Levinas, trauma, and God: Does Emmanuel Levinas idealize trauma?

C. Fred Alford

Levinas, trauma, and God: Does Emmanuel Levinas idealize trauma?

from: www.traumatheory.com

Emmanuel Levinas was an unlikely combination of Talmudic scholar and
postmodern philosopher. Or at least he was adopted by postmoderns, such as
Jacques Derrida, who wrote a book about him, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.

Levinas struggled with what a modern experience of God might actually be
like. He ended up describing the experience in terms of trauma. The idea
that an encounter with God is traumatic has a venerable history, going back
to Moses, from whom God concealed His face, lest Moses be struck dead
(Exodus 33.22). But Levinas is dealing with a postmodern God, whom we
experience through an encounter with Infinity.

Cathy Caruth and trauma

An encounter with infinity is traumatic enough, and the terms in which
Levinas describes this trauma come remarkably close to Cathy Caruth's
account of trauma. Caruth is probably the most influential figure in
literary trauma theory today. For Caruth, the traumatic experience cannot
be represented because it occurred before its recipient was prepared to
know it. Or as Caruth puts it, deeply traumatic experiences are events
without witnesses, experienced a moment too late, before the self was there
to mediate it. As a result, the trauma remains unsymbolized, unintegrated
into normal memory.

Unlike Freud, Caruth's is not a developmental claim but a temporal one.
Extreme trauma is inscribed upon an otherwise-mature subject who was not
there, because the experience was so far beyond the normal it could not be
prepared for, categorized, or shared. The traumatized, says Caruth,

carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves
the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (p. 5).

In a sense, the traumatized are their trauma until they are able to
integrate it, almost always with the help of another who hears what the
traumatized are unable know.

Levinas

Levinas sounds remarkably like Caruth. For Levinas, the experience of the
Infinite is traumatic because it slips into me before I am ready, "despite
the taut weave of consciousness." The experience of the infinite is "a
trauma (traumatisme) that surprises me absolutely, always already passed in
a past that was never present." (1987, p. 75) The past was never present
because it remains stuck in traumatic time, the past that occupies the
present without being subject to it. If the past were subject to the
present, it could be repressed.

Trapped in being

Levinas says that most of us are trapped in our own little worlds, the
world of everyday life with its pleasures, cares, and concerns. Levinas
fears being trapped in being, as he calls it, more than he fears trauma.
On the contrary, trauma is an exit from being. That's good.

Only occasionally does Levinas indulge in psychological reflection, as when
he tries to explain the origin of the experience of being trapped in being,
what he calls the il y a, which literally means "there is."

My reflection on this subject starts with childhood memories. One
sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of
his bedroom as 'rumbling.' It is something resembling what one hears
when one puts an empty shell close to the ear, as if the emptiness were
full, as if the silence were a noise. . . . Existence and Existents
tries to describe this horrible thing, and moreover describes it as horror
and panic. (1985, p. 48)

As it turns out, the horror and panic is at being trapped inside oneself.
"It is not," says Levinas, "a matter of escaping from solitude, but rather
of escaping from being." (1985, p. 59)

Trauma is the exit, which Levinas refers to as "the passivity of a trauma
through which the idea of God would have been placed in us." (1987, p. 64)
By this he means that the experience of the Infinite is already in us, we
just don't know it. The experience of the Infinite is beyond "scientific"
time, belonging to what the medieval scholastics called the Nunc Stans, the
everlasting and eternal now.

This actually reflects a central element of traumatic experience: that it
is never over. The past is never past; it is always laying claim to the
present, so that under the influence of trauma it becomes impossible to say
"a terrible thing happened once." Terrible things keep happening forever.
That is the definition of trauma; it is what the flashbacks, the
nightmares, and the hypervigilance, are all about, and these are only the
most dramatic symptoms.

The trauma of awakening

For Levinas there are two stages to the traumatic encounter with the
Infinite. In the first the Infinite intrudes itself into me before I know
that it is there, before I can symbolically register and make sense of the
experience. Before I can defend against it. The second stage is when the
Infinite stands between me and my ego, so that I know or rather feel the
truth: that I no longer belong to myself.

All who have been traumatized are familiar with the second stage, in which
the voices and visions of the past live a life of their own within oneself.
In Levinas' account, this second stage of trauma, what he calls the
"trauma of a fission of oneself," is represented by the other who inhabits
me (who come between me and my ego), while remaining totally other (1987,
p. 78). I think it sounds like an alien intrusion. For Levinas it is a
welcome one.

What makes this experience traumatic, what keeps it traumatic, is that my
relationship to the other remains a "relationship without relation." An
encounter with another person takes place, but it is "without relation," as
the other remains absolutely other (Levinas, 1969, p. 80). Otherwise the
relationship is likely to become personal, something that makes me feel
good. The traumatic quality of the encounter with the other person
guarantees its generality, its impartiality. It also guarantees a terrible
loneliness, as I can take no personal satisfaction in helping another.

Levinas would defend his account by saying that he is describing part of an
experience, not its totality. It is as though two experiences take place
at the same time: one in which I am an agent of the Infinite, another in
which I am involved with and care for real people with real faces. The
face, as it turns out, represents an encounter with the face of God,
experienced in the faces of other people in their need. However, the
encounter that frees me from the burden of my being, Levinas' real goal, is
with a face (visage) without features. Personal identity is dangerous, for
it attaches us to particular others. I think it sounds a little creepy,
but perhaps I am taking this too literally.

Is this a misuse of trauma?

I don't think it's a misuse of trauma to use it to express religious
experience. Transcendent experience has long been connected with trauma-
like experiences. Saul was blind for three days after hearing the voice of
God (Acts 9.1-9).

The misuse of trauma is in turning trauma into an escape from being, as
though trauma is the crack that lets the light in. What really traumatizes
Levinas is the experience of just being himself, as though to be is
equivalent to being trapped within oneself, an autistic prison, what he
calls the il y a. It's an odd trauma when considered in the abstract, for
it lacks a key characteristic of trauma, intrusion.

Nevertheless, entrapment, imprisonment, being held hostage, have long been
associated with severe trauma. Levinas seeks out this trauma too, which he
characterizes in terms of being held hostage to the other's needs, a
condition in which I exist solely to serve the other, what he calls the
"trauma of accusation." (Levinas, 1988, p. 15) Once again, trauma is a
good thing, but only because it traps us outside ourselves without letting
us be free, and without letting us back in. Those who have experienced
real mundane trauma may wonder about its goodness.

Is this weird?

To anyone unfamiliar with Levinas, he must seem seriously weird. The
reader would be right. Idealizing trauma as though it were a religious
experience, while troubling to some of us who know the horribleness of the
trauma of this world, has a long history. The problem with Levinas is the
way he would solve the trauma of being by enslaving us to others with
featureless faces. That is, to people with whom it is impossible to have
real and satisfying relationships. To me that is the most traumatic
experience of all. One could argue that I am taking Levinas too literally.
I think I'm taking him seriously.

References

Cathy Caruth, Introduction, Unclaimed Experience. Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1996.

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity. Duquesne University Press, 1985.

Emmanuel Levinas, God and philosophy, in Collected Philosophical Papers,
ed. A. Lingis. Martinus Nijhoff, 1987.



Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being. Duquesne University Press, 1998