Derrida+Mirada

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Hard, Dry Eyes and Eyes That Weep: Vision and Ethics in Levinas andDerrida

*Chloi Taylor */ University of Toronto/[email protected]

(c) 2006 Chloi Taylor.All rights reserved.

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1. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas opposes the Greekinterest in aesthetics, luminosity, and the plastic form to therejection of the image in Hebraic philosophy and ethics.Christianity, in making the Word flesh, repeats the Greek desirefor the visible, the artistically manifested need to /see/ God, incontradistinction to Judaism, in which God is heard rather thanseen, manifesting Himself in language, both aural and written,

rather than in form. Levinas thus follows the Hebraic tradition indescribing the ethical relation as taking place in a face-to-faceencounter with the other which is nevertheless a "manifestation ofthe face over and beyond form," occurring in language rather thanin sight (Totality and Infinity 61 [66]).[1 ] Levinasexplains: "Form--incessantly betraying its own manifestation,congealing into plastic form, for it is adequate to thesame--alienates the exteriority of the other" (Totality andInfinity 61 [66]). To encounter the other as a face is toencounter her in her absolute alterity from myself, to be faced byher as unthematizable, escaping all my attempts to understand andthus to assimilate her. The face makes it impossible for me toreduce the other to myself, to my ideas of her, to my theories,categories, and knowledge. Since form betrays the other, forLevinas, the face of ethics is not the face whose form we take inwith our eyes. On the contrary, the way we look at (and alsotouch[2 ]) faces is said to foreclose ethics: "The face ispresent in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot becomprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nortouched--for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the Ienvelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely acontent" (Totality and Infinity 211 [194]).

2. In works such as "Violence and Metaphysics" and "The Principle ofReason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," JacquesDerrida, like Levinas, frequently associates vision with animposition of sameness on the other, and thus as violent in terms

of the philosophy of difference which he shares with Levinas andfeminist writers such as Hilhne Cixous.[3 ] This essayargues that blindness becomes a trope for Levinasian ethicality inworks by Derrida such as Memoirs of the Blind and Specters ofMarx. On the one hand, therefore, this essay explores the ways inwhich Levinas and Derrida take up a similarly negativeunderstanding of the relationship between visuality and ethics,giving rise to an ethics of blindness. On the other hand, itargues that vision is not entirely rejected by either philosopher,but that a recognition of other, less violent ways of seeing, and


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a more positive conception of the ethical potential of vision,co-exist with Levinas's and Derrida's more explicit critiques ofvision. Finally, this essay expands upon the latter, more positiveconception of vision to be found in the writings of both Levinasand Derrida, or the possibilities of a visionary ethics.

The Violence of Vision

3. The "face" of ethics, according to Levinas, occurs in discourserather than in visual form. While seeing the other entailsenveloping her into the same, language "slices" through thisknowledge that vision imposes: "Speech cuts across vision" (/"Laparole tranche sur la vision"/) (Totality and Infinity 212 [195]).The slicing of language divides or differentiates the other fromme. Discourse, like vision, may /try/ to thematize the other, butwhile vision succeeds, the other can always evade thecategorizations of language, slip behind the Said, remain aSaying, even in silence: "Words are said, be it only by thesilence kept, whose weight acknowledges this evasion of the Other"

(Totality and Infinity 212 [195]). The other, an interlocutor, canengage with me in language, while she cannot respond in a similarway to having been seen. While being seen is simply an absorptionof the other to which she cannot answer, she may always avoidsimilar absorption in the case of discourse. According to Levinas,in language the self and other enter into a relation in whichdifference is established and cannot be overcome, even if onlybecause of the weight of the other's silence upon me.

4. In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida focuses on Levinas'scritique of the visual metaphor in Greco-Christian philosophy.Specifically, Derrida draws out the manners in which Levinasdescribes the interconnected concepts of vision, sun, light, andtruth as functioning to abolish the otherness of the face-to-face

or ethical relation in the works of philosophers from Plato toHeidegger. Derrida describes Levinas's first book, Thiorie del'intuition dans la phinominologie de Husserl, as a first attemptat developing "a philosophical discourse against light" (126[85]), and against the pre-determining gaze which this lightallows. In this work, "the imperialism of /theoria/ alreadybothered Levinas. More than any other philosophy, phenomenology,in the wake of Plato, was to be struck with light" (126 [85]). Inphenomenological philosophy, for Levinas, vision pre-determinesthe other who is seen, not allowing her to appear in her othernessas she may do in language. As Derrida observes, Levinas raises aneven stronger critique later against Heidegger, who is describedas continuing to write within "a Greco-Platonic tradition under

the surveillance of the agency of the glance and the metaphor oflight . . . light, unveiling, comprehension or precomprehension"("Violence and Metaphysics" 131 [88]). Vision already assumes anunderstanding of the other, for Levinas, and thispre-understanding prior to the visual encounter is forced onto theother in a violent unveiling within the clearing of light. Thecritique which Derrida describes Levinas as directing at thehistory of philosophy, and at Husserl and Heidegger in particular,is that through its search for the light of Being and ofphenomena, it abolishes difference and imposes the One and the


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Same on the other. Greco-phenomenological philosophy creates

a world of light and of unity, a "philosophy of a world oflight, a world without time." In this heliopolitics, "thesocial ideal will be sought in an ideal of fusion . . . thesubject . . . losing himself in a collective representation,in a common ideal . . . . It is the collectivity which says

"us," and which, turned toward the intelligible sun, towardthe truth, experience, the other at his side and not face toface with him . . . . /Miteinandersein/ also remains thecollectivity of the with." ("Violence and Metaphysics" 134

[90])

In his final summation of Levinas's critique of visuality and ofheliological philosophy, Derrida writes

therefore, there is a soliloquy of reason and a solitude oflight. Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of theother, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies ofviolence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition, in

its meaning and at bottom, would make common cause withoppression and with the totalitarianism of the same. Theancient clandestine friendship between light and power, theancient complicity between theoretical objectivity andtechnico-political possession . . . . To see and to know, tohave and to will, unfold only within the oppressive andluminous identity of the same. ("Violence and Metaphysics" 136[91-2])

In contrast, in Totality and Infinity, as Derrida describes thiswork, Levinas theorizes the face as "appearing" in language andnot only to vision, as a "certain non-light" which counteracts theviolence of visuality ("Violence and Metaphysics" 126 [85]).

5. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Filix Guattari discussfaces and faciality as neutralizing and de-individualizing ratherthan as other and unique: "Faces are not basically individual;they define zones of frequency or probability, delimit a fieldthat neutralizes in advance any expressions or connectionsunamenable to the appropriate significations" (168). According toDeleuze and Guattari, the "abstract machine of faciality" producesfaces, and these faces are not encountered in their alterity butare rather always in a dichotomized relation to the same. The face"is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the blackhole of his eyes. The face is Christ. The face is the typicalEuropean" (176). The face, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the faceof 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 averageordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the firstdivergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in thesecond or third category . . . . They must be Christianized, inother words, facialized" (178). While for Levinas the face isexteriority 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


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no exterior, there are no people on the outside . . . Racismnever detects the particles of the other; it propagates wavesof sameness until those who resist identification have beenwiped out. (178)

6. Despite the striking differences in the manners in which Levinasand Deleuze and Guattari understand the face, Levinas might in

fact agree with Deleuze and Guattari in so far as the latter arediscussing a visualized face. While Levinas emphasizes that theface of which he is writing is not the physiognomic or visuallyencountered face, facialization for Deleuze and Guattari functionsthrough vision: the Christ-face, for instance, is said to havebeen "exploited" through visual art, through the paintings of theMiddle Ages and Renaissance. For Deleuze and Guattari, thisneutral "Bunker-face," which has been reproduced in visual mediaand is encountered with the eyes, must be "destroyed, dismantled"and "escape[d]," and, citing Henry Miller, this can be done bycutting off vision, shutting the eyes: "I no longer look into theeyes of the woman I hold in my arms . . . My eyes are useless, forthey render back only the image of the known . . . /Therefore I

close my ears, my eyes, my mouth/" (A Thousand Plateaus 171). Inso far as this is a material, visually encountered face, and notthe face of transcendence, Levinas might agree that it needs to beescaped since, for Levinas, when it is the eyes which encounterthe other's face, Miller is apt in saying that "they render backonly the image of the known," that is a representation of thesame, the expected, the pre-understood, allowing no surprise oralterity. The face which Levinas is describing, in contrast, is aface which will always allow for surprise. This face is anencounter with the Other /as/ other, and, as described in Totalityand Infinity, it is not discovered through the eyes, and is notmediated 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 greatdeal of his ethical philosophy, and it seems that it functionswell for this purpose precisely because it corresponds to the waywe frequently experience faces through vision, encountering withour eyes the expressiveness and difference of faces, perceivingthem not only as objects of our own gazes but as the site of /theother's eyes/. Faces strike and evade us, frustrate us with theirsecrets, are unthematizably complex, inaccessible beneath ourgaze. As Sartre notes in his discussion of the other's gaze, facesdisconcert us, decentralize and alienate the world from us,precisely because they make us recognize the independence andinaccessibility of the other's subjectivity. Faces make us awareof our inability to grasp the other, the impossibility of knowing

what she thinks of us, of knowing what the familiar--nowunfamiliar--world (and we in it) is /for her/. Although there havebeen tragic and violent attempts throughout history to categorizeindividuals by facial as well as body types, and although Deleuzeand Guattari are correct that the visually-encountered,physiognomic face is submitted to dichotomizing norms, it is alsotrue that we are fascinated by looking at faces in theirsingularity, 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


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Levinas chooses the face as the shorthand term for his complexunderstanding of alterity, and why it can convince others of hisclaims. It would seem, then, that Levinas takes advantage of thecompellingness of the visual metaphor of the face, the meaning itholds for us as such, and yet denies that it functions in visionin fact.

8. Although I will complexify this reading below, it appears--and hasbeen 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 theother such that she is subsumed within the grasp of the knowing orseeing subject. According to such a reading, it would follow thatfor Levinas we never see without knowing, never look in wonder. Weare never spellbound, fascinated, bewildered, paralyzed orsurprised by that upon which we gaze. We are never absorbed bywhat we look at rather than engaged in the absorption of it. Wenever respond to what we see rather than imposing our knowledge onit. We never have our expectations thwarted by sight. We never see

difference, we only see the same, the same as ourselves or thesame as our expectations of the other, which is thus allowed to beno other. It is never the seen, therefore, which is active uponour 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, itseems that although Levinas is right in acknowledging silence asdiscursive, in Totality and Infinity he too readily acceptssilence as response enough, or too hastily assumes that differencewill always be able to interrupt the relation between subject andother through discourse. We may question whether it is sufficientto say that the other can always respond in such a way that shewill be responded to in language, since silence itself is a

response that weighs on her interlocutor, or whether we need moreof an account of the functionings of power in discourse, thedistribution of access to language, the effects of thisdistribution such that certain others can respond in languageproper while others may only respond in silence. There are noforms of discourse explored by Levinas to which the other /cannot/respond, to which the possibility of an other response isforeclosed by the discourse itself.[4 ] Silence ispresumed to be heard, is thought to always weigh on me as anevasion of my themes, and Levinas does not theorize the manners inwhich I can all too easily not hear the other's silence, or caninterpret her silence as submission to or agreement with what Ihave said, that she may be forgotten in her quietude, and thus

that silence may not function as an interruption of the Said. Wemay ask, therefore, whether this is enough of an account of theways that silence may all too easily be taken as agreement withand adhesion to the same. Indeed, we need an account of how bothlanguage and silence may cut (/tranche/) to do violence, tosilence, and not only to divide into an ethics of alterity.Levinas appears to have too readily dismissed vision as animposition of knowledge on the other, while language has been toohastily accepted as evading such inflictions, as always permittingresponse. In fact, both vision and discourse function in some


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cases as impositions of knowledge, power, and sameness on theother, but both may function otherwise, as when the other's speechor silence is heard and responded to, or when sight absorbs,surprises, awes and bewilders the seeing subject, rather thansimply 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 mostdefinitive statements on the subject would lead us to believe. Ina late interview, "On Obliteration," Levinas again discusses theface in terms of vision, but now in positive terms. He isresponding to a series of sculptures by Sacha Sosno, several ofwhich represent heads with the faces "obliterated" by geometricalshapes. Here Levinas says that

there are different ways of being a face. Without mouth, eyesor nose, an arm or a hand by Rodin is already a face. But thenapes of the necks of those people who wait in line at theentrance gate of the Lubyanka prison in Moscow--in order todeliver letters or packages to parents or friends arrested by

the GPU, as we find in Vasily Grossman's Life andDestiny--those napes which still express anguish, anxiety andtears 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 Lubyankaprison that Levinas is here willing to consider the ethicalexperience of the face in visual terms--"those napes which stillexpress anguish, anxiety and tears to the people who /see/them"--and to acknowledge more than one form of vision. From theexample of Rodin's sculpted hands, it is also clear that, despitehis earlier consignment of art to the Said, Levinas is willing tothink about works of visual art as having a face, a face that wesee. In a way that is interesting in terms of the discussion of

weeping below, Levinas also describes the face, in this case thenape of the neck, as expressing tears.

11. David Michael Levin has repeatedly considered Levinas's complexunderstanding of vision, most exhaustively in The Philosopher'sGaze. Taking a very different stance towards "blindness" and thenarrowing of our human, lidded eyes than, as shall be seen,Derrida does in Memoirs of the Blind, Levin dedicates this book tothe "remembrance of centuries of victims brought by inhumanity andcultural blindness, by eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, andhate, into depths of pain and suffering--or to even darkercruelties engraved in dust and ashes." Like Derrida, Levin takesan interest in Diderot's writing on blindness, but cites a very

different passage: while Derrida will focus on Diderot's writingof a love letter blind (Memoirs 101), Levin cites Diderot'ssuspicion that those who do not see may consequently be impairedin their abilities to feel:

What difference is there to a blind person between a manurinating and a man bleeding to death without speaking? Do weourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or thesmallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lackof sight does on the blind? Thus do all our virtues depend on


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our way of apprehending things and on the degree to whichexternal objects affect us . . . . I feel quite sure that wereit not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewerqualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear nolarger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with theirown hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in painthough we can crush an ant without a second thought, are these

actions not governed by the same principle? (Philosopher'sGaze 4-5)

However dubious Diderot's generalizations about the capacity forcompassion in blind persons,[5 ] this passage may havesomething to say to us today, at a moment when we have availableto us ways of killing and enforcing poverty "blindly," or uponvast numbers of sentient beings at a great distance, thus avoidinglooking upon the sufferings that we cause: we now placeslaughterhouses outside of our cities,[6 ] we exploitchild and adult laborers in poverty-stricken countries, and weengage in modern forms of warfare that do not require soldiers tosee the people they kill. Violence today is facilitated by our

blindness, by our no longer needing to meet our victimsface-to-face. Significantly, if we resist denying the relevance ofvisuality in the face-to-face encounter, we can fruitfully use aLevinasian theory of ethics to consider the grounds of possibilityof modern forms of violence.

12. In citing Diderot, and throughout his writings on vision, Levin isarguing for vision's significance to our humanity and to ourcapacity for compassion and ethics. If we are to speak ofcompassion in the philosophy of Levinas, it is necessary tounderstand it as a passive suffering for the other withoutidentification, a substitution which would not entailunderstanding 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 asuffering-with, or a passivity which avoids subsuming the otherinto the same. Levinas writes, "the extreme passivity of'incarnation'--being exposed to illness, suffering, to death is tobe exposed to compassion" (Otherwise than Being 139n12 [195n12]).Following Levin, I would thus be arguing that one may be passivelyexposed to the other's suffering through the visual encounter, andas such be exposed to compassion as an encounter with alterity.Compassionate substitution as such would not abolish the other'sotherness, and would not claim to actively grasp that suffering orto 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 eyestowards his books and thoughts, closes his eyes to contemplate,shutting them upon the anguish around him. Even philosophers suchas Plato who have emphasized vision most often spoke of the "eyeof the intellect" rather than of the seeing eye, and Democritusput out the latter to "see" with the former. At first glance,then, Derrida and Levinas, in their preference for language overand against vision, may not be novel in their philosophicalapproach to vision, nor even particularly Hebraic, but rather


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follow a tradition of philosophers averting their eyes. Yet Levinfinds many passages in which Levinas depends on vision for hisunderstanding of ethics, and argues that Levinas's understandingthat the visuality of his language is merely metaphoric is not,cannot, and /should not/ be consistently maintained. Noting thatLevinas argues that the face "is not a form offered to sereneperception," Levin asks, "why must perception be understood as

serene, or contemplative?" and notes that it is not so in thephenomenologies of Heidegger and of Merleau-Ponty (Philosopher'sGaze 267). Questioning whether vision must also be active, animposition upon or absorption of the other, Levin finds moments inLevinas's philosophy in which vision is understood as "passive"and as "subjection,"[7 ] 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 theconsistent decisions on Levinas's part to use visual metaphors todescribe 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 hesupposes, 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 thevisible, out of sight, rather than extending it from the visibleinto the invisible?" (Philosopher's Gaze 259). Later he asks: "butdoesn't this withdrawal of the face from visibility and sight alsorisk withdrawing from ethics all that might have been gained forit by introducing the face and the face-to-face relation into thediscussion?" (265).

14. Levin suggests that Levinas sometimes recognizes that visionfunctions ethically, otherwise than as philosophers, includingLevinas himself, have frequently assumed. For Levin, it is theseother ways of seeing that need to be further developed, and notsight that must be rejected /tout court/. He cites T. S. Eliot's

confession, "I see the eyes but not the tears/ This is myaffliction," and it seems that this distinction may capture forLevin the two manners of seeing in question: a seeing that doesnot see tears, and a seeing that sees tears, and that perhaps sees/through/ or /in/ tears as well. Levinas has most often assumedthe seeing eye that does not see tears, and that would not shedtears in response to what it sees, that imposes and absorbs ratherthan being passively struck by the other and her suffering. Atother moments, however, and in his consistent use of visualmetaphors to describe the ethical encounter, Levinas is developingnew ways of thinking about seeing, and thus new ways of seeing inlanguage and in history, ones that depend on an understanding ofthe second way of seeing, an ethically responsive seeing, a seeing

of tears.

15. Returning to "Violence and Metaphysics," it is important to notethat even while drawing out Levinas's critique of heliologicalphilosophy, Derrida stresses the manner in which vision itself isgiven to us through language, and thus that the problematicfeatures of vision are problems not intrinsic to the sense ofsight but rather embedded in metaphysical discourse. It is not sosimple a matter, therefore, as positing language as an ethicalalternative to seeing, for sight only comes to us through its


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discursive constructions. As such, if we wish to change theviolent ways in which we see, we must first change the language ofvision. In particular, Derrida highlights the metaphorical sensein which Levinas is speaking of vision and light, or the manner inwhich the seeing that Levinas describes as violent is notcharacteristic of the sense of sight per se, nor even of sight aswe need necessarily experience it, but is rather the manner in

which sight as we practice and think it has been given to us bythe Greek metaphysical tradition. As such, Derrida makes clearthat 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 theviolence, and thus, in a sense, the metaphor of light allows us tonot see, or prevents us from seeing otherwise than as the metaphorallows: this light in language blinds us and prevents us fromseeing the other as she is and from responding to her oppression.As such, Derrida argues that Levinas is not really advocatingblindness rather than sight, but is "denouncing the blindness oftheoretism" 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 historyexcept that which occurs through language, and Borges is rightwhen he says that "perhaps universal history is but the history ofseveral metaphors," metaphors amongst which the example of lightis predominant and inescapable. Indeed, Derrida notes that Levinashimself does not escape the use of this metaphor: "Who will everdominate it, who will ever pronounce its meaning without firstbeing pronounced by it? What language will ever escape it? How,for example, will the metaphysics of the face as the epiphany ofthe other free itself of light?" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 137

[92]). The nudity of the other is itself described by Levinas interms of visuality and manifestation, as epiphany, or, as Levinhas noted, as the "shimmer of infinity." As Derrida describes it,"the nudity of the face of the other--this epiphany of a certainnon-light before which all violence is to be quieted anddisarmed--will still have to be exposed to a certainenlightenment" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 126 [85]).

17. There is hence no escaping the metaphors of vision, light,enlightenment, and manifestation, and it must therefore be atransformation of that metaphor which Levinas would enact in hiswriting, or the first steps towards the theorization of other waysof seeing which he is taking, even if by all appearances, or in a

more self-conscious way, he seems to be rejecting vision and lightaltogether. As such, on this more nuanced reading, which may ormay not have been Levinas's own, it is not non-vision which wouldbe sought by Levinas, for, in Derrida's words, "light perhaps hasno opposite; if it does, it is certainly not night" ("Violence andMetaphysics" 137 [92]). It cannot be darkness and blindness thatLevinas would prefer to vision and light, but, as Derridastresses, a form of seeing which is other than that which theGreco-Christian tradition of philosophy has inscribed in languageand history, what Levin calls a "postmetaphysical vision."[8


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]

18. While Derrida makes it clear, then, that the vision in question ismetaphorical, that it is but a "technico-political" alibi, as wehave seen he suggests that this metaphor is never entirelyescapable 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 andchoosing the best light." Derrida cites Borges again: "perhapsuniversal history is but the history of the diverse /intonations/of several metaphors" (137 [92]). One is tempted to think that atransformed metaphor that rethinks without escaping light could bemoonlight, a gentler, more obscure and mysterious light than thepenetrating rays of the philosopher's sun which expose, burn, andmay blind the eyes, preventing real seeing. For Derrida, whateverform of light this may be, it is

not a community without light, not a blindfolded synagogue,but a community anterior to Platonic light . . . . Only theother, the totally other, can be manifested as what it is

before the shared truth, within a certain nonmanifestation anda certain absence. ("Violence and Metaphysics" 135 [91])

Not escaping the language of light, Levinas, in his use of wordssuch as "epiphany" and "shimmering," is choosing the best light,is modifying the metaphor to render it less violent and moreethical. For Levinas it is precisely through language that we canescape the violence of vision as language has produced it, andthus, according to a Levinasian reading of vision that Levinashimself may or may not have intended, it is through language thatthe experience of light will be, not avoided, but transformed.

19. Despite this more nuanced account of vision in Levinas to be foundin Levin's work and in Derrida's "Violence and Metaphysics," as

shall be seen in the following section, it is the more explicitaccount of sight that is most often taken as Levinas's final wordon vision, and that, it would seem, has at times "guided" or atleast been repeated by Derrida in his self-avowed blindness.[9] Despite his careful reading of Levinas, Derrida will attimes himself suggest a voluntary blinding, a closing and turningaway of the eyes in order to avoid the vicissitudes of vision thathe and Levinas describe. Although in "Violence and Metaphysics"Derrida argues that the solution to the violence of light cannotbe a simple rejection of vision for language, in later works hestates 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 obviousreading, is not seen, and the face-to-face encounter occursotherwise than through the gaze, it is immediately appropriatethat Derrida would see the blindman as an ethical figure, for allof the blindman's encounters with others must occur without seeingtheir form.[10 ] In Specters of Marx and Memoirs of theBlind, Derrida considers positions of blindness in terms that, forLevinas, describe ethical relations. A particular form of


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blindness described in Specters of Marx and Echographies oftelevision is the "visor effect," the situation in which "we donot see who looks at us" (Specters 7). For Derrida, the mostdramatic example of such a scenerio of a-reciprocal vision occursin hauntings:

The specter is not simply this visible invisible that I can

see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without anypossible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when Iam blind, blind by situation. The specter enjoys the right ofabsolute inspection. He is the right of inspection itself.(Echographies 137 [121])

The "right of inspection" ("/droit de regard/") is describedearlier in Echographies as "the right to control and surveillance"(42 [34]). This right to see, control, and survey is evoked as aspecifically masculine form of power: "the right to /penetrate/ a'public' or 'private' space, the right to 'introduce' the eye andall 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 theintimate spaces of others either through the use of the eye itselfor through prosthetic devices such as surveillance cameras, and,as shall be seen, Derrida describes the feminized, blind, anda-reciprocal submission to this masculine gaze in ethical terms.

21. In Specters of Marx Derrida uses the example of the ghost ofHamlet's father to describe the "visor effect," for the Danishspecter wears a helmet through which he can see those whom hehaunts without their being able to see him. The visor

lets one see nothing of the spectral body, but at the level ofthe head and beneath the visor, it permits the

so-called-father to see and to speak. Some slits are cut intoit 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 ofarms and indicated the chief's authority, like the blazon ofhis nobility. (Specters 8)

The masculine, a-reciprocal penetration of the "right ofinspection" is described by Derrida as paternal, indicative of thespecter's authority, his right to speak and to be heard. Spectersare presented by Derrida as having (and indeed as /being/) the"droit de regard" in so far as they see us, haunt us, even whilewe 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 theirgazes, and even to some degree see them through this sensation oftouch, while they remain intangible, ungraspable, and invisible.This "furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible" ispresented by Derrida as

the tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, butstill the body of some/one/ as some/one other/. And of


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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 ourselvesbeing looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even beforeand beyond any look on our part, according to an absoluteanteriority . . . and asymmetry, according to an absolutelyunmasterable 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 seesus, and who makes the law, who delivers the injunction . . .we cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back onits voice. An essentially blind submission to his secret.(Specters 7)

In Totality and Infinity, as we have seen, Levinas writes that inthe 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 neitherseen nor touched, although we sense the visual relation, that weare being seen, not through our own vision but through feeling,

"we /feel/ ourselves seen," even while the other remainsungraspable 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 hisalterity. We realize that the ghost is other without "hasten[ing]to determine" him. We are unable even to categorize him as a selfor as a subject, as a consciousness or person, and as such heremains radically unthematizable. As with the Levinasian ethicalrelation, the haunting of a specter is also asymmetrical in power,for the ghost has the power to penetrate ocularly and bodily intoour private spaces, to see and to speak and to be heard and tocommand, even as we cannot see or grasp this bodily form, and mustanswer 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 theother's voice. We must learn to speak to ghosts, which is not tocommand them--Derrida notes Horatio's inability to speak to ghostswhen he "imperiously" "charges" and "conjures" the specter ofHamlet's father. Derrida writes, "as theoreticians or witnesses,spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe thatlooking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the mostcompetent position to do what is necessary: speak to the specter"(Specters 11). Looking is once more opposed to language or tospeaking, and it is the blind submission to language which isrequired in the ethical relation, and the absence of sight on thesubject's part which gives rise to its possibility.

23. In multiple ways we have seen that Derrida chooses to explore thehaunting of the self in terms that evoke the ethical relation inLevinas, a relation in which the face-to-face encounter is ana-reciprocal response to an elevated other whose alterity I cannotsubsume or grasp, which I cannot reduce through vision, touch, orknowledge, and which takes place in language and commands me, inresponse to which I must listen and speak. The feminized positionof being blind in the presence of masculinized and authoritativeother, of being unable to return a specifically patriarchal and"male gaze," of being forced to respond to another through


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language even while the linguistic exchange must take place on theother's terms--which Sartre and a quite a few feminists mightdescribe as a hell of other people (if we were only able tothematize the ghost as such)--is thus presented by Derrida as thecondition under which an encounter with alterity--a feminizedethics, for Levinas--may occur.

24. In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida presents an even more sustaineddiscussion of the blindman as an ethical figure in Levinasianterms. Derrida describes the blindman as necessarily "exposed,naked, offered up to the gaze and to the hand, indeed to themanipulations of the other--he is also a subject deceived . . . .The other can take advantage of him [/L'autre peut abuser delui/]" (97 [94]). This emphasis on the blindman's openness topotential abuse is similar to Levinas's description of the self'sexposure, her nudity before the other, and of the suffering sheundergoes at the other's hands. As Levinas acknowledges, "I can beexploited" (Otherwise than Being 93 [55]). Similarly, whileLevinas describes the self as a prisoner in his own skin, unableto 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, cutoff from others and the world (Memoirs 45-6, 120). This is not"the bad solitude of solidity and self-identity" that repressesethical transcendence, or the solitude that "does not appear toitself to be solitude, because it is the solitude of totality andopacity" of which Derrida writes in "Violence and Metaphysics"(135 [91]), but the solitude of unfulfillable obsession for theother, of substitution without identification, of love withoutpossession or knowledge. Levinas writes of the subject asstrangled within the restriction of its own epidermal barrier asit longs for the other: "accused in its skin, too tight for itsskin," "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 recoursein anything, in itself like in its skin . . . and obsessed by theothers" (Otherwise than Being 106, 110-112). This subject's heartis "beating dully against the walls of [its own] skin," but unableto break free. For Derrida, the blindman's very eyes, like theskin for Levinas, become similarly isolating prison walls: "Theconfinement of the blind man can thus isolate him behind . . .hard walls," "these leaden walls" (46 [40]). Derrida cites Rilke'sDie Blinde, who says, "/Ich bin von allem verlassen--/ Ich bineine Insel/" and "/Ich bin eine Insel und allein/," whileDerrida'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 theother, as well as his "walled-in" state which severs him in painfrom the other, place him initially in the role (in Levinasianterms) of the self, Derrida also describes the vulnerability ofthe blindman in terms that situate him as the other. He isdescribed, for instance, as evoking an ethical response /from/ theself, 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


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art with arms outstretched, his hand preceding him tentatively,imploringly, as he is obliged to venture in the world, exposed andat risk. The outstretched hands, Derrida writes, "do not seekanything in particular; they implore the other, the other hand,the helping or charitable hand, the hand of the other who promisesthem 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" ormyopia in similarly ethical terms. In a manner which Derridaappreciates, Cixous mourns the loss of her blindness through lasersurgery. 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 orblindness with hesitation--"I shall always hesitate. I shall notleave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see"("Savoir" 13)--and thus relates sight, like Derrida, to an all toocertain step, to an irresponsible knowing.

26. In the final pages of Memoirs, Derrida describes weeping as a formof blindness which is the "truth" of the eyes, its most human

function.[11 ] 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 thevery course of experience, in this coursing of water, anessence of the eye, of man's eye, in any case, the eyeunderstood in the anthropo-theological space of the sacredallegory. Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would bedestined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment theyveil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye. Andwhat they cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there wherethe gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve, would benothing less than /al_theia/, the /truth/ of the eyes, whoseultimate 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 beforeit illuminates, revelation is the moment of the "tears ofjoy."(Memoirs 125 [126])

Weeping, as opposed to seeing, is the supreme function of humaneyes for Derrida because, while other animals can see, only humanscry with their eyes (of course, while Derrida does not note this,other animals do cry and respond to the suffering of human andanimal others /vocally/).[12 ] As Derrida also observes,while not all humans can see, all humans, including the blind, canweep. Derrida notes that in representation it is most often womenwho weep, as in the representations of Mary and other women at the

cross[13 ], and so exemplary blindness, like that of thesubject encountering the "visor effect" or the a-reciprocal gaze,is thus culturally feminine, as is ethics for Levinas. In Totalityand Infinity, the feminine is related to the receptive orwelcoming domesticity of ethics, while in Otherwise than Being orBeyond Essence ethics is associated with maternity. We may thinkonce more of Mary's tears.

27. Some years before Memoirs of the Blind, in "The Principle ofReason: The University in the Eyes of its Pupils," Derrida


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compares human eyes to those of animals, recalling Aristotle'sdistinction between animals with "hard, dry eyes" and those witheyelids. Hard, dry eyes, can never shut but must always see, whilelidded eyes can blink, close, retreat from vision. In this essayDerrida 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 wehave seen, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx that scholars arethe least well equipped to speak with specters, because they relyexcessively on seeing/knowing (sa/voir); in "The Principle ofReason" Derrida once more characterizes the university aspredominantly ocular. It is imperative, therefore, that scholarslearn to take advantage of being the sorts of animals with liddedeyes, in order not merely to see and know, but to listen andlearn: "Opening the eyes to know, closing them--or at leastlistening--in order to know how to learn and to learn how to know"(5). Derrida asks if, figuratively speaking, the university, thatinstitute of knowledge, must not "close its eyes or narrow itsoutlook . . . . Shutting off sight in order to learn," and insists

that the university must not be a dry-eyed or sclerophthalmicanimal. Of such animals he writes, "what is terrifying about ananimal 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, torape if necessary, by fixing it in front of himself, or byswooping down on it like a bird of prey" (10). A human being, onthe 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 requireshearing, and a figurative or literal shutting of the eyes. Hereagain the assumptions arise that vision can only be violent andnever responsive, can only be about knowledge, an imposition ofknowledge on the other, a swooping down like a bird of prey, a

rape, rather than a way to learn, a way in which pre-conceivedknowledge is confounded, and an imposition on us to which weunwillingly respond. We may pause and recall here, however,Levin's dedication to The Philosopher's Gaze, in which he refersto "eyes narrowed in brutal lust, rage, and hate" and to "culturalblindness," and thus think twice about Derrida's account of thevirtues of the lids of human eyes.

28. Strangely, this discussion of hard, dry eyes foreshadows Derrida'sown medical experience, a few years later, as he describes it inMemoirs, in which a facial paralysis prevented him from shuttinghis eye, and hence from attending his first scheduled appointmentat the Louvre. Derrida suddenly found himself a sclerophthalmic

animal, the terrifying "bird of prey" he had described in hisearlier essay. He portrays himself in this period: "the left sideof the face stiffened, the left eye transfixed and horrible tobehold in a mirror . . . the eyelid no longer closing normally: aloss of the 'wink' or 'blink,' therefore, this moment of blindnessthat ensures sight its breath" (Memoirs 38 [32]). It was whenDerrida could blink again that, grateful to have once more therespite of blindness, he went to the Louvre and chose to organizehis exhibition around the theme of the closed eye. Like his friendand sometimes co-author Hilhne Cixous, who has said "I am always


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trying to write with my eyes closed" ("Appendix" 146), Derridaemphasizes that he wrote sections of Memoirs of the Blind blindly,in the dark or looking away from the page. Although he does notraise again the discussion of hard and /dry/-eyed animals, animalsthat are never blind, it is of interest that he now discussesblindness in terms of tears, of eyes wet and soft with sorrow.

29. Derrida concludes his book on blindness with the citation ofMarvell's poem, "Eyes and Tears," the concluding line of which is"these weeping eyes, those seeing tears." Derrida's interlocutorasks, "tears that see . . . . Do you believe?" and Derridaanswers, "I don't know, one has to believe" (129). Here, Derrida's"step" is hesitant, like that of the blindman or the myopicCixous; he does not know, and he considers tears that /see/, andwishes to believe in this /vision/. Yet, unlike Marvell, Derrida'sdiscussion of tears has not been of tears that see, nor of eyes intears which see, but of tears which blind, and of other forms ofblindness, 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, butrather may respond in tears, tears which blur without fullyobscuring, veil with transparent matter. Seeing in tears is thusan example of the way in which sight may be confused, unknowing,and thus not always an imposition of knowledge on the object ofthe gaze. Because we cry at what we see, and cry involuntarily,crying is an instance of sight which is passive, a response to theobject of the gaze acting upon the eyes, an example of another wayof seeing other than that which has dominated Western metaphysics.

30. Derrida illustrates his discussion of tears with an image of awoman at the cross who, weeping, covers her eyes with her hands inthe gesture of the blindman, and yet we may think of ways ofweeping in which the eyes are not covered, closed, or blinded.

Levin, in a chapter of The Opening of Vision entitled "Crying fora Vision," conceives of seeing, and seeing in tears specifically,not as a form of knowing but of learning. His aim is to "toreintegrate the perceptivity of crying into the larger process ofvision, letting it show itself as a moment of extremely importantlearning." 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. Onlywith the crying, only then, does vision begin" (Opening of Vision172):

our eyes are not only articulate organs of sight; they arealso the emotionally expressive organs of crying . . . . Is it

merely an accidental or contingent fact that the eyes arecapable of crying as well as seeing? Or is crying in the mostintimate, most closely touching relationship to seeing? . . .What is the ontological significance of crying as a mode ofvisionary being? (PAGE ##?)

Like Derrida, Levin notes that only human beings cry with theireyes, and thus that crying may well be what makes our eyesspecifically human. Unlike Derrida, however, for Levin crying isalso what makes our /vision/ human, rather than blinding that


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vision. Here it is not a matter of "imploration rather thanvision" (Memoirs 125 [126]), but of vision which implores andresponds to imploration. Levin argues that crying may "ennoble"vision in the human sphere, the sphere of ethics, and that theabsence of the ability to shed tears may be what "marks off theinhuman." This inability describes the Nazi commandant and hisvictim, 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 toshed a tear: for different reasons, their eyes are dry, empty,hollow. What we have seen, we who are alive today, of humancruelty and evil demands that we give thought to this capacityfor crying and examine, looking into ourselves, the nature--orcharacter--of its relation to vision. What does this capacitymake visible? What is its truth? What is the truth it sees?What does it know as a "speech" of our nature? How does itguide our vision? (PAGE ##)

31. The comparison of tears to speech is interesting in that we areable to think of the eyes (and eyes in tears) as ears, and also asmouths, as speaking to the other in "words" that oral language maynot contain or allow, and as a way of responding, of hearing andanswering, which is again both extra-linguistic and an /other/form of speech. Levinas, once more, is thus too quick in hisopposition of vision and language, of vision as an imposition ofsameness and speech as an opening to alterity, because tears canbe words, words spoken, words responding to, and also, likewriting, words /seen/.

32. While, unlike Derrida, Levin does not elaborate on the cultural orstereotypical femininity of tears, he notes that seeing

objectively, objectifyingly, with wide, dry eyes, in the mannerwhich philosophy (and feminism) has almost always conceived ofvision, with the "right of inspection" or "droit de regard," isperhaps to see, and to see vision, through "masculine" eyes.[14] Arguably this talk of "masculinity" and "femininity" inLevinas, Derrida, and Levin raises problems from a feministperspective,[15 ] but if I am to follow Levinas, Derrida,and Levin for a moment, I would argue that if there can be atransformation of the metaphor of vision and light, if we canconceive of a more "feminine" visuality, then it would be amistake to separate vision from ethics entirely, or to give visiononly to the other in the ethical relation (as in the visoreffect). This, however, is what Levinas and Derrida seem at least

frequently to have done. Despite some ambivalence, and someself-consciousness of the metaphorical status of what is beingrejected, they nevertheless hastily accept vision as anexclusively "masculine" sense organ and deficient as such from theperspective of a "feminine" ethics, rather than explicitlyexploring the possibilities of new light-metaphors, of a"feminine" vision--a "feminine" vision which, in fact, like itsexemplary capacity to cry, is simply human. Ethical vision as I amhere theorizing it is not therefore opposed to the sight of men,but to the hard, dry-eyed sight of Derrida's sclerophthalmic


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animals. One way of thinking about this ethical vision is througha 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 hiswife that he keeps her in a room for days to examine her andreproduce exactly what he sees (Memoirs 41). He grasps her form,captures her image, and hence possesses her with literallybreath-taking lifelikeness on canvas. This intense beinggazed-upon causes the sitter to fall dead at the moment herhusband completes her portrait. Indeed, she has been quietly dyingwith each of her husband's glances. Despite his intense looking,the artist had not /noticed/ his wife's growing pallor, the mannerin which her face had been slowly robbed of its color as he placedit on canvas. The artist had gazed upon his wife knowingly, butwithout visually encountering the alterity of her from hisknowledge, of encroaching death. The wife ceases to exist as a

separate person from her husband and his art at the moment he hasknown the last detail of her, and thus her alterity isextinguished through his scrutinizing gaze. Although Derrida doesnot note this, it is remarkable that when the eyes of the narratorof "The Oval Portrait" first fall upon this violent picture, hisreaction is to close his eyes. Such is the understanding of visionmost often assumed by Levinas and Derrida, in which /voir/ is/savoir/ and /avoir/, and /s/a/voir/ is violence, and what weought to do is shut our eyes. I have suggested, however, thatperhaps this way of seeing is not /sa/-voir, but /son/-voir, orrather /sans/-voir, a "masculine" seeing which goes withoutseeing, without allowing to see and to be seen, and withoutresponding to the seen. An /other/ way of seeing, however, a lessculturally "masculine," less active, less violent seeing, a

moonlit-seeing perhaps, is suggested by Derrida's own reading ofLevinas's critique of vision when he suggests that Levinas is notarguing for "a community without light, not a blindfoldedsynagogue," but for a non-neutral, non-Platonic light, and a newway of seeing in the light of which "the totally other . . . canbe manifested as what it is" ("Violence and Metaphysics" 135[91]). As Levin notes, and as Derrida comes /close/ to seeing inMemoirs, this would be a culturally "feminine" but in factspecifically /human/ way of seeing, a seeing in tears.[16

]

34. Interestingly, just as Levinas's explicit rejection of vision fromethical relations can and has been nuanced to show an

understanding of the manners in which vision may in fact respondto the other, or can give rise to an ethical encounter rather thanabolish 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 alreadyexperience it a more positive and ethical function, and theorizes"voir et savoir" as "incommensurables" (Echographies 131).[17] It is with these moments in Derrida's work that I wouldlike to conclude.


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35. First, it can be noted that in his description of the ethicalresponse to the blindman, Derrida assumes that I respond to theblindman's outstretched hand because I see the sight of him whichmoves me, and thus respond, am responsible for the Other, throughvision. Similarly, in Echographies of Television, Derridadescribes another situation in which vision called spectators toethical and political responsibility, to respond against the

violence done to others, and in which sight was passive. In thepassage in question, Derrida describes the visual witnessing bytelevision spectators of the police brutality against Rodney King.He writes,

for the scene was, unfortunately, banal. Other, much worsescenes happen, alas, here and there, every day. Only there itwas, this scene was filmed and shown to the entire nation. Noone could look the other way, away from what had, as it were,been put right before his eyes, and even forced into hisconsciousness or onto his conscience, apparently withoutintervention, without mediator. And all of a sudden thisbecame 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 gaverise to an ethical response as language arguably could not: whileAmericans /knew/ that there were instances of racial profiling andbrutality against visible minorities by the police force everyday--and knew this based on having /heard/ and /read/ of suchcases--they could (and by and large did) avoid responding to thisknowledge, and it was only when confronted with one such scene/visually/ that a collective ethical response immediatelyoccurred. In this case, both the sight of the beating and theethical response to which it gave rise were "imposed" on theviewers, and thus vision, and the spectator's response to what was

seen, are described as passive: a sight is forced upon one's eyesand one cannot help but respond. Although, as Derrida notes, suchscenes as the Rodney King beating occur every day, with thetelevisation of the filming of this particular incident "no onecould look the other way" ("/personne ne pouvait plus ditournerles yeux/"). Unlike the narrator's response in "The OvalPortrait," in Derrida's discussion of the Rodney King video it isethically crucial that one /not/ turn one's eyes away from theviolence one sees. Moreover, one /cannot/ turn away from thissight or shut one's eyes to it, for vision is already passivelycaptivated by what has "been put right before his eyes," to whichone responds "all of a sudden": one is already responding to whathas been taken in before one has the choice to look away.

Response, the realization that an intolerable situation isoccurring and must be responded to, happens all of a suddenthrough vision, as may not be the case with language. In thisdiscussion we see that, contrary to the other instances in whichvision is theorized as active and violent in Derrida's writing,here vision is theorized as the passive imposition of ethicalresponsibility upon a subject.

36. What these examples show is that, as Derrida argues in "Violenceand Metaphysics," the theory of vision and light as violent is but


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a metaphor, even if it is one of the fundamental metaphors whichhas shaped our history, experience, and thought, and which hasserved too often as an alibi for real violence. Nonetheless, Ihave argued that Levinas's persistent use of visual metaphorsthroughout his work despite his own critique of visuality showsnot only that this metaphor is, as Derrida says, inescapable, butalso that it can be transformed to describe other ways of seeing

that we already experience. Derrida notes that there is noalternative to the metaphor of light, and certainly night andblindfolded synagogues are not such alternatives, and yet we canthink of options other than the binding and blinding of eyes, andof other forms of light than the penetrating gaze of the sun. Assuch, we can develop new metaphors of light and seeing, moonlitmetaphors of bewildered and responsive vision. One such image ofvision I have developed in this essay is that of seeing tears andof seeing in tears, an image that, as seen, occurs briefly inLevinas's discussion of the sculptures of Sacha Sosno, and equallybriefly in the conclusion of Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind. AsDerrida concludes Memoirs, so I would like to conclude here withthe suggestion that we need to believe in "these weeping eyes,

those seeing tears," and in a visionary ethics.

/ Department of PhilosophyUniversity of [email protected] /

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Notes

Matthias Fritsch, Robert Gibbs, Iain MacDonald, and the reviewersat Postmodern Culture have given me helpful and encouraging


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comments on this paper, for which I give many thanks.

1 . On Levinas's discussion of vision and its relation toJudaism, see Jay 543 ff.

2 . For a discussion of vision and touch in Levinas'sphilosophy, see Vasseleu.

3 . For a discussion of the shared critiques of thephallogocentrism of vision in Derrida and Cixous, see Jay 493-542.

4 . I am thinking for instance of Lyotard's discussion ofthe /differend./

5 . A disability critique of Diderot's discussion ofblindness and of the way in which blindness functions as a tropefor inethicality and ethicality respectively in the works of Levinand Derrida could be warranted, although it is beyond the scope ofthe current paper.

6 . For a discussion of whether "other animals" can beconsidered to be others whom we encounter in ethical, face-to-facerelations on Levinasian terms, see Llewelyn.

7 . Levin is discussing Levinas's "Language and Proximity";see his Collected Philosophical Papers 118.

8 . See Levin, "Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight" 398.

9 . Derrida refers to his writing of Memoirs of the Blindas the confessions of a blindman. He also claims to be struck by"a double infirmity: to this day, I still think that I will neverknow either how to draw or to look at a drawing" (37). For acritical 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'swritings on art, see Krell. For Krell's discussion of the Louvreexhibition and Memoirs of the Blind in particular, see 50-81.

10 . Derrida uses the term "blindman" rather than "blindperson" because he notes that most blind persons represented inart (other than those blinded by tears) are men. The point thatthe blind must encounter the other through language rather thanthrough form is qualified by the manner in which the blind mayencounter the other's form through touch, which, for Levinas, isalso not a manner in which the face may be encountered.

11 . For a discussion of tears in Derrida, see Caputo.

12 . Marvell writes, "For others too can see, or sleep/But only human eyes can weep" (qtd. in Derrida, Mimoires 130).

13 . The last image reproduced in Mimoires is of a womanweeping at the cross.

14 . In The Opening of Vision (282), Levin cites CarolGilligan's observation as to "how accustomed we have become to


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seeing life through men's eyes," from In a Different Voice.

15 . Levinas himself notes the "archaic" and merelycultural status of these gendered terms, and says in an interview:"Perhaps . . . all these allusions to the ontological differencesbetween the masculine and the feminine would appear less archaicif, instead of dividing humanity into two species (or into two

genres [also meaning "two /genders/" in French]), they wouldsignify that the participation in the masculine and the femininewere the attributes of every human being" (Ethics and Infinity 68[71]). Levinasian feminist philosophers such as Leora Batnitzkyhave argued that Levinas's use of gendered terminology, althoughit revalorizes traditionally feminine values and activities, doesmore harm than good, for it undermines the philosophical value ofLevinas's claims about the human, and reinscribes care as thedomain and responsibility of women. See for instance Batnitzky 23.For further discussion of these points, see my "Levinasian Ethicsand Feminist Ethics of Care."

16 . I say that Derrida comes close to seeing this,

because though he recognizes that tears are "feminine," he doesnot recognize them as a "feminine" form of seeing, but only as a"feminine" form of blindness.

17 . In "Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight," Levinalso argues that Derrida has a positive as well as a negativeaccount of vision. Levin claims that Derrida, like Foucault, seesmodernity as ocularcentric, and resists this ocularcentricity, butthat neither philosopher entirely rejects vision. Rather, both arecritiquing and employing vision strategically in order to theorizeand bring about a "postmetaphysical vision" (398). Levin thuswrites that Derrida and Foucault "make use of vision in a critiqueof vision. Thus we must see that there is a potential in ourvision that is opposed to the potential that our modern age has

tended for the most part to realize. Our vision also has anemancipatory, or utopian, potential" (404).

In an example, Levin notes that Derrida prioritizes /graphe/(writing) over /phone/ (sound), and thus prioritizes somethingvisible (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 isable to look at the one who speaks. In contrast, one reads, andsees, the other's writing in her absence. Preferring the visible/graphe/ to the invisible /phone/ thus uses vision to subvert theocularcentric metaphysics of presence (412). It is not simply thatDerrida rejects vision, but rather that he chooses strategically

certain forms of vision in order to subvert the dominant visualmetaphysics.

Works Cited

Batnitzky, Leora. "Dependency and Vulnerability: Jewish andFeminist Existentialist Constructions of the Human." Women andGender in Jewish Philosophy. Ed. Hava Tirsosh-Samuelson.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. 127-52.


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Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997.

Cixous, Hilhne. "Appendix: An Exchange with Hilhne Cixous." VerenaAndermatt Conley. Hilhne Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: Uof Nebraska P, 1984. 129-61.

---. "Savoir." Veils. Hilhne Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Trans.Geoffrey Bennington. Stanford, Stanford UP, 2001. 1-16.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Filix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolisand London: U of Minneapolis P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. Echographies ofTelevision: Filmed Interviews. Trans. Jennifer Bajorek. Cambridge:Blackwell, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and

Other Ruins. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1993.

---. "The Principle of Reason: The University in the Eyes of itsPupils." Diacritics Fall 1983: 3-20.

---. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge,1994.

---. "Violence et mitaphysique: Essai sur la pensie d'EmmanuelLevinas." L'Icriture et la difference Paris: Iditions du Seuil,1967. 117-228.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in

Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: U of California P,1993.

Kelly, Michael. Iconoclasm in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,2003.

Krell, David Farrell. The Purest of Bastards: Works of Mourning,Art, and Affirmation in the Thought of Jacques Derrida. UniversityPark: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000.

Levin, David Michael. "Keeping Foucault and Derrida in Sight:Panopticism and the Politics of Subversion." Sites of Vision: TheDiscursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy. Ed.

David Michael Levin. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997. 397-465.

---. The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation.New York: Routledge: 1988.

---. The Philosopher's Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows ofEnlightenment. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. R. Cohen.Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985.


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---. Ithique et infini: entretiens avec Philippe Nemo. Paris,Fayard, 1982.

---. "On Obliteration: Discussing Sacha Sosno." Art & Text 33(Winter 1989): 30-41.

---. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. AlphonsoLingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1998.

---. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:Duquesne UP, 1969.

Llewelyn, John. "Am I Obsessed with Bobby?" Rereading Levinas.Eds. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Indianapolis: IndianaUP, 1991. 234-246.

Taylor, Chloi. "Levinasian Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care."Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 9.2 (Fall2005): 217-240.

Vasseleu, Cathryn. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch inIrigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. London: Routledge, 1998.

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