Levinas, Blanchot, Jabes: Figures of Estrangement by Gary D. Mole

By Gary D. Mole

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Additional resources for Levinas, Blanchot, Jabes: Figures of Estrangement (Crosscurrents : Comparative Studies in European Literature and Philosophy)

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What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing to hide from oneself, the irremissible presence of the ego to self" (L-DE, 8687). It is < previous page page_28 next page > < previous page page_29 next page > Page 29 therefore our intimacy, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful. It is not our nothingness that is revealed, but the totality of our existence: ''What shame uncovers is being uncovering itself" (L-DE, 87). The Sickness of Being Lévinas reinforces this idea that being is a weight for itself by returning to the notion of malaise as it appears particularly in nausea.

I]n the barbarian and primitive symbol of race. . Hitler has reminded us that we cannot abandon Judaism" (cited by Rolland, L-DE, 103-4). 2 "The language of these sentences," comments Rolland, "cannot fail to strike us with its similarity to that employed by De l'évasion in order to express the way in which the existent is constrained to its existence" (Rolland, L-DE, 104). This equivalence between being riveted to being and the Jew riveted to his Jewishness also finds echoes in Blanchot's L'Idylle and in the following chiastic phrase by Jabès: "Being-Jewish is but the Jewishness of being" (J-P, 84).

Pleasure is broken at the moment it seems to be escaping absolutely. This, suggests Lévinas, leads to the feeling of shame. The Shamefulness of Being Removing shame from its more familiar connotations of a moral order (the shame one may feel after having committed something one knows to be morally wrong), Lévinas states that "the whole intensity of shame, the whole stinging sensation it entails, consists exactly in the impossibility in which we find ourselves of not identifying with the being that is already étranger to us and whose motives for acting we can no longer understand" (L-DE, 85).

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