“A Century with Levinas:
Levinas – Blanchot, Thinking the Difference”

There are good reasons for linking the name of Maurice Blanchot with that of Emmanuel Levinas (2006 and 2007 will mark the centenaries of Levinas and Blanchot respectively). There is the enduring bond of friendship between two authors, exemplified by

• their student years in Strasbourg,
• the help Blanchot gave to Levinas’s family during the Occupation,
• the witness he bore in favor of Judaism,
• the common effort of each man to think and say what is unspeakable about the Shoah.

Many were the agreements, much was shared between them.

Blanchot provided the following commentary on the meaning and the mystery of their encounter: ‘Something deep down drew us towards each other’. Yet it was a friendship paradoxically without encounter (or so little, when all is said and done), which traversed the twentieth century and lasted their entire lifetimes. This friendship figures as a silent exchange throughout their writings:

• on numerous occasions they comment on each other,
• refer,
• pay homage and even
• devote a number of texts to each other.

Blanchot’s writing and that of Levinas thus developed and deepened in a certain proximity.

• From the discovery of the ‘il y a’
• to their distant exchanges on the status of the work of art,
• by way of a dialogue on the subjects of
  • ethics,
  • Judaism and
  • the Bible, which Blanchot cites in his last writings.
• It is the rejection of the primacy of ontology that brings the two authors close.

And no doubt for this reason, the names of Levinas and Blanchot have become reference points in the discourse of a certain postmodernity.
This association has occasionally given rise to some misunderstanding, particularly with regard to the notion of ‘ethics’ in the Anglo-Saxon world, and this has sometimes led to a blurring of the differences between the two thinkers.

Yet these relations of friendship and this proximity have not prevented several authors from pointing to a deep divide separating the two thinkers.

• Françoise Collin notes as early as 1971: ‘we are always dealing with two registers of writing and thought which it is difficult to compare’.
• More recently, Jacques Derrida, who ‘avowedly placed his work under the triple aegis of Heidegger, Blanchot and Levinas’, acknowledges that in the case of the latter two we encounter ‘two untranslatable idioms’: ‘Whatever Levinas and Blanchot said or allowed to become apparent concerning their agreement, their alliance, an abyss divides them which could, were we to wish to undertake the exercise, give rise to irreconcilable differences, and sometimes to head-on, explosive confrontations‘.

Other fault-lines may also appear, though these never suspended their encounter.

It would thus appear that the relations between Blanchot and Levinas cannot simply be reduced to an alliance between partners who were reacting against the primacy of ontology in Western thought, and whose reference to the ‘neuter’ crystallizes the difference in their critical attitudes in the face of Heidegger’s ontology. Nevertheless,

• how are we to articulate the differences which separate the two friends,
• and how are we to think their friendship (and the community which is inherent in it) on the basis of these differences?

It is to these two questions, among others, that the colloquium will be devoted.

• At the heart of this enquiry, there is first of all a divergence of understanding concerning language.
  • For Levinas, language is defined essentially as discourse – as speech directed at the other (autrui).
  • For Blanchot on the other hand, the essence of language can only be approached through writing.
• Linked to this divergence is a different comprehension of subjectivity:
  • for Blanchot, the advent of language is an invitation to an experience which transcends the instance of utterance;
  • Levinas on the contrary describes the event of language as a promotion of subjectivity, which is called on to reply ‘I’, ‘here I am’, in other words, to bear witness.

In order to make explicit this difference, it is the key notions of

• event,
• image,
• understanding,
• self,
• existence,
• other,
• ethics and
• God

which must be articulated differently.

And yet, in spite of these differences, the authors entered into a dialogue in which the relation between speech and writing is reflected, and in which it is the question of subjectivity itself which is at stake. From this point of view, an examination of their dialogue is an invitation to think the conditions of possibility (in the two-fold Kantian sense of ‘transcendental’ and ‘critical’) of community and of friendship.