A Study Of Transcendence In Levinas’ Literary Criticism

With the outbreak of the World Wars,a serious crisis of modernity appeared in the Western society in the 20^th century.“The evil of humanity”has become a theme for theorists to rethink.Emmanuel Levinas,a French philospher,began his philosophy by criticizing“evil”.As a new generation of phenomenologists leading“the theological turn”,Levinas founded that the root of this crisis was in the tradition of the Western metaphysics.And this is especially typcical of Husserl and Heidegger.Husserl’s theory of intentionality is based on the“noema-noesis”,but reason cannot exhaust all the activities of consciousness.Heidegger’s ontology continued Husserl’s philosophy,and eventually made people trapped in the quagmire of solipsism and unable to extricate themselves.Therefore,Levinas proposed a transcendental way which was different from Husserl’s,that is,on the premise of not violating the phenomenological method,taking sensible materiality as the beginning,constructing a new subjectivety different from reason,and asking for the more initial appearance of things.Based on this,Levinas launched his unique work of philosophical writing and literary criticism.Among the many objects of comment,the writers Maurice Blanchot and Paul Celan were the focus of Levinas’s attention.In his view,Blanchot’s literary practice emphasizes the passivity of the subject of literary creation and the materiality of literary texts,and tries to achieve a breakthrough in Heidegger’s ontology.This theory goes deep into the dark core of literature and has its rationality;but on the other hand,it loses the personality dimension of the subject,and instead defends the boundary of ontology by denying Heidegger’s philosophy.Celan is different:as a survivor of the Holocaust in the Second World War,he used contradictory and distorted language to create literature,completed the nearly impossible literary witness to the war and reconstructed the reality.Both Blanchot and Celan maintain absolute externality,but the difference between them is that the latter always preserves the dimension of personality for the subject.This is the way of transcendence advocated by Levinas—the ego responds to the distant call from others in the original experience of non-intellectuality,so as to truly achieve a breakthrough in Husserl and Heidegger’s theory of intentionality.And transcendence,the movement of‘for-the-other’,is an ethical gesture itself.It is the transcendence that makes goodness possible.