Language :: Transcendence :: Cinema

No matter the passage of now over forty years, the question of the relation of language and transcendence raised in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” is decisive. On first glance, this is a simple matter: to speak/write is to traffic in the logos, so any move outside being or essence (in a word, the ‘logos’) is stalled before it begins. This is not to say that transcendence is muted or erased. Rather, transcendence is interrupted in the same measure that it interrupts. The overstep on Levinas’ part is the failure to catch site of this reversal of interruption. Thus, Derrida captures his critique of Levinas in the single phrase “the dream of a pure heterology.”

Celan :: Poetry :: Sadness

Unfortunately, we’re done discussing Celan’s poetics. Wednesday is the last day of class and I wanted to finish the course with Derrida’s essay on forgiveness. I really like the forgiveness essay. The best of Derrida’s discerning eye is on display and it has enormous consequences for how we think about life after violence. But that is another reflection altogether.

As we concluded discussing Celan, there was the curious – yet completely obvious – question of how to locate the scope of Derrida’s claims about the date, the password (shibboleth), and singularity.

Celan :: Levinas :: Derrida

I waited a long time for this section of my course on Levinas and Derrida: engagement with Celan’s conception of the poetic word. For me, it is just a compelling question on the face of it – how the poetic word functions in relation to singularity; and so how the poetic word articulates transcendence; and so how the poetic words becomes (or already is) ethical. Fascinating, no? What is brought into being in poetry (the poiesis of the poetic) is the ethical creature. The poetic word will have obligated me.

But there is also a fascinating collection of relations within (not yet between) these three thinkers.

Reading Levinas in Latin America

What do my end-of-semester books tell me? I always ask.

I’ve been thinking for the past handful-plus years about how to translate Levinas’ work – which is so critically entrenched in the European experience – into the experience of the Americas – which is so critically disengaged from the European experience. This engagement/disengagement is hardly a firm limit. On the one hand, Levinas’ conception of the Other is so obviously indebted to the trajectory of European history, which he (not unproblematically) calls ‘the Bible and the Greeks.’ This debt is on display in his sense of critique (strategy) and exemplary historical cases (content). On the other hand, there is surely a case to be made for a general structure of transcendence to which we can attribute explanatory force, even if that force is, in the end, abut how such an explanation breaks apart.