Poetic Language and Prophetic Language in Levinas's Works (original) (raw)

said to Janouch that 'the task of the poet is a prophetic task [.. .]'" (Blanchot 1982, 73), 1 determining in the same conversation that the Jewish people live with the voices of Scripture, that these are by no means relegated to the past, and that, on the contrary, they are in the present. The manuscript of Emmanuel Levinas's "The Servant and Her Master," held in the Maurice Blanchot archive, contains several additions to the published article Levinas dedicated to Maurice Blanchot's narrative Awaiting Oblivion (1963). A relatively lengthy addition was to constitute a footnote in the version first published in the celebrated volume of Critique from June, 1966, 2 a special issue comprising the first volume of collected articles dedicated to Blanchot, and was subsequently included in Levinas's volume On Maurice Blanchot (1975). The footnote reads: No ethical element comes into play in Blanchot's work so as to constitute this modality. It is not owing to its impoverished nature, nor to persecution or contempt, that it acquires the privilege of disappearing from the horizon, of transcending it, and then responding from the depths of its absence only to the call of the best. And yet every now and then, transcendence in Blanchot consists of the very uncertainty of presence, "as if she were only present so as to prevent herself from speaking. Then came the moments when, the thread of their relationship having been broken, she recovered her calm reality. It was at those moments that he saw better in how extraordinary a state of weakness she was, one from which she drew that authority which sometimes made her speak" (pp. 25-6). We said earlier that the word poetry referred to the disruption of immanence to which language is condemned in becoming its own prisoner. There is no question of considering this disruption as a purely aesthetic event. But the word poetry does not after all name a species whose genus is referred to by the word art. Inseparable from speech (le verbe), it overflows with prophetic meanings. (Levinas 1989, 158-159) 3 Translation: Translated, from the French, by Ashraf Noor 1 The French translation of Gustav Janouch's Gespräche mit Kafka uses the word "writer" and not "poet" (see Janouch 1998, 231). 2 Critique 229 (1966), special issue devoted to Maurice Blanchot. 3 This footnote refers to the sentence: "Such is the scintillating modality of transcendence, of what truly comes to pass." (Levinas 1989, 156) Open Access.