as Derrida says, inescapable, but
also that it can be transformed to describe other ways of seeing
that we already experience. Derrida notes that there is no
alternative to the metaphor of light, and certainly night and
blindfolded synagogues are not such alternatives, and yet we can
think of options other than the binding and blinding of eyes, and
of other forms of light than the penetrating gaze of the sun. As
such, we can develop new metaphors of light and seeing, moonlit
metaphors of bewildered and responsive vision. One such image of
vision I have developed in this essay is that of seeing tears and
of seeing in tears, an image that, as seen, occurs briefly in
Levinas's discussion of the sculptures of Sacha Sosno, and equally
briefly in the conclusion of Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind. As
Derrida concludes Memoirs, so I would like to conclude here with
the suggestion that we need to believe in "these weeping eyes,
those seeing tears," and in a visionary ethics.
/ Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto
chloe.taylor@utoronto.ca /
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Notes
Matthias Fritsch, Robert Gibbs, Iain MacDonald, and the reviewers
at Postmodern Culture have given me helpful and encouraging
comments on this paper, for which I give many thanks.
1 <#ref1>. On Levinas's discussion of vision and its relation to
Judaism, see Jay 543 ff.
2 <#ref2>. For a discussion of vision and touch in Levinas's
philosophy, see Vasseleu.
3 <#ref3>. For a discussion of the shared critiques of the
phallogocentrism of vision in Derrida and Cixous, see Jay 493-542.
4 <#ref4>. I am thinking for instance of Lyotard's discussion of
the /differend./
5 <#ref5>. A disability critique of Diderot's discussion of
blindness and of the way in which blindness functions as a trope
for inethicality and ethicality respectively in the works of Levin
and Derrida could be warranted, although it is beyond the scope of
the current paper.
6 <#ref6>. For a discussion of whether "other animals" can be
considered to be others whom we encounter in ethical, face-to-face
relations on Levinasian terms, see Llewelyn.
7 <#ref7>. Levin is discussing Levinas's "Language and Proximity";
see his Collected Philosophical Papers 118.
8 <#ref8>. See Levin, "Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight" 398.
9 <#ref9>. Derrida refers to his writing of Memoirs of the Blind
as the confessions of a blindman. He also claims to be struck by
"a double infirmity: to this day, I still think that I will never
know either how to draw or to look at a drawing" (37). For a
critical discussion of Derrida's blindness and anti-ocularism in
the curatorship of the Louvre exhibition and Memoirs of the Blind,
see Kelly 108-120). For a more positive discussion of Derrida's
writings on art, see Krell. For Krell's discussion of the Louvre
exhibition and Memoirs of the Blind in particular, see 50-81.
10 <#ref10>. Derrida uses the term "blindman" rather than "blind
person" because he notes that most blind persons represented in
art (other than those blinded by tears) are men. The point that
the blind must encounter the other through language rather than
through form is qualified by the manner in which the blind may
encounter the other's form through touch, which, for Levinas, is
also not a manner in which the face may be encountered.
11 <#ref11>. For a discussion of tears in Derrida, see Caputo.
12 <#ref12>. Marvell writes, "For others too can see, or sleep/
But only human eyes can weep" (qtd. in Derrida, Mimoires 130).
13 <#ref13>. The last image reproduced in Mimoires is of a woman
weeping at the cross.
14 <#ref14>. In The Opening of Vision (282), Levin cites Carol
Gilligan's observation as to "how accustomed we have become to
seeing life through men's eyes," from In a Different Voice.
15 <#ref15>. Levinas himself notes the "archaic" and merely
cultural status of these gendered terms, and says in an interview:
"Perhaps . . . all these allusions to the ontological differences
between the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaic
if, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two
genres [also meaning "two /genders/" in French]), they would
signify that the participation in the masculine and the feminine
were the attributes of every human being" (Ethics and Infinity 68
[71]). Levinasian feminist philosophers such as Leora Batnitzky
have argued that Levinas's use of gendered terminology, although
it revalorizes traditionally feminine values and activities, does
more harm than good, for it undermines the philosophical value of
Levinas's claims about the human, and reinscribes care as the
domain and responsibility of women. See for instance Batnitzky 23.
For further discussion of these points, see my "Levinasian Ethics
and Feminist Ethics of Care."
16 <#ref16>. I say that Derrida comes close to seeing this,
because though he recognizes that tears are "feminine," he does
not recognize them as a "feminine" form of seeing, but only as a
"feminine" form of blindness.
17 <#ref17>. In "Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight," Levin
also argues that Derrida has a positive as well as a negative
account of vision. Levin claims that Derrida, like Foucault, sees
modernity as ocularcentric, and resists this ocularcentricity, but
that neither philosopher entirely rejects vision. Rather, both are
critiquing and employing vision strategically in order to theorize
and bring about a "postmetaphysical vision" (398). Levin thus
writes that Derrida and Foucault "make use of vision in a critique
of vision. Thus we must see that there is a potential in our
vision that is opposed to the potential that our modern age has
tended for the most part to realize. Our vision also has an
emancipatory, or utopian, potential" (404).
In an example, Levin notes that Derrida prioritizes /graphe/
(writing) over /phone/ (sound), and thus prioritizes something
visible (written words) over something invisible (voice); however
/phone/ may be more inscribed than /graphe/ in the desire to see,
for one hears the other's voice when in her presence, and thus is
able to look at the one who speaks. In contrast, one reads, and
sees, the other's writing in her absence. Preferring the visible
/graphe/ to the invisible /phone/ thus uses vision to subvert the
ocularcentric metaphysics of presence (412). It is not simply that
Derrida rejects vision, but rather that he chooses strategically
certain forms of vision in order to subvert the dominant visual
metaphysics.
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