What Levinas means here is that works of art impose feelings and impressions on people, who receive them passively and egoistically. Art does not lead to interaction with others, and, hence, engaging with a work of art is an act of disengagement and disinterestedness.5 It is also a “stoppage [arrêt] of time” (RO 119; RS 8). That is, the act of giving one’s attention to a work of art creates a category of time that is “below” time, “an interruption of time by a movement going on the hither side of time” (RO 109; RS 3), in which fate replaces freedom (RO 121; RS 9–10). In engaging with art, people lose their agency in time, or their freedom, which is a condition of being open to the other. For Levinas, therefore, the Hegelian conception of art is problematic from both an epistemological and a moral point of view. It pretends that art is more real than reality when, in fact, it resides in reality’s shadow; and it “liberates the artist from his duties as a man” (RO 109; RS 2). As a result, art is always a form of idolatry: “The petrification of the instant in the heart of duration … is the great obsession of the artist’s world, the pagan world” (RO 123; RS 11).
On the other hand, Levinas’s own work is full of literary references, which he employs for emphasis or to illustrate ethical situations and arguments. He admired the works of Shakespeare, Proust, Dostoyevsky, and others, and there is reason enough to suppose that he enjoyed music and painting no less than other philosophers and intellectuals of his time. Last, his own flourishing and emphatic style seems at times more poetic than strictly “philosophical.” In this, he reminds us of Plato, who condemned the poets but had his own poetic style—and of Socrates, who rhetorically rejected rhetoric.
To explain the contradiction between Levinas’s positions on art, some scholars have claimed to discern an evolution in his views, from a negative perception of art in the early texts to a reevaluation of it in the mature body of work.6 It has also been argued that Levinas seems to make a distinction between literature and fine or visual art. The former, this argument goes, would avoid artistic idolatry because it is made of language, which constitutes the relation to the other.7 Yet Jill Robbins observes a tension that operates “within each of [Levinas’s] texts about art,” from the beginning to the end of his philosophical journey.8 Regardless of any possible evolution of his views or any distinction between (visual) art and literature, Levinas’s writings reflect a real conflict between two opposing conceptions of art, one that sees art as ethical and one that sees it as anti-ethical.
Robbins shows that Levinas’s criticism of idolatry (also called “the mythical” or “the mystical,” and sometimes “the magical”) in art is consistent throughout his entire work.9 But what do these terms (idolatry, the mythical, the mystical, and the magical) actually mean? To answer this question, let us turn to the Talmudic reading “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry,” published in In the Time of the Nations in 1988. In that late text, Levinas explains that idolatry was conceptualized for the first time in the book that defines itself precisely against it, the Hebrew Bible or Torah, which created both the category of idolatry and that of its opposite, “religion.”10 Idolatry, in this context, means closure—“some secret closing up of the soul”: the impossibility or the interdiction of exegesis (AHN 70; ITN 57). It consists of clinging to the immanence of meaning and refusing to look for what transcends it through commentary and dialogue. Idolatry is therefore the adoration of sameness. What idolaters see in every image, in every event, and in every word of God is, in effect, what they want to see, namely, themselves.
By contrast, “religion” or Torah is the possibility or even the requirement of interpretation, which is the ability to go beyond one’s own cognition or understanding. Interpreting means, if you will, leaving the mind’s comfort zone, the place where everything makes immediate sense. It consists of letting the text uproot the reader from what was meaningful in the first place. If so, the Torah contests not only idolatry but also the activity of essence or ontology, which in all situations aims at finding resemblances and at ascertaining sameness. “Contempt for the Torah as Idolatry” is arguably Levinas’s clearest explanation of the similarity, and perhaps equivalence, between idolatry and ontology. Like idolatry, ontology functions in an immanent dimension (AT 130; AT’ 122), and it seeks to transform difference into sameness. Ethics (the aspect of Torah that combats idolatry) is therefore openness to transcendence and otherness, while ontology is closure within presence.
To return to Levinas’s formulation in “Reality and Its Shadow,” ontology, like idolatry, is a stopping, or arrest, of time. Or as he says in later texts, ontology is “synchrony” while ethics works as “diachrony” (EI 48; EI’ 56). Diachrony is the possibility of transcendence in time, a “disjunction of identity where the same does not come back to the same” (AE 88; OB 52). In that context, the transcendence proposed (or created) by the Torah, that is, the openness to otherness and, hence, the possibility of interpretation, fractures idolatry and ontology both in relationships between human beings and in relationships between a reader and her book.11 In both domains, the subject can be either petrified into presence and fate (RO 123; RS 11) or open to interpretation—that is, to the other.
Idolatry, meaning the petrification into presence and fate that occurs when we engage with a work of art, acts through rhythm. Rhythm is “the way the poetic order affects us.… Rhythm represents a unique situation where we cannot speak of consent, assumption, initiative or freedom, because the subject is caught up and carried away by it” (RO 111; RS 4).12 By rhythm, Levinas does not mean a feature of music and sound but the essence of the aesthetic experience, in which the subject becomes passive and participates in the world like a thing: “[The subject] is among things as a thing, as part of the show.” His or her consciousness is “paralyzed in his or her freedom” (RO 112; RS 4). Therefore, “art’s bewitching [ensorceleurs] rhythms” are a prison that only ethics can break, because by definition ethics is the power of rupture (DL 408; DF 293).13 We find the same rejection of rhythm and its partner, dance, in interviews of the late 1980s—one by Christoph von Wolzogen and the other by Raoul Mortley. In the latter interview Levinas declares: “I often say, though it’s a dangerous thing to say publicly, that humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks.… All the rest—all the exotic—is dance.”14 We will return at the end of this book to this “frankly racist aside,” as Critchley calls it, and to other similar comments by Levinas.15 What interests us at this point is the distinction made between situations that generate active dialogue and interpretation, and experiences in which agency is transformed into passive involvement.
It is remarkable that in the texts cited above—both the early and the late—Levinas attacks “passivity,” while in seminal texts he uses that word to celebrate the ethical attitude.16 Ethical passivity, or “radical passivity,” as Wall calls it, is the openness of the subject to otherness. In Levinas’s famous expression, it is the “substitution for the other through responsibility” (AE 181; OB 114).17 Hence, the notion of ethical passivity designates an activity of the subject on behalf of the other (AE 182; OB 115). However, there exists another passivity, which Levinas rejects as anti-ethical. This “inert passivity” (AE 181; OB 115) is that engendered by rhythm. It constitutes an anti-ethical attitude because, in it, the subject withdraws from his or her responsibility for the other.
In sum, there are two kinds of passivity and disinterestedness: the ethical kind, which is responsibility for the other, and the artistic kind, which constitutes a withdrawing from responsibility. We can now understand better Levinas’s criticism of art in “Reality and Its Shadow.” It is through rhythm that art leads to inert passivity, namely, to disengagement from responsibility. This view is found not only in Levinas’s early texts but throughout his entire body of work, up to his 1988 interview with Francoise Armengaud, published in De l’oblitération, which deals with Sosno’s sculptures. There Levinas says, “Beauty’s perfection enforces silence without taking care of the rest.