Fateful

Images

ALPHONSO

LINGIS State University

The Pennsylvania

Reality

and

its Appearances

Phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, reduced the reality of things to the totality of their appearances. It is because something appears that we can assert that it exists. It belongs to the essence of a real And the appearances are appearances thing to generate appearances. of things. Appearances do not flow by, a drifting fog of tones and To be outside hues; they separate into identifiable units, gestalten. our minds belongs to the things, and their appearances are outside. We do not see patterns suspended in the inner space of the mind, but the colors, sizes, shapes of outside things. The real thing itself-the chair or the building caught sight of in its fragmentary appearancesis not something invisible, or conceptual, not an identity-term posited by the mind; it is the totality as sketched out in any of its appearances. Any of its appearances we see implicate further appearances: how the surface exposed in front of us implicates and is continued by a back side, an underside. The chair or a building exists in a wave of duration across which it evolves perspectival profiles of itself. a thing generates show it as it really is. Yet not all the appearances Natural perception itself, Maurice Merleau-Ponty pointed out, distinof things and their perspectival guishes between the real properties distorted medium or deformations, appearances by the intervening obscured by the distance, colors seen in dim or colored light, shapes 55

56 set askew. The real properties appear in the thing when the thing itself is within reach, set at the right distance and position, accessible to our multiple sensory and motor powers. Other appearances appear not as false or illusory (or mentally fabricated) but as transitional: they lead to the real thing and its real characteristics, and disappear when they appear. The flattened oval shape of the dinner plate seen on the shelf leads to and merges into the circular form which spreads out all the patterns of the plate equally before our view, as monocular images of an object set at explorable fade out before the integral appearance distance from our eyes. Formal and Substantial Appearances of Real Things

The apprehension of the real features and natures of things is an action. It is when we position ourselves before a thing, and position it and their colors before us, such that its surfaces are visible throughout and textures observable, and its overall structure is surveyable that the this thing appears to be a unit that holds together. This positioning, is a form of The construction of manipulation primary understanding. a scientific representation of the universe proceeds out of an action of their properties isolating substances and discovering by putting them in reaction with other substances; and it is predictive; it issues in technological transformations. are the things Since we uncover and discover things by manipulation, but are not forms but also forcesmanipulanda? Things only anything form is the ways its their forms are dynamic forms. The hammer's the grip of force of resistance or drive fits in with other things-with the hand of the user and with the other things movable, breakable, or assemblable with its force. A thing thus reduces to the unity of its are in fact modes of appropriateness; and "properties"-which in establishes a relational phenomenological ontology conception place of the ancient substantive definition of things, taken, since Hume, to be metaphysical. Levinas points out, things do not momentarily take But, Emmanuel in of form in the unarticulated the flow and shadow, elements, light heat and damp, along the ground, with the specific function the mahand simultaneously outlines and makes use of. It is benipulating cause they are already there, detachable substances, in themselves and at our disposal, that we can envision uses for them. Use presupposes contours that constitute a piece of possession. The clearly delimited as a mark out the it is from or detachable reality thing way separate from other things. Because a thing's form, its closed surfaces, makes

57 of it something that is closed in upon itself, it is also graspable and at our disposal. What offers no surfaces detachable and transportable, not things, but to take hold of-air, heat, warmth, light, ground-are sensuous elements. What offers a form but is not detachable-a mounHenri Wallon said, an "ultratain range, the clouds, the moon-is, thing." Wallon discovered that children who draw houses, people, cars, to one another do not know how big and trees in relative proportion to draw the moon in relation to these things. The moon and the clouds follow us as we walk; they are movables, but not removables. The identity a thing acquires by virtue of its form makes it susceptible to being compared, and quantified. But a form does exchanged, not so much expose and make accessible and graspable the inner nature of things as clothe them. Under their forms which have made and domesticated, their inner natures are clothed. things graspable Their natures remain decent and abstract. The functional forms of that make them or cover over their subthings implements furnishings stantial natures. The fiberglass, metal alloy, or plastic substance of the automobile remain abstract and unknown under the molded forms; the form of the stone axe, which detaches it for our eye, leaves the that is uncovered substance by the broken and decayed form in all in the abstract generality of "stone" or "fossil substance." Roquentin the public garden senses how ungraspable is the substance of the bench under the forms and functions that extend it as surfaces in the light. The Space and Time of Real Things

Things are not just patterns projected in space before us or streaming by; they take form in the place we inhabit. They await us in our home and along the paths extended from our door. Before things become the body of the user, prostheses, annexed to they implements (Zeuge), are furnishings, meubles-movable goods, detachable substances brought into the zone of the home, tranquillized, and kept in reserve. The of means misses their concept reality. Things are terms, that rest in In termini. their in themselves, substantiality they are goods-good and not utilities. themselves, attractions, simply good-for, Space does not open about us from the first in the homogeneity and infinity of geometrical extension nor as a layout of instrumental connections. The primary segregation separates a zone of the intimate from the outlying zone of the alien. The zone we inhabit, our home, is a supporting and return. A zone of retreat, a point of departure and repose, it is known in an involution of sensibility, in tranquillity enjoyment.

58 In their substantiality the tranquillity of the home. things condense We rest within the solidity of the four walls and sink into the rest of the easy chair. Below our window the garden gate and the tree-lined road and the bridge over the river are composed and serene. They at a distance the threats and the sound and the provocations, keep in themselves, of the stock and the battlefields. At rest fury exchanges these substances do not gear into the things about them or onto our an aura. Our active forces forces; they emanate a savor, a resonance, are freed from them, but they softly invade our sensibility, which comes to rest in them. A house is equipped with means-with kitchen equipment, with tools for cleaning and for repairing; it becomes a home by filling up with a fish tank, rocks gathgoods, with easy chairs, books and recordings, ered on walks and pieces of driftwood. Once we have attended to the mechanisms of home equipment enough to have acquired the proper use of them, they revert to a substantial presence in contact with our of things do not only provide data sensuality. The sensuous properties for identifying them practically and conceptually. Things support us, sustain us, exalt us. They buoy up our gaze, fill our hearing, nourish our energies, restore our movements. The living-room furniture, the drapes, the lighting acquire the density of a sensuous harmony. The smells and air and rigor of the gymnastics court or ski invigorating slopes envelop the room of the student athlete. The jacket, full of smells and memories, that he has worn the last half of his life and the stained and worn knife that have made a shelter for him in the woods lie about the old man, who is nestling in cardboard boxes in the doorway as a barrier against the traffic and rules of the street and the dense tone of respite. By taking hold of their contours and detaching things from the elements, by keeping them at one's disposition within the zone one inhabits, by finding uses for them, an agent enters into the time of things. Things harbor possibilities, a future possibilities for use and for enjoyment; extends from them. But as substances, withdrawn from the uncharted expanses of the alien, at rest within the repose of the home, they exist in a present which is not simply the point of conversion of their resources into possibility, a present which extends of itself in endurance. The paths leading from our door to the things that furnish our environment also lead on into the outlying regions of the alien. Levinas describes the outer regions beyond the limits of what we inhabit as uncharted forest, desert, oceans, sky, depths of the elements-earth, it as the realm of pagan gods, he darkness. Yet in also designating of things that are movables withopens the possibility of a description

59 out being furnishings. Our departures from the home are not all predaThe things we come tory sallies to acquire possessions and implements. in the of the alien are themselves alien forms. upon outlying regions The carved rock we come upon in the clearing in the forest in the the bleached twisted log we come upon on Guatemalan mountains, of our hands that impose their uses on the sands are not correlates tree and them; they are forms made by the growth of a long-dead the made and carved sea, by geological upheavals polished by by a of a vanished and softened the rain and the moss. priest people by Such things crystalize as lures in which our look, our touch, our life and sent further into the alien. They flowing outward is channelled are entries into the inhuman. We find ourselves drifting far from our home toward the time of ancient gods of lost peoples, toward the geological epochs of the oceans and the continents. Alien things are charms and omens; they function as matrices of The albatross is a form itself and varying rhythmically expropriation. in In the Antarctic the summer drawing vanishing arabesques sky. meadows the patches of grasses in seed and the thick spiny leaves coiling around the stalk of a thistle form snares for our eyes, into which each time a wave of our life sinks and is lost. In a foreign city the pagoda, the parks, and the colors and designs of the shantytown crystalize into ensembles which present us with unknown shapes and substances dense with imperatives for oblivion-seekers. When people first discover the coral seas, they often buy underwater cameras to take from the ocean depths its enchanted colors and forms, motivated by But one quickly learns the desire to share them with the surface-bound. that the forms and colors fixed on photographic paper stabilized what existed in shimmering movement. In the depths of the ocean one is only a visitor. Misleading Action Appearances and Errant Images

takes hold of things in their appearances, and takes the apthe and of things. to exhibit pearances reality, carpentry, properties that are not the of the real of Appearances appearances properties in their are taken coherent intersensorial as transitional unity things them, or reposirelays toward the real appearances; by repositioning real features and traits. oneself before we to the them, pass tioning can also be can mislead action. Appearances deceptive; they of mind was wrong to impute these illusive apModern philosophy pearances to fabricating tendencies of the mind. The things themselves are devious, producing deceptive images of themselves. It is the things

60 that cast monocular images of themselves upon our eyes set too close before them. If what looks to be a shimmering pool of water appears on the highway before us, this misleading is in no sense appearance "subjective," a private image fabricated within the closed sphere of the mind. Everyone in the car sees it, and cannot help but see spectator's it. It is the asphalt highway itself that engenders this image of itself in the medium of the sunlight-soaked layer of heated air. can mislead the eye and hand that wishes to appropriAppearances ate a thing. The appearances a thing generates can also lead us off that thing entirely and off things entirely. Levinas shows that to judge such images as illusions and to explain them as fantasies concocted by a mind that indulges in deluding itself is to neglect the phenomenological ontology that must describe how they show themselves to be. deformed appearances of Things do not only produce perspectivally their shapes, appearances distorted medium or by the intervening obscured by the distance, colors dimmed, bleached, or stained by the onto other light. Things also cast colors and shapes off themselves substances or onto empty spaces. The water of the garden pool casts streaks of zigzag light onto the screen of cypresses behind. Things cast shadows on other things. They cast reflections of themselves into the water and onto mirrors and into the crystal globes of eyes. They emanate halos about themselves and dense or brooding or shimmering The colors of a face do not outline the surfaces and only atmospheres. of the of that but interact with one another in face, pores carpentry the brew of a sensual, swarthy, or translucid Kawabata complexion. the fireflies on the and strobe of cheeks brow of a contemplates glow woman in the night. Things are not found separated in gestalten in a medium. They condense in the radiance of the light, along transparent the road, in the continuum and flow of the surfaces of the ground and of the building; their tangible substance surfaces in the continuity of the night. And their colors bleed out of themselves to stain the into contours their one another to form atmosphere; shapes merge and hollows of the continuous surfaces. In twilight the colors of the forest below disengage from the contours of the leaves and the trees and interact with one another, doubling up the trees with a layer of dense green harmonics. Each thing presents not only itself, the abiding essence that maintains it as a practicable form and a task; across a wave of duration it refracts off doubles of itself, facades, simulacra, shadows, reflections, without the real thing appearing, mirages. These are appearances apin which that mask or caricature the real thing, appearances pearances the real thing is ungraspable, and appearances of those appearances.

61 A face exposed to view doubles up with a caricature of itself. The he has prepared to professor is occupied in reading the explanations communicate them to the students in the room. But the way he holds his lecture papers, his gestures, his complexion, the shape of his skull and the fall of his hair separate from this professorial work to form a In attending to the impicturesque image. This image is caricatural. or the loutish image, the students age, the foppish or the buffoonish are not penetrating to the reality of the professor and his work therenor exercising some penetrating Both insight into his real character. his character and his professor persona disappear, as though he had left the room, leaving there only his trappings and paraphernalia. The to some other character, as though resemblance remains, resemblance he had been replaced by someone imitating him, making the gestures but no longer doing the teaching. A squirrel or rabbit nibbling its way across the garden doubles up in the image of a child or a dwarfish human by linking up with the images of people who seem to be only scurrying about in the landscape and not pursuing their tasks. The walls of a house double up into a facade, into the image of a face whose windows are eyes and whose door is a mouth linking up with the images of faces that are frozen and expressionless. The trees extending their bare branches against the wintry and gesticulating sky double up into an image of hands scratching meaninglessly by linking up with hands flaying about instead of operating effectively with things. The hills rising out of the plain double up into the image of breasts exposed to the voluptuous twilight by linking up with the image of a body prone in a swoon or in sleep. In their creaking in the wind we hear Everything that is resounds. the rigidity and flexibility of the bamboos; in the rumble from the ceiling we hear the heaviness and irregular contours of something rolling over the floor above. But the sounds also drift off things, and link up with one another, in rhythms. The sound of a drop of water falling into the bathtub reveals to us its nature as a drop of water and reveals the surface of the water still left in the bathtub after we have left it without draining it, called away by the sound of someone knocking at the door. But the sounds also link up with one another, and we hear a morse code of sounds: dum, dum-dumm, a rhythm dum, dum-dumm, from faucet and the suritself disconnected the obsessively repeating face of the water, pursuing its way in the free space. It is through action that we comprehend how things hold together and fit in with other things. These images refracted off things are not they are ways things ways the thing is there together and graspable; elsewhere than where are and are The they ungraspable. appear

62 between us and these images is one of captivation and relationship Their to is us act on us a across magical, they possession. relationship distance and without intermediaries. their Images captivate by rhythm. When we walk through the forest, the shadows link up in a rhythm which lifts our eyes from the substance of the trees and underbrush Seated in a train, we look and induces in them a rhythmic movement. out of the window, actively seeking to identify things, landmarks, towns, but soon the color and forms of the mountains disengage from the of the and flow the window and distract us; our landscape by map in the of the flow trees and hills, followgaze gets caught up rhythmic as our in the ing rhythm, moving rhythmically, hearing gets entangled the rhythmic sound of the train wheels turning on the rails. Our attention to the meaning of the words of a story being told is doubled up with an awareness of the sounds, the rhythm of the sounds, which tend to form closed wholes that link up with and call for one another. We do not actively link up the sounds and produce the rhythm of them but exists between them; inthat does not exist in any one in the rhythm. It captivates us and invades us, so stead we participate that the pace of our hearing becomes rhythmic. Levinas disengages the specific traits of involvement in a rhythm which is the specific form of awareness of these images. Captivated by the in which the and coherence of images consistency things dissipates, the consistency and coherence of the ego dissolves. We lie in bed trying to sleep or to read, but the tap-tap of the dripping faucet invades us, and we end up caught in it. Unable to break free of it, unable to direct our attention to our own concerns, we are reduced to anonymin a it as one hears it, as anyone hears it. Involvement ity, hearing is if is not consciousness identified with intenconsciousness, rhythm tionality, for the I is no longer there to exercise initiatives and objectify. in music produces the intense agitation of walking or Involvement while the is freedom of consciousness dancing, paralyzed. Nor does involvement in a rhythm have the form of the unconscious, since all elements of the situation are present and nowise disguised or conis also different cealed. from the Being caught up in a rhythm in habits and found body intentionality prepredicative Merleau-Ponty skills. It produces an intense sense of presence, an obsessed lucidity in which habits, quite different from the obscurity and indistinctness or instinct reflexes, operates. The images in which the consistency and coherence of things dissiare without of of interest, interesting, being utility to us. Our pate awareness is inter-ested itself (inter-esse), finding among them, an imof itself. It becomes each age rhythmic itself, pulse of awareness an

63 image of the prior pulse, linked up with it and called up by it-and each pulse of awareness an image of the visual or sonorous images whose rhythm captivates it. It is with dreaming that states of captivation by images is to be comlike a subpared. The dreaming is not conscious of the dream-images situated over them and them or like a subject ject observing against but it is not of unconscious them since them, either, fabricating they The dreaming subjecare intensely present as articulated apparitions. to them, caught up in them, entangled in them, tivity is subjected unable to separate itself from them and from their own progression. the garden Likewise, the rabbit or squirrel nibbling its way through doubles up into an image of a child or dwarfish human not because our mind actively selects images and links them up, but because our mind is captivated by images disconnected from things that of themin link harmonics and selves up rhythms. from objects; Sounds are the qualities most detached sounds dematerialize the substance of the things they resounded, and exhibit When we listen to the obsessive tap-tap of the their own reverberation. or the the with the substance of the faucet, faucet, music, relationship the water, or with the substance of the trumpets and drums is lost is not apprehending is not grasping sight of. Listening "something," things with concepts. We arrive at the concert hall, and look at the musicians tuning up, emptying spittle from their trumpets, pounding on the taut surfaces of their drums, clanging the cymbals, picking at the strings of the harp. Then the music begins, the sounds detach themselves entirely from the substances whose metallic or wood or catgut nature they revealed, and are set free in another where dimension, they link up in rhythms and melodies. And our hearing is caught up in those rhythms and melodies, its initiatives terminated; we follow the music anonymously, like and with anyone who listens to it. The whole setting open to our perception, with its practical and intellectually elaborated structures, can touch us musically, can become an image. The caricaturized shapes and drifting colors are set free from the layout of things uncovered, discovered, manipulated and grasped in action, to form a dense and distinct realm. This double materializes not as a Platonic realm beyond manipulation poised for intellectual but as something on this side of the practicable world. contemplation, The images effect an obscuring of the practicable field, a density and that cakes up the carpentry and gearings of things. They materiality clog up the onward course of action and discourse. They dilate with a different tempo and temporality than that of furnishings and implements-of things.

64 In Platonic terms, the order of real things engenders a succession of which their resemble them but without their truth, images reality, images, that are semblances. These images are not true and are not false apstratum. Images are pearances either; they form a distinct ontological that do not function as signs appearances relaying the gaze to the have lost their themselves, things they transparency; they thicken, materialize for themselves. They are places where the real practicable and graspable world is engulfed in another, purely sensuous, realm. Levinas shows how images exist in a time that is not the time of the course of the inhabitable and practicable world. When we see the real brown of the table, we see how the table was brown and will be brown. When we look at the real front side of this chair or this toaster, it it unfolds a leads us to the sides and the back side and the underside; time of its progressive development and exposure. But when we get of the toaster in the wincaught up in the shadow or the reflection dow, the image does not evolve; it endures in a present without possibilities. When we look at the face speaking and see the professor teaching, we see the expression and form of that face evolving in the elaboration of sentences and paragraphs. But when we see instead the caricatural double, the foppish or buffoon or loutish image, this image appears fixed in its endurance without change. Each image is an instant-not but that it stands in itself, and cut off from that it is instantaneous, past and future. The fixity of images is not that of concepts. When we grasp things and fix their natures in concepts, these concepts offer the succession of things to our powers and connect up with other concepts in a dialectic. The motor force of that dialectic is in them. When we see the shadow or the reflection that doubles up the table, these shadows and reflections link up with other shadows and other reflections. They do not evolve or continue of themselves; it is their rhythm or their tempo them like a fate. They exist in a time without the dethat commands terminism by which causes result in effects and without the freedom by which things take initiatives on their own. Hiking down from the hills above, we survey the town below either to map out the best path down into it before darkness falls or to disengage its colonial layout of church square, bus terminus, and commercial and residential districts. Then each flank of a hill evolves toward the town center. But when we are walking, this practical and circumspective survey gets displaced by an awareness caught up in the rhythm of hills, trees, and luminous of autumn leaves. Then each salvo of autumn leaves we splatterings pass drifts by poised for itself and answers and calls up the prior and of images-and not ones like images of them-images succeeding

65 unfoldings of them. Images fall out of the course of the things of the in world and of the action that deals with them; they are immobilized their own fates. The fixity of images is also not that of the endurance of things, of which furnish the zone we inhabit. Levinas relates the substances, instantness of an image, immobilized, without issuing in a prolonged future, to the time of dying. In the measure that one knows one is dying, one knows that the powers to take hold of things, to advance in the world are being taken from one. In the end one can do nothing. One can effect no action, one cannot advance into a future made of One can do nothing but wait. promises and chances and possibilities. Wait for death itself to come. One is in suspense, held in life, held in to another the present, without being able to continue present, another possibility. One waits, as in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Pit and the as death in the blade of the pendulum dePendulum," imperceptibly scends. This is not the Heideggerian anxiety, which resolutely of its own forces confronts death and hurls oneself into the abyss. It is the anxiety of having fallen out of the advance of the world, the time of a time that enhistory, into a time that is dead but not extinguished, dures, a time in which one goes on without going any where. The images are in this dead time, held in suspense, enduring without advancing or evolving in an impotent present. It is a realm that cannot end, where the present cannot open upon a becoming, where the images, moved by the tempo or the rhythm as by fate, cannot even extinguish themselves. Art and Fate

Artistry breaks with comprehensive activity, with grasping and manipulating things. Modern art events and objects that present themselves as absolute music, pure painting, pure poetry, have driven things out of the realm of colors detached from objects and of sounds detached from resounding pieces of metal and wood. But in those paintings and statues that did represent something or someone, the image itself closes in upon itself and breaks with the ongoing life of the young woman who posed for some hours in the artist's studio and whom he paid and perhaps seduced or married. An artist occupies himself not with the essences of things, but with their appearances, their images, idealizations In the statue and caricatures. (more exactly idolizations) of the athlete, the properties of the image emanating from an athlete are disengaged from that athlete and fixed in the mineral substance of the marble, where they are not the properties of that marble. Although

66 the words of a poet do have meaning, a meaning that may delineate the form and destiny of things for the first time, the poet is enchanted with the resonance of words instead of their references, with the play of harmonics and dissonances between the resonances of words, and of words. Since with the rhythm of the succession of the resonance they are words, they still have meaning, but they depict things fancifully or metaphorically, substituting an image for the concept that grasps and formulates the inner structure of things. An art event or object is an image withdrawn from the onward course of things being articulated, and discussed. In displayed, elaborated, that onward course of things, it materializes a zone of nontruth, an event of obscuring, a descent of night, an invasion of shadow. Artistry finds each time the moment when the event or object itself It is impossible to refuses to accept anything more, appears saturated. add or subtract anything from the Mona Lisa; we see that, Leonardo stopped when he saw that. A poem by itself comes to its completion, when the poet sees that no word can be added to improve it, no word come to an end, and as they take place subtracted. Even happenings themselves from the separate trafficking of the city. In language everything said calls for and requires a response; there is no last word on any subject. To say something is to begin a dialectic. In labor, everything found or fashioned as a tool opens upon an indefinite range of uses. Art historians artificially link up art events and objects into a dialectical history, explaining how the art "works" how the "works" of classical antiquity were reborn in the renaissance, and Leonardo of Michelangelo da Vinci led to mannerism, and then to Dutch and Flemish romanticism, and then to the new classicism of the ancien regime, and then to impressionism, cubism, fauvism, futurand so But that an artificial on. all is construction elaborated ism, centuries after. When we stand before the Mona Lisa or the David of these "works" are sealed in their own completion, and Michelangelo, no survey of the mannerist "works" that came after illuminate their artistic perfection. Classical art which was representational corrects the caricatural imin snub the stiff It closes the on itself. nose, ages-the gesture. image of the image. A human Classical beauty is this closure and perfection image carved in marble, with all the loose hair, the moles, the flabby an image of an athlete who is wholly, entirely, inbuttocks corrected, an a athlete, tegrally figure of power and effectiveness. But the classical artist only succeeds in producing an idol, that is, an image that is and in itself but mute and inactive and sunken into a closed perfect athlete not be an athlete unless he aspired in the The could stupor.

67 and closing the impresent to act, to let fly the discus. In perfecting the artist has immobilized the image in an of this athlete, age poised instant that endures without a future. "Eternally Laocoon will be caught up in the grip of serpents; the Mona Lisa will smile eternally. Eterin the strained muscles of Laocoon will be nally the future announced unable to become present. Eternally the smile of the Mona Lisa about to broaden will not broaden." It is not that the artistry immobilized the real present of the athlete, in his action. Instead the artreal athlete the appearance the showing ist was captivated by the image that emanated there-which, as an image, did not direct the force of the past to unfold a future. The instant of this image that cannot pass of its own forces and cannot take on anything, cannot undertake anything, is a present fallen out of time and into the dead time of fate. A present that is impotent to force history the course of the future, impotent to force the very movement of a is a its that knows existence as fate. Art future, present only images are compared with dreams; their time is the time of nightmares. The painter who paints the youthful blush on the cheeks of a young woman immobilizes this blush, turns it into an image and takes it out of the subsequent life and history of that woman. The novelist who narrates the lives of a number of characters them in his imprisons narrative. They seem to be people in the world, and at the end of the novel the course of the world about them makes no headway. The trees, the animals, the weather, the other people in the city only make an appearance as the setting, the context of these characters; they have no other life. They are images disengaged from the real trees, aniand other who on their own. mals, weather, go people In music, literature, theater, and cinema, the time that the artist introduces between the images does not cancel the immobility of the in a novel can only repeat indefiimages themselves. The characters acts the same and the same nitely thoughts. They will take no further initiative as a result of having gone through all these acts and thoughts, and nothing further will happen to them. Marcelo Taranto composed a film-a tale of an architect struggling to produce a civic building both beautiful and protective of the environment-in which at a certain point the characters get an inkling, then the indubitable recogniin a film, and that the urban and tion, that they are but characters architectural projects they are involved in and they themselves will come to an end within 45 minutes. But in fact the present in which artcrafted images exist does not have this power to foresee their real futures. When we cut out a segment of life and make it into a narrative, we represent people and events in the course of a plot that has a beginning,

68 middle, and end. The narrative comes to its comic or tragic or ironic conclusion. But of course when Kerouac or we set out on this motorcycle trip across the country, we did not move along the lines of this and events that we encounplot, and the other people, landscapes, tered did not present themselves as characters and events in a plot. The narrative deals not with real people and events, but with their images. When we watch a movie, the reality of the actors themselves disappear under their roles, but the characters they portray appear to subin their actions as we would in stitute for them, and we get interested watching real people. But the cineast is not a historian or biographer; what interests him are the images that real people generate and the between those images. There are always moments in Alain relationship Robbe-Grillet's films when time stops, when all the characters stop their hands or their legs in mid-air and compose an image, a scene, a tabis stopped in his tenleau. These are moments when the spectator dency to go along with the action and views the personages as characters, the action as a spectacle. Art extends the space and time-the dead time, time of fate or dywhich the images of things are ing, outside of life and history-in with their life and their power absent from them. Artimmobilized, of the urgency and pressure istry, which takes flight when something of need are lifted, and which thus is so often identified with freedom, in fact enters into the nontemporality and unfreedom of fate. That in history, laborious and enterprising humans could also have been distracted by the sorcery of art reveals, in the midst of time and of history, an uncertainty about the continuation of time. Life falls into the time of dying, the dead time of fate. Artistry is the very presentiment of fate. To make or to contemArtistry thereby frees us from responsibility. plate a painting, to write or read a novel is to no longer have to conceive reality, is to abandon the effort of science, philosophy, and action. This irresponsibility charms us as lightness and grace. Artistry deals not with horrors and malice but with their images, their caricatures; fixed in their contours and speechthey are given over to contemplation, The very powers of eternal malediction less and impotent. appear innocent ; Satan is fascinating in all his pomps. The world to be built is and perfection of its shadows. Before its replaced by the completion annexation back to China, Hong Kong television showed three or four costume dramas of Imperial China a day. Before Gorbachev, any week Moscovites packed the Bolshoi, Congress Palace night ten thousand and Tchaikovsky theaters to watch grand opera. There is, Levinas writes,

69 something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague. The harmonics of colors detached from the surfaces of things, the realm of resonance and music, the realm of the purely tangible, the realm of free-floating scents and savors in the night, the realm of dreams, the realm of voluptuous and hallucinations, contours and phantasms, are erotic obsessions are unpracticable spaces. They spaces that beckon to us and summon us imperatively through images. They are spaces when we enter we cease to bodies and be where, them, competent become resonating become nocturcarnal, sensual, oneirotic, boxes, bodies. are realms of and action-at-a-distance, nal, They phantasmal sorcery, and enchantment. They are realms where one cannot touch, cannot use what is there. They are zones where cannot manipulate, the world of work and history enters into decomposition. The shadowy world of art is a realm of evasion from one's responsibility. It is not that Levinas thinks that we are imperatively destined to the world of work and appropriation. It is rather because for Levinas in the appeal and contestation we must answer to the imperative of others. There is not something irresolute and cowardly in losing oneself in the realm of music instead of devoting oneself to furnishing one's home with possessions, in writing a poem instead of engineering wicked and egoist in a highway. It is rather that there is something oneself in the realm of music when the losing burning city resounds with cries for help. Art and Language

One speaks of the language of poets, of realist or romantic or postmodem But an novels, the "language" of painting, of cinema, of architecture. neither of the author nor of art event or object is not an expression, any real individuals and situations, any more than a mirage-lake on a of the inner nature of that highway. An art highway is an expression event or object does not speak, does not engage a dialogue. It closes in upon its own completion and perfection. Poems and novels stop itself within their own closures. Like the "In the beginning" language "At that time" of the or myths and epics, opening words of a poem or a novel do not respond to any utterances that may have preceded them, and nothing that can be said after them, by the reader or the critic, belongs to them. But about art, language proliferates-the language of art criticism, and also the language of philosophy. The critics are not themselves artists; they are spectators. Either they seem to be saying in clear language

70 what the poet or the cineast is taken to have said in obscure and confused language, in which case the poem or the movie are superfluous and vain. Hegel said that in modern times the medium in which the essential was set up and set forth was no longer art but rational philosophy and science. Or else criticism seems to be vainly trying to put in words what can only be exhibited in colors, in sounds, in the masses and spaces of architecture. Criticism divests the artist not only of inspiration and genius but in an also of irresponsibility. "artwork" its technique, a By disengaging critic treats the artist as a man at work. In elaborating a discourse or taken up, about the "influences" an artist is said to have undergone criticism links this disengaged and proud artist to real history. Nietzsche admitted the validity of an aesthetics from the point of view of the artists and not from the point of view of critics, that is, spectators and audience. But criticism also can do something else. The critic enters into the realm of art, that ether of shadows and images, and entertains it as his own mental environment, even though as a critic he seeks to speak frankly and through concepts. The most lucid writer in art criticism will finds his language captivated by images. His discourse is telling by virtue of what it contains of allusions, suggestion, double meanings and equivocations, those shadows of concepts. His language is not really that of truth, the setting up of the essential in a stable and public medium, but it is not simply a parasitical and impotent discourse that can be validated neither as science nor as art. For it is true that art has always called for language. The language of art appreciation introduces the empyrean of reflections, mirages, simulacra, and mute idols into the world of the mind. What about philosophy? to Philosophy has an essential relationship sets out to determine art. For when philosophy the apontologically pearances in which reality appears, it discovers about the concepts that of real things, all the doubles, mirages, masks, grasp the carpentry shadows, images that reality engenders. Its discourse cannot simply turn away from the path of images in order to remain resolutely on the path of reality. Its discourse cannot simply elaborate a dialectic of histhe images, tory and dismiss the time of fate. Philosophy interprets treats the succession of images completed, fixed by art as perfected, discourse can be captivated by myth as by the image myth. Philosophical of truth-and deceived by what it takes that myth to say. It becomes conscious of the sources of images, not only of the production of the that are appearances of real things, but also of the imappearances ages. What the idol will say when it is made to speak is that it is a

71 mute and inexpressive image, fixed in a time of fate. Thus philosophy, set up to found rationally the city and the sciences, is contaminated by an uncertainty of time's continuation and a premonition of fate.

REFERENCES Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers of EmmanuelLevinas, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). -. Existenceand Existents,trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). -. Totalityand Infinity,trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979). Henri Wallon, Lesoriginesde la pensechezl'enfant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945).