There Is No Racism Intended

Emmanuel Levinas: I always say — but under my breath — that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing. I think these texts are open to the whole world. There is no racism intended.

Questioner: "Everything else is dancing" — one could naturally think of Nietzsche.

E.L.: Yes, but you know television shows the horrible things occurring in South Africa. And there, when they bury people, they dance. Have you seen this? That is really some way to express mourning.

Q.: It, too, is an expression.

E.L.: Yes, of course, so far I am still a philosopher. But it supplies us the expression of a dancing civilization. They weep differently.

— EMMANUEL LEVINAS, "Intention, Event, and the Other"

Dedication to the movement of hips requires asking whether Emmanuel Levinas's refusal of dance is anything more than a moment in the ongoing, unintended, anticipatory recording with a difference of racism's last word. It's not only that one wants to avoid the conclusion that Levinas was as devoid of funk as Hendrik Verwoerd; for so far as one still desires philosophy one is compelled to ask if philosophy's representative man — the perennial insider who stands as if he were outside, enthralled by his authentic mirror image; the one who thwarts impediment and enters, and always more fully inhabits, always as if saving and returning; the one who declares the end — is necessarily prone to that brash, invasive stillness that has enforced the openness of the whole world to the Bible and the Greeks. This question invokes an incalculable rhythm, moving in and out of measure like a fugitive. It concerns the locale and the age of elusion, a spatiotemporal coordinate that is, as we'll see, beneath the underbreath. Consider that a tempo-topology of flight is offered, in its greatest intensity, as a problematic of crossing and gathering, of the bridge, of translation not only as distance and traversal, but also as scar and transverse city. This, too, is Levinas's transport. So that the one who with such sad clarity expresses the fixation of unintended racism is also the one who would forge and enact a philosophy of escape. One of these things is not like the other, a condition requiring some choreatic intervention. For Levinas, the example of Franz Rosenzweig is decisive: fateful in the linkage of translation with true vocality as the protection and projection of things; fatal in the exclusivity of what is valorized as exemplary and worthy of translation.

The true goal of the mind is translating: only when a thing has been translated does it become truly vocal, no longer to be done away with. Only in the Septuagint has revelation come to be at home in the world, and so long as Homer did not speak Latin he was not a fact. The same holds good for translating from man to man.

The ethical imperative of translation — more fundamentally, the figuring of the ethical as translation — bears, in breath, a utopian social weight, the heft and density of a rematerialization of the city from deep outside. But how will the outside have irrupted into the incorporatively exclusionary nexus of the Bible and the Greeks that is implied in Rosenzweig and amplified in Levinas? And what does that nexus tell us about the project of philosophy as Levinas defines it, the danger of philosophy as he diagnoses it? What if we trace the decaying orbit of his commitments by way of their own units and methods of measure? Meanwhile, there remains the possibility of another geometry, another dynamics of the bridge, the dispersed and dispersive thing, (the laws of) its movements and its loads, its choreographic madnesses, its phonographic flights and descents (and fights and dissents), its pornographic restraints and licenses: perhaps we can go from a restricted to a general economy of translation.

Reading Levinas requires some attempt to both account for and disrupt the trajectory between the following passages, the first from 1934, and the second from 1986:

How is universality compatible with racism? The answer — to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism — involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the ideaof expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea.

The idea propagated detaches itself essentially from its point of departure. In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of "masters": it is a process of equalization. To convert or persuade is to create peers. The universality of an order in Western society always reflects this universality of truth.

But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. Nietzsche's will to power, which modern Germany is rediscovering and glorifying, is not only a new ideal; it is an ideal that simultaneously brings with it its own form of universalization: war and conquest.

But here we return to well-known truths. We have tried to link them to a fundamental principle. Perhaps we have succeeded in showing that racism is not just opposed to such and such a particular point in Christian and liberal culture. It is not a particular dogma concerning democracy, parliamentary government, dictatorial regime, or religious politics that is in question. It is the very humanity of man.

I think that Europe is the Bible and the Greeks, but it is also the Bible that renders the Greeks necessary. ... The great problem would consist in asking, what is the relation between the two traditions? Is it simply the convergence of two influences that constitute the European? I don't know if it is very popular to say this, but for me European man is central, in spite of all that has happened to us during this century, in spite of "the savage mind." The savage mind is a thinking that a European knew to discover, it was not the savage thinkers who discovered our thinking. There is a kind of envelopment of all thinking by the European subject. Europe has many things to be reproached for, its history has been a history of blood and war, but it is also the place where this blood and war have been regretted and constitute a bad conscience of Europe, which is also the return of Europe, not toward Greece, but toward the Bible. Old or New Testament — but it is in the Old Testament that everything, in my opinion, is borne. This is the sense in which I will answer your question: am I a religious thinker? I say sometimes: man is Europe and the Bible, and all the rest can be translated from...