The Other speaks and addresses in the manner of face—the premier indication of the ethical bond. Levinas remarks:
The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring
as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea. . . It expresses itself. (Levinas 1979: 51)
The face is the immediate expression which goes beyond any generalization or categorical understanding. Without lapsing into any form or image which would be subsumed under certain measurement or idea-association, the face presents Levinas’s attempt to break away from the grid of difference which implies a common ground of comparison or judgment. The face is an expression of the Other resisting any reduction or thematization as “[t]he face is signification, and signification without context. . . . the face is meaning all by itself. . . . It is what cannot become a content”
(Levinas 1985: 86-87). In face of the Other, the self is awakened to a
being-other-than-self which exists prior to self-consciousness with the Other serving as the centrifugal force. Besides, the face takes the initiative in the ethical relation while the self could only passively react or respond to it. “The face is a hand in search of recompense, an open hand. That is, it needs something. It is going to ask you for something. . . . It is a new way of speaking of the face” (1988: 169). There
is a demand of response without knowing what is meant to say. The response implies an inevitable responsibility that the self is obliged to. To sum up, the face is the expression itself, making impossible any signifying process which at the same time disquiets the self-centered consciousness or recognition of the self. Yet, it designates the self’s passivity and responsibility by demanding an inevitable and irreplaceable response.
C. Diachrony
While the ethical language designates the immediate but ungraspable face of the Other in the sensible, diachrony is the way Levinas further elaborates on the ethical relation with the Other as well as the face. Levinas’s diachrony, originally a temporal notion, reveals not merely the relation with the unthematizable Other but Levinas’s efforts in re-examining and redefining the notion of time. No longer treating time as a linear process, Levinas is apparently and greatly inspired by Bergson and Heidegger. Basically, both of them refute the traditionally-conceived order of spatialized time and hold that there should be a juxtaposition of time in which the past , the future, and the present are not disconnected from each other. The present coexists and interacts with the memory of the past as well as the anticipation of the future. Different temporal phases are seemingly interwoven with each other.
But Levinas, doing more than what they aim to manifest, comments:
Time is then neither a projection of being toward its end, as in Heidegger, nor a mobile image of the immobile eternity, as in Plato. It is the time of fulfillment, a complete determination that is the actualization of all potentiality, of all the obscurity of the factual in which stands the subjectivity of man alienated in his technical activities. (2000a: 95) Levinas takes time as the manifestation of the self’s relation with what the present
could not totalize. Time, in Levinas’s terms, designates “the future of being-toward-death, a future defined exclusively by the unique relationship of being-to-death as being outside oneself, which is also being whole, or being properly oneself” (2000a: 44). Time is the self’s relation with the being outside oneself instead of the possibility or memory of the being. It is different from “[t]he temporalization of time. . . is indeed recuperated by an active ego which recalls through memory and reconstructs in historiography the past that is bygone, or through imagination and prevision anticipates the future” (2000b: 51). The time explicating such an ethical relation is termed diachrony, featuring in the situation that “the negativity of a temporal anarchy, this refusal of the present, of appearing, of the immemorial, commands me and ordains me to the other, to the first one on the scene, and makes me approach him, makes me his neighbor” (2000b: 11). Diachrony here refers to a force which could be neither severed nor integrated. It addresses the self, making an irresistible demand for the self’s responsibility. It is a relation with the Other—characterized by the separate inseparation and unrelated relation as it would be elaborated in the following discussion.
In the ethical relation, Levinas demonstrates that the sensible is the first language of the Other, while the notions of the face and diachrony indicate Levinas’s effort in revealing the immediate and non-totalizable expression of the Other as well as the ethical relation construed. Interestingly, he juxtaposes the spatial and the temporal, face and diachrony, to mark the uniqueness of the ethical relation, and at the same time remolds the notions of space and time, implying their interwoven, rather than distinct, relation.
Despite the fact that critics mostly figure Levinas’s argument of language as the ethical Other in a rather abstract or transcendental manner, DeLillo’s trilogy, is particularly inspiring in presenting a sensible, embodied contour of language
constructed in the postmodern age. Consisting three of his major works which spans a decade, The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and Mao II (1991) , the trilogy sheds light on how language acts as an Other in daily life and how the self reacts in the ethical confrontation. For the former concern, DeLillo, remarkably, goes from three different aspects to sketch the saying of language. Firs, DeLillo depicts the language of sensibility as man’s sensory perception of the wor(l)d including the visible, the audible, and the readable. This is the first language of the Other that man is demanded to respond to. In addition, the otherness of language is further shown in the names which are meant to designate the world, marking the arbitrariness of the naming process. Man’s obsession with the names or words becomes a yearning to solve the mystery of the natural language lying behind the man-made one. Yet, language as sensibility goes in two directions: one leads to the language man invents to impose on and comprehend the world; the other raises the awareness of the body which is an-other speaker that we have to respond to. There lies a corporeal language which is no less difficult to decipher. Death, to DeLillo, makes the most forceful representative of the corporeal language. It speaks in a wordlessly but disquieting and even life-threatening manner. It is not merely self-diminishing but self-othering. This leads to the more profound concern of DeLillo’s: if there is any possibility sustained to anchor the self.? Hence, the third one is pivoted on the language of the image, which is duplicated, fabricated, disseminated and even abused in the postmodern age to the extent that DeLillo furthers the saying of language as the base to explore the possibility of individuality in the postmodern age. As the natural and bodily language demonstrated a haunting and threatening Other, the self is
marked with passivity and vulnerability. The language of the image designates DeLillo’s notable efforts in reverting the ethical concern back to the self and explore how the self possibly situates himself in ethical relation. That is, the analysis in
these perspectives actually accounts for the ethical journey of the self from the state of being haunted by the Other through the phase of self-Othering to the possibility of individuality.
As the otherness of language designates the ethical relation instead of an endless self-referring signifying system or a self-contained land, it is impossible to neglect the self. Moreover, such an exploration of the self would be worthwhile in another sense, since it makes a dialogue with the much-debated idea of the self in the postmodern milieu. While Lyotard terms the postmodern condition as “the
increduality towards the grand narratives,” Frederic Jameson, Foucault, and even Deleuze are considering the self no longer autonomous, self-sufficient and rational.
They separately bring out the viewpoints on the impossibility of the modern ego, or the self lapsing into the contingent or nomadic fabrication. Hence, such a dialogue is important to discern if the self is just dissolved or submerged in the ethical relation with language or if there is still any anchorage for the self. Remarkably, the examination of the otherness of language is conducive in exploring the self in the postmodern milieu.
Conclusion
Language has been one of the focal points in both theoretical mapping and literary presentation. Their analyses or explorations fail to make any definite answer to what language refers. However, their efforts do point out a fact that language serves as man’s confrontation with something uncontrollable and incomprehensible, although different theorists bring up different perspectives. That is a trend which no longer insists on the exploration of language itself but probes into the relation between man and language like Heidegger, Blanchot and Levinas. They mean to depict such an acute experience that man has to confront in everyday life. However,
different from Heidgger who still persists in the reference of truth in language and Blanchot who views language as a neutral zone where man is almost dissolved, Levinas takes the saying in language as the ethical Other who could not be reduced or totalized in any presupposed ideas or conceptions. Such an ethical relation with language could be demonstrated by Levinas’s notions of sensibility, face, and diachrony which respectively stand for a relation built on empirical life instead of transcendental or metaphysical thinking, a confrontation without reciprocity but with a demand for responsibility, and an irreducible and unthematizable otherness.
Pivoted on language as the ethical Other, Levinas would do much help in shedding light on Don DeLillo’s observation and meditation on language which similarly starts with the sensible reading of the wor(l)d and is embodied in everyday life. Language is more than the words, the sounds, and even the silences but the absolute alterity in reality.