Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched 149859350X, 9781498593502

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Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch

Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch On What Cannot be Touched

Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-9350-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4985-9351-9 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: That Which Cannot Be Touched: Introduction to Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch ix Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos 1 The Metaphysics of Love and the Theory of Forgiveness in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy Giulia Maniezzi 2 Paradoxes of Virtue in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Moral Philosophy José Manuel Beato 3 “I can’t beat it”: Dimensions of the Bad Conscience in Manchester by the Sea Marguerite La Caze

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4 An Enduring Audience: Jankélévitch and Plotinus Tim Flanagan

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5 Speaking in the Night: On the Non-Sense of Death and Life Aaron T. Looney

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6 Vladimir Jankélévitch’s “Diseases of Temporality” and Their Impact on Reconciliatory Processes Francesco Ferrari 7 Jankélévitch’s Metaphysics of Humility Andrew Kelley

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8 The Work of Remorse: Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Conception of the Ethical Subject and François Ozon’s Frantz Magdalena Zolkos

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9 The Philosophy of the Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi and the Possibility of a Nonreligious Spirituality Clovis Salgado Gontijo

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10 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, and the Emergence of a Musical Aesthetic Paul Atkinson

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Index 197 Notes on Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This project began from our mutual admiration for Vladimir Jankélévitch’s beautiful and intensely rich philosophical texts, which we wanted to help find a wider readership to enjoy reading and researching. Recent translations of his works into English made this goal more realistic and we were lucky to discover a group of like-minded thinkers, who encouraged us through the project, including Peter Banki, Richard College, Angelee Joy Contini, Damian Cox, Elese Dowden, Robyn Horner, Alexandre Lefebvre, Diane Perpich, Françoise Schwab, and Cindy Zeiher, so we would like to warmly thank them. We are grateful to all the contributors, Clovis Salgado Gontijo, Andrew Kelley, José Manuel Beato, Giulia Maniezzi, Paul Atkinson, Tim Flanagan, Aaron Looney, Francesco Ferrari, who wrote such wonderful essays and were so patient with and responsive to our editing. We appreciate the financial, institutional, and administrative support for this project given by Paula Gleeson, Lisa Tarantino, and Nikolas Kompridis at the Institute of Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University. We would also like to recognize Jana Hodges-Kluck and Trevor Crowell at Lexington for their enthusiasm about Jankélévitch’s work and publication of this collection. Finally, we would also like to acknowledge each other as co-editors—it has been an honor and pleasure to work together and to support each other in this at times challenging, but also deeply satisfying endeavor. Marguerite La Caze Magdalena Zolkos

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Introduction That Which Cannot Be Touched: Introduction to Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos

The philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985) presents its students with the following puzzle, or, using Jankélévitch’s own terminology, we should rather say “secret”: despite the richness and originality of his ideas in the fields of moral philosophy, virtue ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of music and philosophy of religion, and despite his perspicacious interpretative engagements with the canonical texts of the Western philosophical tradition and the interlocutions with his contemporaries, Jankélévitch has remained at the margins of twentieth century French philosophy—his thought unclassifiable within any of its major movements, and his intellectual and political allegiances, including Plotinus, Schelling, and Bergson—multiple and diverse.1 He was an accomplished author and a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne for over two decades, very much admired by his students, but he also felt isolated within the compartmentalized world of French academic philosophy. To his contemporaries Jankélévitch was, as Goddard puts it, a “source of endless surprise” and “a champion of nonconformity.”2 Perhaps nowhere had Jankélévitch’s nonconformity become as apparent as in his decision—following German Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, during which he was prevented from teaching because of his Jewish background—to disengage entirely from German culture and philosophy in his academic writings and in his public engagements. This also included a systematic removal of references to German philosophy from his own pre-war writings, as in the case of the 1951 revisions of La Mauvaise Conscience, originally published in 1933.3 In the introduction to the English translation of Le Pardon, its translator Andrew Kelley cites Jankélévitch’s words, expressing a feeling of ix

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homelessness within the philosophical discussions and preoccupations of his era, but also a sense of hope that the relevance of his work will become more apparent in the time to come: “I am writing for the twenty-first century, which will discuss my ideas with passion, as opposed to the twentieth century.”4 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the interest in Jankélévitch’s thought, following the recent translations of his works into English, Italian, and German, is growing. His original approach to ethical analysis of forgiveness and remorse,5 his deep conviction that philosophy should respond to historical injustice, and his keenly perceptive analysis of the moral life of the subject resonate strongly with those who seek to respond to the problems of the contemporary world without resorting to nihilism or despondency. This volume brings together scholars of Jankélévitch’s philosophy, from within and outside Anglophone academia, to engage analytically and exegetically with the key problems of Jankélévitch’s thought, as well as to explore its relevance for a range of pressing political and ethical questions, including historical guilt, post-secularism and forgiveness. In this collection, we bring together a selection of texts from contemporary scholarship on Jankélévitch, with the aims of popularizing further his writings within and outside the philosophical community; of articulating the intricate connections within his philosophical and musicological oeuvre and bringing to the surface some of its key concepts and motifs; and of exploring the potential contribution of Jankélévitch’s philosophy to thinking more deeply about some of the problems that are currently galvanizing (and dividing) the public, such as the role of forgiveness and remorse in post-atrocity and post-colonial societies, or regarding the imprescriptibility and inexcusability of certain crimes.6 In this introduction we outline the key themes and approaches explored and elaborated by the contributors to this book, sketch links (and possibly tensions) between them, and situate the contributing texts within the broader philosophical context of Jankélévitchean scholarship. CREATION, INITIATION, INSTANT A frequently noted characteristic of Jankélévitch’s project has been his lifelong reworking of, and returning to, philosophical concepts and motifs that he had already sketched or touched upon in his earliest writings, including his doctoral thesis on Schelling,7 and his 1931 book on Bergson (reedited in 1959),8 or what Clovis Salgado Gontijo in his contribution to this volume calls the “exceptional cohesion” of Jankélévitch’s thought.9 As Andrew Kelley suggests in the introduction to Forgiveness,10 in contrast to the philosophers whose oeuvre is customarily viewed from a linear perspective, and where a relatively unproblematic distinction between an “early” and a “late”

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period is identifiable, in the case of Jankélévitch a more appropriate image is that of a mosaic or tapestry, where recurrent themes and problems are being continuously revisited, reworked, and rearticulated. This has had important implications for those readers of Jankélévitch who have undertaken attempts at illuminating hitherto unnoticed relationships, for instance, between Jankélévitch’s metaphysics and his moral philosophy, or between his philosophy of music and ethics. Focusing specifically on Jankélévitch’s philosophy of forgiveness and its link to his metaphysics of love, Giulia Maniezzi makes a connection between Jankélévitch’s major work on metaphysics of creation, Philosophie Première,11 where he outlines the conception of the Absolute based on the ideas of radical transcendence, and his moral philosophy of forgiveness. Creation is for Jankélévitch an actus purus, a “pure act” or a “pure operation,” which occurs without any preexisting order, or being (it is without any a priori, but, rather, brings its own a priori into existence).12 The original act of creation is identified as love (and as freedom) precisely because it is spontaneous, singular, unjustified, and unmotivated. Such metaphysics of creation has profound implications for how he later philosophizes love, grace, humility, and courage in his other works—so-called virtues of initiation—as acts of recreation, which directly replicate and reenact the “pure operation” of creation. Focusing specifically on forgiveness, Maniezzi shows that it constitutes for Jankélévitch a “hyperbolic form of love,” both because it comes as grace— just like the original act of creation, it is not preceded by any “essence” or “ground” in the form of the offender’s apology or penitence—and because forgiveness is truly generative of “new configuration in the world.”13 Kelley captures well forgiveness’s similarity to the original act of creation in his introduction to Forgiveness when he points to its singularity and spontaneity, and to its hyperbolic aspect. It is impossible to identify forgiveness as a “thing” or an “action”; instead, “[e]very time one attempts to forgive, one creates forgiveness anew.”14 The preoccupation with acts of beginning and (re-)creation, and with love, also features strongly in Jankélévitch writings on virtues (primarily in his 1949 Traité des Vertus), discussed in this volume by José Manuel Beato in a contribution titled “Paradoxes of Virtue in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Moral Philosophy.” Jankélévitch produces a list of specific virtues, and he catalogues them into two hierarchically arranged categories: the “virtues of initiation” (courage, love, charity and humility) are superior to “virtues of continuation” (fidelity, friendship, justice and modesty).15 At the heart of the Jankélévitchean conception of virtue is “acting for the good of the other,”16 which aligns very closely with the aforementioned metaphysics of creation in Philosophie Première, and with what Dagmar Smreková has called Jankélévitch’s “rejection of substantialism,” whereby “the good is not prior to the

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action of the moral subject.”17 In so far as for Jankélévitch virtue does not arise from the subject’s virtuosity (understood as a disposition, characteristic, developed skill, or an acquired property of the subject), but, rather, by declaring the primacy of doing over being, virtue connotes a creative act of bringing good into the world, it is “quodditative.”18 In an important sense, then, the virtuous act ensues ex nihilo, out of nowhere and out of nothing, demanding of the subject “perpetual renewal, constant commitment and continued effort.”19 This suggests in turn, as Beato puts it, rather beautifully, that Jankélévitch depicts ethics as a “demiurgical and poetic improvisation, below and beyond normativity.”20 Admittedly, this unpremeditated occurrence relates specifically to those virtues that Jankélévitch describes as initiative and creative, rather than continual; the latter, as Colin Smith points out, arise from “conflicting rival claims” and are an “equilibrium of conflicting forces,” rather than bestowed spontaneously.21 Maniezzi’s focus on creation, and its link to love, and Beato’s distinction between “virtues of beginning” and “virtues of continuity” imply another key concept in Jankélévitch’s writings, namely “the instant” (l’instant), which he differentiates from interval or duration—the measurable time (l’intervalle), and Jankélévitch matches the “virtues of continuity” with the interval (virtuous acts that ensure the maintenance, continuity of, and commitment to, the existing order), and the “virtues of beginning” with the instant (virtuous acts that disrupt the order to initiate something or create something anew). He writes about the instant in Philosophie Première that it is (located) “between Nothing and Being, [. . .] Almost-nothing [Presque-rien] or Almost-being [Presque-être],”22 and Andrew Kelley interprets this statement as a philosophical characterization of the instant from the perspective of “presque,” or “almost,” which means that it is envisioned as neither a duration of time (no matter how small) nor “nothingness, or the void, or complete negation.”23 Rather, in so far as the instant captures an act that occurs in the present, now and is of the moment—unsubstantiated by any past “essence” or “being” and uncertain in its futurition—the instant in Jankélévitch’s work designates a “threshold at which a change comes to pass, [. . .] an abrupt change from one quality to another.”24 As Beato shows, the concept of the instant is needed to understand what Jankélévitch means by virtue—the concept of the virtue captures the subject’s desires and/or actions that arise in an instant and are “driven by a loving intention.”25 This further demonstrates the originality of Jankélévitch’s contribution to the field of virtue ethics, because the connection between virtues and the instant distances his virtue-based ethics from, inter alia, the Aristotelian tradition of describing virtues as “character traits” or volitional dispositions of a person. In contrast, intentionality is important in Jankélévitch’s virtue ethics because it produces a highly inclusive conception of virtuous life (everyone can act virtuously) and because it emphasizes

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the significance of desiring virtue (in order to act virtuously, the subject needs to “want to want it”).26 If Jankélévitch’s idea of forgiveness is analogous to, and infused with his philosophical reflections about, the act of creation—spontaneous, unscripted, unmotivated, and unjustified27—then it is important to consider, as Marguerite La Caze does in her contribution to this book, the philosophy of remorse in the face of inexpiable crime and the (im)possibility of self-forgiveness. Her essay, titled “‘I can’t beat it’: Dimensions of the Bad Conscience in Manchester by the Sea,” offers a philosophical discussion of the main protagonist of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 film, Manchester by the Sea. Following the act of unintentionally causing a house fire, which results in the death of his three children, Lee Chandler undergoes a self-imposed withdrawal from society, becomes emotionally numb, joyless and indifferent, surrendering to overwhelming remorse, despair, and inconsolable mourning. In La Caze’s view of the film, Chandler personifies Jankélévitch’s philosophy of the “bad conscience”; in particular, Chandler’s recalcitrant refusal to accept (Randi’s, his former wife’s) forgiveness, and to forgive himself, both illuminates and complicates the crucial distinction introduced in The Bad Conscience, namely between repairing the consequences of the misdeed and undoing the misdeed itself.28 A characteristic trait of remorse is that, in contrast to nostalgia and regret, which take as their object a desirable past that the subject longs to repeat and relive, it is about compunction for what should not have happened. As La Caze argues, this also points to the problem of intention; however, in contrast to Jankélévitch’s virtue ethics where intention designated the subject’s “will to will” (to bring about the good), in this case intention concerns deliberate and calculated wrongs. How does it matter for the ethical dynamics of remorsefulness if the acts were committed unintentionally? Reading together The Bad Conscience and Manchester by the Sea, La Caze points to the radically demanding ethics of remorse in Jankélévitch and its uncompromising representation in the character of Chandler: at the experiential and phenomenological level of remorse, the unintentionality of his misdeed presents not his innocence but an ever more profound moral failure of action and responsibility. The question of whether it is possible for the subject to forgive oneself, or whether the presence of another is a constitutive requirement for forgiveness, has been a subject of rich debates.29 For Jankélévitch, the impossibility of self-forgiveness is conceptually impossible because of the fact that forgiveness is the ethical and personal relation to and with the other (forgiveness is “a gracious gift from the offended to the offender,” Jankélévitch writes in Forgiveness).30 In contrast, in Manchester by the Sea that impossibility of self-forgiveness is existential—it is a gift or an act of grace that is offered (in the form of Randi’s loving forgiveness, through which she permits and encourages Chandler’s self-forgiveness), but

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refused.31 This application of a Jankélévitchean prism onto Manchester by the Sea underwrites yet again the importance of love in Jankélévitch’s philosophy. La Caze identifies a relationship between the subject’s “capacity for love and the capacity for remorse,”32 which is particularly conspicuous in a powerful scene of a quotidian familial sociality between Chandler, his spouse, and children, because the retrospective angle emphasizes its semelfactivity as a scene of love that “took place only once [and which] cannot be repeated or returned to.”33 It is from the site of love that forgiveness arises as an act of undeserved grace, or a true gift, from another. Forgiveness might not have the expected redemptive effect, or be conspicuous and evident, but, rather, as in Chandler’s life, can occur as/through a kind of subtle ethical shift, or an elusive transformation, where, as Peter Banki argues in a different context, quoting Freud, “[e]verything remains the same, but [. . .] is ‘ever so slightly different’.”34 That forgiveness might have actually happened, in spite of Chandler’s refusal to receive it, underwrites the radical ethical imaginary of grace in the film, which also resonates starkly with Jankélévitch’s statement that “grace is offered uniquely to those who have not sought it out.”35 FIGURES OF “ORIGINAL NEGATIVITY” The chapters by Giulia Maniezzi and Tim Flanagan have in common that they both illuminate the centrality of what Michael Gallope calls “figure[s] of ‘original negativity’” in Jankélévitch’s thought (Gallope 2017).36 Maniezzi and Flanagan also share the conviction that in order to understand the importance of such negative figurations in Jankélévitch’s work, one must look carefully at one tradition in particular, namely the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (whose writings, The Enneads, were the subject of Jankélévitch’s master’s dissertation).37 As Colin Smith put it, “[t]he starting-point of Jankélévitch’s thought is the concept of a unity of being which is unaware of itself and therefore undivided against itself”38 (Smith 1957). It is the subject’s selfknowledge, or self-consciousness, which simultaneously makes him/her the object of one’s consciousness that signifies for Jankélévitch the “initial stage of detachment, [. . .] the division of the self (dédoublement d’avec soi).”39 That detachment marks a fissure or a gap between the subject’s experience of the world and the way he/she experiences themself as the object of knowledge—Jankélévitch calls this state “half-consciousness,” demi-conscience, and its existential manifestations are shame and regret (Smith 2010 [1964]).40 For Maniezzi, such figuration of “original negativity” is exemplified by the significance of “acting-without-being” (faire-sans-être) in Jankélévitch’s metaphysics of creation. The creative operations of “making-exist” (faireêtre) have no prerequisite of prior ontological foundation. Maniezzi argues

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that Jankélévitch inverts here the Thomistic position of operari sequitur esse, according to which without being there can be no action or becoming, in the direction of identifying the Absolute with the “intangible act of making anything exist that, in itself, is nothing.”41 In turn, for Flanagan, an example of that “original negativity” is Jankélévitch’s notion of silence, which he discusses in chapter four of Music and the Ineffable,42 and which Flanagan takes to exemplify the “inexpressive ground in whatever can be expressed” and “the imperceptible element of perception.”43 This is not to equate silence with the absence or negation of sound, but, rather, to postulate that even though “there is indeed a reduction or a suspension of sorts in any experience of silence,” silence constitutes an instant in or through which music and sound come to be—Jankélévitch writes that “music can only breathe when it has the oxygen of silence [. . .] one needs silence in order to hear music.”44 There is a notable likeness here between Jankélévitch’s description of the relationship between music and silence, and that of life and death.45 In both cases Jankélévitch warns his readers against the “myth of symmetry” that governs our habitual understanding of life and death, as well as music and silence, and which is a result of the spatial imaginary of phenomena that are temporal in character.46 Just as the instance of death is not a kind of “inverted” moment of naissance (a “birth backward”), so is it erroneous to depict music as an affirmation of sound and silence as its negation. Rather, it is “by silence” that there is “anything to hear at all.”47 What Flanagan illuminates in his discussion is that Jankélévitch’s portrayal of silence as a kind of “interval” that discontinues noise, and that generates, or initiates, sound at the level of musical experiences needs to be recognized as a Plotinian echo in Jankélévitch’s thought in so far as it “attests to a uniquely ontological unity between mind and world.”48 Specifically, Flanagan points to Plotinus’s notion of parakolouthēsis (“conscious awareness” or “higherorder consciousness”), which denotes the subject’s (second-order) awareness of her/his (first-order) activities—the contemplative achievement of selfknowledge, which can create fissures within the unity between the subject and the experience, thus potentially impeding the soul’s “kinship” with the world. The limits of the subject’s reflexive and discursive engagement with oneself have been central to Jankélévitch’s articulation of “moral conscience” in The Bad Conscience.49 In regard to the experience of silence as continuous, or unitary with sound and music, what is required is a distinctive kind of Plotinian sensitivity and contemplation that Flanagan terms “active spontaneity” and “[a] reflection [. . .] that is self-sufficient and yet not always immediately present, familiar, or even recognizable to itself.”50 The Jankélévitchean figures of “original negativity” emphasize the limitations of discursive thought in relation to such phenomena, or events, as evil, silence, or death. In “Speaking in the Night: On the Non-Sense of Death

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and Life” Aaron T. Looney argues that in Jankélévitch’s philosophy death figures as the “wholly other,” or epekeina, “the beyond” (l’au-delà). It is this annihilation of being and of meaning that Jankélévitch refers to when he writes about the non-sense of death. Death is “monstrosity and absurdity [. . .], alterity and nothingness”; it is “beyond thought and language, beyond or outside the categories of being.”51 This figuration of death also illustrates the semantic operations of the concept of “hapax” in Jankélévitch’s thought. The Greek term “hápax legomenon,” meaning literally “only once said,” refers to the phenomenon of semelfactivity—in texts, of words appearing only once, and, on the existential plane, of singular, unique, and unrepeatable phenomena. It is that semelfactive aspect that helps to identify death as unknowable because it locates first-person death (in contrast to second-person death) beyond the human capacity for self-reflection or self-knowledge.52 Beyond the discussion of death, “hapax” refers to other phenomena to underscore their uniqueness. Thus, Jankélévitch says that “each true occurrence is an hapax, which is to say that, which includes neither a precedent, nor a repetition, neither a foretaste, nor an aftertaste; hapax does not announce itself through precursive signs, it does not know ‘second times.’”53 Here Jankélévitch brings together the hapax of death with Søren Kierkegaard’s figure of “a leap” to characterize death as a punctual event, or a kind of a rupture or abruption. In Looney’s words, “[w] ithout itself appearing in the interval of time, death is an event that appears only to disappear. Jankélévitch calls it almost-nothing (presque-rien), a ‘disappearing appearance’ (apparition disparaissante). When death enters, life exits.”54 The aspect of semelfactivity allows Jankélévitch to distinguish his thanatological reflections from Jean-Paul Sartre’s in Being and Nothingness,55 in that it is precisely the scandal of death as the event that extinguishes life that also reveals what is outside of the annihilating power of death, namely the erasure of life’s quoddity (that it has been). This is not an anonymous death (in the third-person) that dominates in medical or statistical discourses, or the inaccessible death of oneself (in the first-person), but death of a significant other (in the second-person) that imbues the discussion with metaphysical and ethical dimensions. Looney shows a nuanced similarity here between the Jankélévitchean and Levinasian philosophy of the Other, with the marked difference that for Levinas the death of the Other is a source of ethical responsibility for the self, whereas Jankélévitch links the second-person death to love. Contra Sartre, for Jankélévitch it is impossible to simply think of death as “return to [. . .] nothingness.”56 Rather, according to him there is an unbridged gap between “never” and “never again”: “[t]he irreversibility of death seals the irreparable character of lived experience.”57 And yet it is also precisely why death ultimately affirms the value and sense of life that reside in life’s capacity to leave an inerasable mark of (once) “having-been,” “having-done,” and “having-loved.” “The shocking absurdity of death, the

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scandal of definitive annihilation” Jankélévitch writes in La Mort, “paradoxically consecrates the posthumous meaning of lived life, [. . .] this posthumous meaning is itself the sense of non-sense.”58 THE ORGAN-OBSTACLE AND THE “GROUND” Another important philosophic motif for Jankélévitch is the “organ-obstacle” (organe-obstacle), through which Jankélévitch’s gestures of the simultaneous effect of enablement and disablement, or the paradox of “things” operating both as an instrument of a particular action, and as its limitation or impediment.59 Jankélévitch borrows the concept of the organ-obstacle from Bergson’s Matter and Memory and observes that “organ-obstacle” is based on an “ironical contradiction” in so far as “it is the quamvis [although] that is the quia [because].”60 The body is such an “organ-obstacle” not only in relation to perception but also in relation to the spiritual in that the body “represents[s] everything the soul has had to vanquish to live alongside a matter that seems to do violence to it and in which it believes itself to be boxed in [. . .].”61 Organ-obstacle forms thus a kind of dialectic between the domain of the spiritual and the condition of embodiment that, as Jankélévitch puts it, “establishes the necessity of incarnation.”62 And thus in Penser la Mort? Jankélévitch gives an example of an actual organ to illustrate the working of such dual effect: an eye both provides the organism with the capacity to relate to the world optically and, at the same time, impedes the organism’s visual perception. For example, the structure of the human eye does not allow for night vision as with the eyes of nocturnal animals, or for the simultaneous perception of multiple images that some insects have, and so on.63 Other organ-obstacles mentioned in Penser la Mort? are the body and language—and death, because, while it is synonymous with a limitation or an impediment to life, the constant presence of death ultimately “elevates life, endows it with passion, fervor, [and] energy.”64 In his essay, titled “Vladimir Jankélévitch’s ‘Diseases of Temporality’ and Their Impact on Reconciliatory Processes,” Francesco Ferrari employs the perspective of “organ-obstacle” to discuss the operation of (hyper-)memory in relation to irrevocability (the impossibility of undoing the past). This is because memory at the same time safeguards and jeopardizes the past.65 It is, simultaneously, an organ of creative integration of the past by the subject and its impediment to the extent that remembrance (of some contents) is conditional on the forgetting (of other contents). But, perhaps, an image of the mnemonic subject who integrates and digests, or, in turn, disavows and represses, the past is already rather misleading, in that from the Jankélévitchean perspective there is no subject prior to, and outside of, the actions

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of memorialization and forgetting; instead, there is an “organism [that] appears as a totality that is incessantly deformed and transformed, revised, retouched, and altered by the accidents of existence.”66 In a chapter on Jankélévitch’s metaphysics of humility, Andrew Kelley makes a connection between the concept of the “organ-obstacle” and Schelling’s philosophy of foundations, or ground, Grund (fondement). The discussion of the notion of the “ground,” in Jankélévitch’s 1933 L’Odyssée de la Conscience dans la dernière Philosophie de Schelling, resonates strongly with the previously identified thematic of “original negativity” in so far as for Jankélévitch the “ground” is the point of initiation of action or condition, which is concurrently both its prefiguration and its negation or contrary. To use an example from Flanagan’s chapter, silence provides such foundation for music, and, from Looney’s chapter, death is such “ground” of life. The temporal dimension of the “ground” is deeply reflective of Bergsonian la durée, because just as for Bergson the past is not ever completely erased, but remains imperishably real in the form of a trace, for Jankélévitch the ground “inaugurates or recommences becoming [le devenir] with each new moment of duration,” while at the same time sacrificing itself (and all the other possibilities of becoming) to the present.67 Kelley describes the notion of “grounding” in Jankélévitch as “ambiguous” and “amphibolic”: it can be read in two different (contrary) ways, and as exerting a dual (contrary) effect—he says that Grund is “a Nothing that is Everything.”68 Jankélévitch’s adaptation of the Schellingian Grund illuminates further the concept of “organ-obstacle” as a “play” of enablement and disablement (vehicle and impairment) that is specific to the relation between the grounding, or foundation, and what it prefigures. The concept of the “organ-obstacle” captures precisely the aspect of amphiboly at the heart of the Schellingian Grund, which the virtue of humility illustrates. Importantly, then, Jankélévitch’s discussion of humility as both a kind of “metaempirical virtue”—both as “something entirely positive and sublime” and as “nothing” (néant) is demonstrative of the logic of the “organ-obstacle.” For Jankélévitch humility is the ground of charity, and, more broadly, of the other virtues in that it does not mean a specific moral deed, or an “item” (as humility’s other, modesty, does), but, rather, it is “a limit on one’s selflove,” from which the other virtuous acts begin.69 Kelley draws the reader’s attention to the striking vocabulary that Jankélévitch develops to delineate humility as Grund (“prostration,” “radical inferiority,” “hyperbolic sacrifice [immolation],” “supernatural and gratuitous sacrifice,” “fall”), and suggests that their underlying commonality is a sense of the subject’s “movement away from oneself,” a “‘nihilization’ of the self.”70 Similarly to Beato’s observation that for Jankélévitch the ego is both the vehicle of moral life and its impediment, Kelley considers the subject’s

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“egoistic instinct” as a condition of possibility humility, because it is the overcoming of the ego that constitutes humility. It thus implies the subject’s “never-ending nihilization” and “reduc[tion] to an almost-nothing” (rather than an achievement of a positive psychological state), which is the starting point of moral acts of “continual recommencement” through virtues (of charity, and so on), because for Jankélévitch it is tantamount to an ethics of radical openness, or receptivity, toward the other. TEMPORAL TROPES: DURATION AND IRREVERSIBILITY Another distinctive theoretical move found in Jankélévitch’s texts concerns his engagement with questions of temporality, which some scholars relate to his overarching preoccupation with resisting the prioritization of spatial metaphors and spatial thinking in Western philosophy.71 This concern of course also relates to the question of Jankélévitch’s creative adaptation of Bergsonism, and, specifically, of the concept of la durée.72 Notably, some Jankélévitch scholars have suggested that his ruminations on irreversibility and irrevocability constitute his most original philosophical ideas.73 By situating the ideas of the durée and of irreversibility in the context of reconciliation processes after atrocity and mass violence, Francesco Ferrari’s phenomenological study of “diseases of temporality” in Jankélévitch’s work is also an attempt to inquire into the implications of Jankélévitch’s philosophy for sociopolitical analysis. Taking as a point of departure the etymology of the word “irreversible,” with its Latin root vers meaning “sense” and “direction” (from Proto-Indo-European wer, “turn” or “bend”), underwrites Jankélévitch’s metaphor of temporality as an arrow moving in one direction. The term “diseases of temporality” includes phenomena such as resentment, nostalgia, regret, and remorse that have in common a certain “painful essence” of sensation, which derives from their resistance, or protest, against irreversibility. Also, they all evidence the psychological, conceptual, and ethical workings of hypermnesia—the “excess of memory”—which functions as the subject’s recalcitrant clinging on to the past as if it were reversible. Central to the investigation into irreversibility is Jankélévitch’s distinction between quiddity (“what” something is/was) and quoddity (“that” something is or was),74 which suggests that the object of restitution is the repair of the consequence of violence, rather than the undoing of the fact that it happens. Here, it becomes apparent that Jankélévitch’s philosophy provides important insights into the analysis of post-atrocity societies. First, it helps to capture an important aspect of those genocidal crimes in history that included attempts at eradicating whole groups of people as if they had never existed (that is,

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destruction of their very quoddity, as well as the destruction of the memory of the fact that they once-have-been). This is exemplified by the Nazis’ attempted genocide of Jews and Roma in Europe, which was not “only” about their physical annihilation but “also” of erasing any remaining traces of their cultures and of erasing the very memory of their destruction. Second, Jankélévitch’s distinction between quiddity and quoddity also provides a conceptual entry point into an analysis of concrete reconciliation processes, including public apologies and restitution, insofar as they might “blend” the official reparative and corrective engagement with the consequences of atrocity with a displaced or suppressed desire to magically undo the past (that it happened).75 One example of such a “disease of temporality” that illuminates the lived and painfully felt human experience of irreversibility and irrevocability is resentment, which Jankélévitch discusses in his L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie as a moral sentiment that rails “against temporality.”76 In Ferrari’s interpretation, “resentment becomes resistance towards the irreversible, in a duty to remember, which is accompanied by the traumatic impossibility of forgetting.”77 This resonates closely with how Jean Améry, another thinker whose writings have been profoundly affected by the experience of the war and the Holocaust, characterized resentment as “not only unnatural but also a logically inconsistent position,” which “[a]bsurdly, demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone.”78 For Jankélévitch, too, resentment gives rise to a position that distrusts and resists moral indifference toward the past, as well as any reconciliatory pursuits that seek to neutralize the victims’ claims that injustice took place in the past.79 Another example of such a “disease of memory” is remorse, the subject matter of Jankélévitch’s La Mauvaise Conscience (The Bad Conscience),80 which Ferrari defines as the impossible desire “to annihilate one’s own deed,” and “annul the fact-of-having-done.”81 In her essay for the volume, “The Work of Remorse. Jankélévitch’s Conception of the Ethical Subject and François Ozon’s Frantz,” Magdalena Zolkos reads Jankélévitch’s philosophy of bad conscience together with the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit in order to ask what it means to claim that remorse does certain “work” for/by/ on the subject. Any use of the vocabulary of a laboring remorseful subject in regard to Jankélévitch’s work must refuse the temptation of imagining that subject as somehow “productive” or “active” (as if there were any kind of subjective capacity or disposition enabling the moment of remorse), but, rather, recognize that there is a need to envision the remorseful subject as radically passive, or, in Jankélévitch’s words, the gratuity and “impotence of remorse.”82 In Zolkos’s chapter, this is done through an interpretative engagement with the themes of remorse and irreversibility in François Ozon’s 2016 film Frantz. In the film, a young veteran of World War I, Adrien, visits the

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family of a German soldier, Frantz, whom he killed in battle. In spite of his intention to confess this inexpiable crime to Frantz’s parents and fiancée, Anna, and beg their forgiveness, in the decisive moment, Adrien makes a very different “confession”: he starts to falsely impersonate Frantz’s close university friend. While, at first sight, this might be read as a psychoanalytic complication of Jankélévitch’s idea of intentionality—Adrien is a truly Freudian subject, whose consciousness, in spite of his intentions, motivations, and resolves, has little mastery over his actions—the depiction of the sensation of remorse in the film as “an inconsolable sadness” and “pure pain” is profoundly Jankélévitchean in spirit.83 For Jankélévitch, the remorseful subject displays a characteristic “infidelity” toward oneself (or, as he writes later, a fidelity of a different order—a “pneumatic fidelity”), which is also the moment of ethical transformation. It is interesting that in Traité des Vertus Jankélévitch identifies fidelity as a “virtue of continuity”; by being associated closely with the remorseful subject’s change or re-creation, the “pneumatic fidelity” seems to align more closely with “virtues of initiation.”84 Adrien’s character illustrates the existential and psychological operations of remorse and irreversibility in that it is the profoundly desired, and yet unachievable, undoing of his misdeed that invokes the subject as undergoing a “division within the self” (dédoublement d’avec soi).85 Moreover, remorse for Jankélévitch (and for Ozon) is hyperbolic in that it does not simply require what Scheler calls the “repentance of conduct,” but the “repentance of being” (“ontic repentance”). The justice of remorse lies beyond the domain of the quantifiable and calculable; it is “neither repressive, nor corrective,” nor is it a “closed, symmetrical, and leveling justice.”86 Rather, the transformation that remorse initiates is marked by joy—not joy as Gaudium (the satisfaction derived from an accomplished duty or repaid debt), but joy as Laetitia (“the surprising modulation of despair into hope”).87 WHAT CANNOT BE TOUCHED: THE UNSPEAKABLE, THE INEFFABLE, THE INTANGIBLE Another recurrent motif in Jankélévitch’s oeuvre has been intangibility. This means, literally, that which cannot be touched, from the Latin tangere, “to touch.” Rather than the contemporary association with immateriality, the notion of intangibility points to the characteristic assertion of Jankélévitch’s philosophical analysis that any descriptions of ethical and aesthetic experiences never quite capture their innermost reality. Instead, these experiences become elusive and equivocal at the very moment when one looks at them closely, or, literally, tries to touch them. That logic of intangibility is incorporated, first, within Jankélévitch’s apophatic method of philosophical inquiry.

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Jankélévitch approaches key philosophical concepts by stating what they are not, rather than cataphatically through assertions. For example, his discussion of forgiveness exemplifies this apophatic method in that his book Forgiveness makes an extensive exposition of what forgiveness is not—including excuse, forgetting, and liquidation. Jankélévitch writes that “[t]he élan of forgiveness is so impalpable, so debatable, that it discourages all attempts at analysis.”88 Forgiveness outlines a horizon of possibility of human sociability and ethical life. Contra popular imagination, forgiveness does not need to consist of an explicit speech act of apology and the performative “I forgive you”; instead, it can occur through subtle, elusive, even surprising, gestures. A moving illustration of this is Jankélévitch’s postwar friendship with a young German man, Wiard Raveling, who wrote to him asking for forgiveness for the crimes of Nazi Germany. While no words “I forgive you” are ever uttered, something akin to forgiveness could come into being during a shared moment of piano playing.89 Both in his philosophy of music and in this thanatological reflections Jankélévitch relies heavily on the difference between “secret” (or “enigma”) and “mystery,”90 which, as he argues in the opening paragraph of Debussy et le Mystère, erroneously tend to be regarded as synonymous. In La Mort, he takes a distance from the Christian traditions that imagine death in possession of a “secret” (elsewhere, he calls Catholicism “necrophilic” and writes about the “love for the corpse” of the “Christian civilization”).91 Here the “secret” of death is imagined as some tangible (literally, touchable) thing or truth, that death is alleged to contain, and that can be revealed and encountered through contemplation, ritualization, preparation, or learning (how to die). The imaginary of death as (containing) a secret, which reaches beyond death, and as such both substantiates and exceeds it, is, Jankélévitch argues, erroneous and deceptive, because it obfuscates the nonsensical reality of death. Instead, as Looney makes it clear in his chapter in the volume, one should rather speak of the “mystery” of death: what death reveals is the inexplicability and wonder that this person (or this animal, or thing) has been (rather than what has been). Jankélévitch’s notion of “mystery” is then infused with his interest in the quodditative, as much as it is indebted to the Platonian thaumazein (“wonder”), and, perhaps, also to a certain conception of the sacred.92 Just as the dominant mode of relating to the secret is an attempt at decipherment, unveiling and gaining its hidden knowledge, so in the case of mystery the mode is an encounter with something—not a “thing,” Jankélévitch writes— but “a climate of destiny” and “a sacrament”—that lies within the order of inscrutability and ineffability. In his chapter in this volume, “The Philosophy of the je-ne-sais-quoi and the Possibility of a Non-religious Spirituality,” Clovis Salgado Gontijo elucidates further Jankélévitch’s notion of mystery. Taking as his starting point the distinction between mysticism and spirituality, as a difference between an

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aspiration to (re-)establish a bond between the individual and the divine, and “an attitude of openness [. . .] before a reality that cannot be surpassed, unveiled or intentionally seized,”93 Gontijo argues that Jankélévitch’s philosophy of the je-ne-sais-quoi and presque-rien could be read as a kind of nonreligious spirituality. Gontijo thus notes a tripartite resemblance between Jankélévitch’s idea of mystery and certain mystic traditions within Christianity: an approach of receptiveness and veneration in the face of mystery, the invariable lack of access to mystery (its unknowability), and the acknowledgement that certain “things” must remain inaccessible to human comprehension. Mystery is then, literally, that which cannot be touched, which is underwritten both by Jankélévitch’s interest in the audible—specifically, musical—rather than ocular, experience, and by his validation of immaterial philosophic and aesthetic entities, such as charm, which combines the sense of a poetic expression and an enchanting rite. For Gontijo, then, the importance of gratuitous imaginaries in Jankélévitch’s work—for instance, forgiveness as an unwarranted and unjustified act of grace—highlights his resistance to spiritual narratives that are supported by the ethos of “progressive ascension to plenitude.”94 And this approach also differentiates Jankélévitch from the nihilistic strand of Western philosophy, since he openly endorses transformative charm through “ephemeral moments of grace.”95 The motif of intangibility is also strongly present in Jankélévitch’s inquiry into a cluster of problems that he describes as “unspeakable” or “unutterable” (indicible). This includes phenomena located outside the domain of intelligibility, such as evil or violence,96 and those outside of possible first-person experience, such as death. Intangibility, signifying the presence of something not simply obscure or non-experiential, but also mysterious, resonates with the concept of the “ineffable” (ineffable), which Jankélévitch uses in his reflections on music and musical experience. For Jankélévitch, the question of musical expressivity is closely linked to that of “charm”—the capacity to engender and resonate, as well as to initiate and create. For Paul Atkinson, who contributes to the volume with an essay “Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson and the Emergence of a Musical Aesthetic,” Jankélévitch’s writings on music are closely related to his creative incorporations of Bergsonism, in particular with regard to the concept of la durée in as much as music “provides a means of reimagining duration,” in the direction of the “continuous, concrete and enduring [idea of time], [. . .] intimately conjoined with human experience and the operation of memory.”97 For Bergson, it was the aesthetic category of melody that captured the intimate connection between time, on the one hand, and consciousness and inner life, on the other. While the notion of la durée eluded scientific apparatus and mathematical calculation (because la durée is not quantifiable or symbolically representable), the sensual experiences of musicality allows the subject to place themselves within the temporal duration. This possibility, Atkinson

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argues, has to do with the fact that the musical experience is not isolatable into single notes—the idea of melody as an aggregate of separate notes, as if there were actual spaces between notes, is for Bergson an outcome of the problematic subjection of the musical experience to the spatializing language of distance and measurement. Rather, there is a need to rethink musical notes as only ever existing relationally and in continuum and “as a multiplicity [. . .] that cannot be readily divided. [. . .] The notes already heard operate at the fringe of each succeeding note, maintaining the continuity of the melody while varying the nuance of the tone.”98 Atkinson presents Jankélévitch’s discussion of the ineffability of music as the backdrop of the relation between the aesthetic and the metaphysical. While he rejects the philosophical tradition that co-opts the sonorous experience within the discursive structure of metaphysics, attempting to illuminate it through the use of idioms and metaphors coming from the extramusical (optical and spatial) registers, and thus depriving music of its uniqueness in relation to language, interlocution, and representation, Jankélévitch accepts the possibility of the metaphysics of music. However, philosophy’s engagement with musicology will need to account for, and work with, musical ineffability, by which Jankélévitch means that music is incommensurable with the tools of philosophical inquiry, including propositional logic, syllogism, and dialectic.99 An example of this incommensurability in Jankélévitch’s work is his discussion of the category of polyphony; (other examples of ineffability that Atkinson discusses are counterpoint and polytonality). Polyphony articulates the relation between music, temporality, and memory in a way that is indecipherable in philosophy’s language. In Jankélévitch’s words, polyphony is the “irrational symbiosis of the heterogeneous” (Jankélévitch 2015).100 As Atkinson argues, in polyphony “there remains a supplementary sensual difference that resists analysis,” because “[e]very addition or variation in music, however small, changes the constitution of the whole, which is something that it not easily accounted for in an analytic system.”101 What Jankélévitch alerts us to are features of music that escape our touch, our calculation, just as he does in the case of the virtues, of forgiveness, humility, remorse, death, love, and spirituality. These essays explore his profound engagement with all of these themes so that his work can find more of its passionate twenty-first century readers. NOTES 1. For an overview of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophic project and/or for biographic introduction in English, see Colin Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Philosophy 32, no. 123 (1957); Andrew Kelley, “Translator’s

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Introduction,” in Forgiveness, ed. Vladimir Jankélévitch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jean-Christophe Goddard, “Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85),” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch, Vladimir,” in Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, eds. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, Forthcoming); “Jankélévitch, Vladimir,” in International Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFollette (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Forthcoming [1st edition 2013]). 2. Goddard, “Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85),” 551. 3. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience (Paris: Flammarion, 1966 [1933, 1952]). 4. Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xiii. 5. The Anglophone scholarship on Jankélévitch’s philosophy of forgiveness has become rather prolific in the recent years, in particular (although not exclusively) in response to the publication of Jacques Derrida’s book on forgiveness. See Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001). See, for example, Russell Ford, “The Problem of Forgiveness: Jankélévitch, Deleuze, and Spinoza,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2017); Sami Pihlström, “Why There Should Be No Argument from Evil: Remarks on Recognition, Antitheodicy, and Impossible Forgiveness,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017); Hanna-Barbara GerlFalkovitz, “Forgiving the Unforgivable? On Guilt and Pardon,” Plough Quarterly Magazine 7 (2016); Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself,” Sophia 52 (2013); Gaëlle Fiasse, “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked,” Philosophy Today 56, no. 1 (2012); Jan-Heiner Tück, “Unforgivable Forgiveness? Jankélévitch, Derrida, and a Hope against All Hope,” Communio: International Catholic Review 31, no. 4 (2004); Dana Hollander, “Contested Forgiveness: Jankélévitch, Levinas, and Derrida at the Colloque Des Intellectuels Juifs,” in Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 6. See also Joëlle Hansel, “Forgiveness and ‘Should We Pardon Them?’: The Pardon and the Imprescriptible,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, ed. Alan Udoff (Lanham: Lexongton Press, 2013); Steven Light, “Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Imprescriptible,” International Studies in Philosophy 29, no. 4 (1997). 7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (Paris: Alcan, 1933). 8. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Alcan, 1959 [1931]); Henri Bergson, trans. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 9. Gontijo in this volume 167. 10. Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction.” 11. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du presque (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953).

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12. Aaron T. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch. The Time of Forgiveness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 19–21. Cf also D. Wolfram Breucker, “La ‘démonique hyperbole’ ou la Philosophie premiere de V. Jankélévitch: une théologie du ‘nescioquid’?” Dans Lignes 28, no. 2 (1996). 13. Maniezzi in this volume 11–12. 14. Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xx & xxi. 15. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 321; Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xviii. 16. Beato in this volume 22. 17. Dagmar Smreková, “The Good and the Virtue in Moral Philosophy of V. Jankélévitch,” Filozofia 57 (2002). 18. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 321. 19. Beato in this volume 29. 20. Ibid. 26. 21. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 321 & 22. 22. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 210; see also Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 12–43. 23. Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xvi. 24. Ibid., xvi & xvii. See also Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 34–39 & 176–79. 25. Beato in this volume 20. 26. Ibid. 29. 27. See also Peter Banki, “Hyper-Ethical Forgiveness and the Inexpiable,” in Phenomenology and Forgiveness, ed. Marguerite La Caze (London: Rowman and Littlefiled, 2018). 28. Vladimir Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 56. 29. Marguerite La Caze, Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence: The Grieving and the Unrepentant (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 149–70; Per-Erik Milam, “How Is Self-Forgiveness Possible?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2015); Byron Williston, “The Importance of Self-Forgiveness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2012). 30. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley, vol. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 31. La Caze in this volume 48. 32. The word “capacity” might be slightly misleading insofar as it suggests a preexisting disposition; rather, just as with virtuosity, at hand in remorse is an act of doing that has no grounding in any prior competence or aptitude. 33. La Caze in this volume 42. 34. Peter Banki, The Forgiveness to Come. The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 40. 35. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 121. 36. Michael Gallope, Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 184. 37. See, for example, Jean Wahl, “La Philosophie première de V. Jankélévitch,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 60, nos. 1–2 (1955).

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38. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 315. 39. Ibid. 40. Colin Smith, Contemporary French Philosophy: A Study in Norms and Values (London: Routledge, 2010 [1964]). 41. Maniezzi in this volume 7. 42. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 130–56. 43. Flanagan in this volume 58. 44. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 136 & 39. 45. Ibid., 132. 46. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Penser la mort? (Paris: Liana Lévi, 1994). Cf. Christina Howells, Mortal Subjects. Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 54–57; Matteo Cestari, “‘Each Death Is Unique.’ Beyond Epistemic Transfiguration in Thanatology,” Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies 6 (2017). See also Looney’s chapter in this volume. 47. Flanagan in this volume 58. 48. Ibid. 58. 49. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 1–34. Cf. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 315–16; Andrew Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Bad Conscience, ed. Vladimir Jankélévitch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), xi–xiii. 50. Flanagan in this volume 66. 51. Looney in this volume 78. 52. Cestari, “‘Each Death Is Unique.’ Beyond Epistemic Transfiguration in Thanatology,” 55–56, 58–59. 53. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 117; emphasis mine. 54. Looney in this volume 78. 55. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 2003). 56. Looney in this volume 81. 57. Ibid. 81. 58. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mort (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1977), 454; Looney’s translation. 59. See, for example, Jenifer Rosato, “Loving More, Being Less. Reflections on Vladimir JankéléVitch’s Le Paradoxe De La Morale,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2014). 60. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 138. 61. Ibid., 138–39. 62. Ibid., 141. 63. Jankélévitch, Penser la mort? 64. Ibid. 65. Ferrari in this volume 96. 66. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 26. 67. Kelley in this volume 120. 68. Ibid. 119.

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69. Ibid. 123. 70. Ibid. 124. 71. See, for example, Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xv–xviii; Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 77–92. 72. Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, ed. Alan Udoff (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013), 28–29. 73. Alexandre Lefebvre, “Jankélévitch on Bergson: Living in Time,” in Henri Bergson by Vladimir Jankélévitch, eds. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), xv. 74. Kelley, “Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness,” 31–39. 75. Cf. Magdalena Zolkos, Restitution and the Imaginary: Undoing, Repair and Return in Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming). 76. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’irréversible et la nostalgie (London: Flammarion, 2011 [1974]), 40–43. 77. Ferrari in this volume 103. 78. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (London: Granta, 1999), 68. 79. Some of the texts that discuss Améry and Jankélévitch together are: Grace Hunt, “Reconciliable Resentments? Jean Améry’s Critique of Forgiveness in the Aftermath of Atrocity,” in Theorizing Transitional Justice, eds. Claudio Corradetti, Nir Eisikovits, and Jack Volpe Rotondi (London: Routledge, 2016); Banki, The Forgiveness to Come. The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical. 80. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience; Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience. 81. Ferrari in this volume 97, 98. 82. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 15. 83. Ibid., 109 & 46. 84. It is interesting that in Debussy et le mystère Jankélévitch describes the difference between “secret” and “mystery” as that between the grammatical and the pneumatic. 85. Smith, “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch,” 315. 86. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 94 & 98. 87. Ibid., 170. 88. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 4. 89. See, for example, Banki, The Forgiveness to Come. The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical; Banki, “Hyper-Ethical Forgiveness and the Inexpiable,” 96. 90. See, for example, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Paris: Plon, 2019 [1949]); Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. See also: Benjamin M. McBrayer, “Mapping Mystery: Brelet, Jankélévitch, and Phenomenologies of Music in Post-World War Ii France” (University of Pittsburgh, 2017). 91. Jankélévitch, Penser la mort? 92. Looney in this volume 77. 93. Gontijo in this volume, 160. 94. Ibid. 169. 95. Ibid. 170.

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96. Kelley, “Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness,” 39. 97. Atkinson in this volume, 178, emphasis mine. 98. Atkinson in this volume 179. 99. Cf. Robin James, “The Gender Politics of Music and the Ineffable: On the Feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5, no. 2 (2018). 100. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 18. 101. Atkinson in this volume, 187, emphasis mine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities. Translated by Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld. London: Granta, 1999. Banki, Peter. The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ———. “Hyper-Ethical Forgiveness and the Inexpiable.” In Phenomenology and Forgiveness, edited by Marguerite La Caze. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018. Breucker, D. Wolfram. “La ‘Démonique Hyperbole’ Ou La Philosophie Premiere de V. Jankélévitch: Une Théologie Du ‘Nescioquid’?” Dans Lignes 28, no. 2 (1996): 90–105. Cestari, Matteo. “‘Each Death Is Unique.’ Beyond Epistemic Transfiguration in Thanatology.” Ca’ Foscari Japanese Studies 6 (2017): 35–78. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001. Fiasse, Gaëlle. “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked.” Philosophy Today 56, no. 1 (2012): 3–15. Ford, Russell. “The Problem of Forgiveness: Jankélévitch, Deleuze, and Spinoza.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 31, no. 3 (2017): 409–21. Gallope, Michael. Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara. “Forgiving the Unforgivable? On Guilt and Pardon.” Plough Quarterly Magazine 7 (2016). Goddard, Jean-Christophe. “Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–85).” In The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, 551–53. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Hansel, Joëlle. “Forgiveness and ‘Should We Pardon Them?’: The Pardon and the Imprescriptible.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, edited by Alan Udoff, 111–26. Lanham: Lexongton Press, 2013. Hollander, Dana. “Contested Forgiveness: Jankélévitch, Levinas, and Derrida at the Colloque Des Intellectuels Juifs.” In Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, edited by Elisabeth Weber, 137–52. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Howells, Christina. Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

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Hunt, Grace. “Reconciliable Resentments? Jean Améry’s Critique of Forgiveness in the Aftermath of Atrocity.” In Theorizing Transitional Justice, edited by Claudio Corradetti, Nir Eisikovits, and Jack Volpe Rotondi, 109–18. London: Routledge, 2016. James, Robin. “The Gender Politics of Music and the Ineffable: On the Feminine in Jankelevitch and Levinas.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 5, no. 2 (2018): 99–118. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. The Bad Conscience. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. Debussy et le mystère. Paris: Plon, 2019 [1949]. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Vol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Henri Bergson. Paris: Alcan, 1959 [1931]. ———. Henri Bergson. Translated by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ———. L’irréversible et la nostalgie. London: Flammarion, 2011 [1974]. ———. L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. Paris: Alcan, 1933. ———. La Mauvaise Conscience. Paris: Flammarion, 1966 [1933, 1952]. ———. La Mort. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1977. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. Paris: Seuil, 1981. ———. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. Penser la mort? Paris: Liana Lévi, 1994. ———. Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du presque. Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953. Kelley, Andrew. “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself.” Sophia 52 (2013): 159–84. ———. “Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, edited by Alan Udoff, 27–46. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013. ———. “Jankélévitch, Vladimir.” In International Encyclopedia of Ethics, edited by Hugh LaFollette. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Forthcoming [1st edition 2013]. ———. “Jankélévitch, Vladimir.” In Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, Forthcoming. ———. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Forgiveness, edited by Vladimir Jankélévitch, vii–xxvii. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. “Translator’s Introduction.” In The Bad Conscience, edited by Vladimir Jankélévitch, vii–xxii. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. La Caze, Marguerite. Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence: The Grieving and the Unrepentant. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. Lefebvre, Alexandre. “Jankélévitch on Bergson: Living in Time.” In Henri Bergson by Vladimir Jankélévitch, edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott, xi– xxviii. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

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Light, Steven. “Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Imprescriptible.” International Studies in Philosophy 29, no. 4 (1997): 51–57. Looney, Aaron T. Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. McBrayer, Benjamin M. “Mapping Mystery: Brelet, Jankélévitch, and Phenomenologies of Music in Post-World War Ii France.” University of Pittsburgh, 2017. Milam, Per-Erik. “How Is Self-Forgiveness Possible?” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 96, no. 1 (2015): 49–69. Pihlström, Sami. “Why There Should Be No Argument from Evil: Remarks on Recognition, Antitheodicy, and Impossible Forgiveness.” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78, nos. 4–5 (2017): 523–36. Rosato, Jenifer. “Loving More, Being Less. Reflections on Vladimir JankéléVitch’s Le Paradoxe de la morale.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2014): 84–103. Smith, Colin. Contemporary French Philosophy: A Study in Norms and Values. London: Routledge, 2010 [1964]. ———. “The Philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch.” Philosophy 32, no. 123 (1957): 315–24. Smreková, Dagmar. “The Good and the Virtue in Moral Philosophy of V. Jankélévitch.” Filozofia 57 (2002): 1–14. Tück, Jan-Heiner. “Unforgivable Forgiveness? Jankélévitch, Derrida, and a Hope against All Hope.” Communio: International Catholic Review 31, no. 4 (2004): 522–39. Wahl, Jean. “La Philosophie première de V. Jankélévitch.” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 60, nos. 1–2 (1955): 161–217. Williston, Byron. “The Importance of Self-Forgiveness.” American Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2012): 67–80. Zolkos, Magdalena. Restitution and the Imaginary: Undoing, Repair and Return in Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming.

Chapter 1

The Metaphysics of Love and the Theory of Forgiveness in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy Giulia Maniezzi

Vladimir Jankélévitch was one of the most active and eclectic protagonists of twentieth-century French philosophy. Despite his undoubted centrality in the cultural and philosophical world of his era and beyond, his name has been glossed over and forgotten for several decades. Many of his texts have never been translated into a foreign language. For a very long time, even the French editions could not be found, because of the low number of published copies. Therefore, regarding secondary literature, almost everywhere—in the English-speaking world, as well as in the French one—the vast majority of his oeuvre has not been given due consideration for far too long. This trend has been systematically reversed only after Jankélévitch’s death in 1985, especially in France and in Italy. Although the first articles and reviews on Jankélévitch’s texts were published at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s,1 it was only in the 1980s that the academic world demonstrated a greater interest in his philosophy.2 Even in France, where Jankélévitch grew up and spent most of his life, the reception of his work was not all that different.3 That is, the first methodical studies appeared only at the end of the 1970s.4 The majority of them, however, were still area-based; they mainly focused on Jankélévitch’s ethical philosophy and musicology and, in doing so, they isolated a single subject or a group of concepts from their theoretical grounding. In many cases, the outcome of this unilateral approach was an artificial subdivision, resulting in an unsatisfactory presentation of Jankélévitch’s philosophy, while unified comprehension of his project was lacking. Therefore, several aspects of Jankélévitch’s thought were only superficially explored and, sometimes, even they remain completely ignored. That is 1

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the case with the essential text Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du “Presque,”5 which Jankélévitch published in 1954 and defined as his metaphysics.6 At present, no monograph nor systematic presentation of this work is available. As a consequence, many studies of Jankélévitch’s most popular texts completely disregard the metaphysical dimension that is the common root of all the area-based problems. A major example of this phenomenon is the impressive text entitled Traité des vertus, which was first published in 1949 and republished, with some additions and changes, between 1968 and 1972.7 Despite the fact that, in this book, Jankélévitch presents a wide gamut of indispensable notions, a detailed study of this monumental work does not exist so far. At first sight, therefore, it seems natural to agree with the popular presentation of Jankélévitch as an “un-actual” philosopher. Jankélévitch, indeed, has explicitly recognized his “untimeliness” in a letter dated August 1954 and addressed to his long-term friend Louis Beauduc.8 In this context, this chapter aims to contribute to clarifying the nexus between Jankélévitch’s morality and his metaphysics, starting from two extremely specific questions: What is the ultimate foundation of forgiveness in Jankélévitch’s moral philosophy? How does he legitimate it? To provide an answer, this chapter focuses on two texts written by Jankélévitch in 1954 and 1967, respectively: Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du Presque, and Forgiveness.9 Referring to these books, it proposes and defends a hypothesis: namely, that Jankélévitch’s concept of forgiveness is grounded in his metaphysical theory of the Absolute as Love. Therefore, the first part of this chapter presents Jankélévitch’s metaphysics, focusing on the question of the ontological meaning of the intangible. The analysis considers the ninth chapter of Philosophie première to introduce Jankélévitch’s notion of creation and explain his concept of the Absolute as acting-without-being (Faire-être-sans-être). The presentation of Jankélévitch’s first philosophy lays the foundation for the second part of this chapter, which explores his concept of forgiveness and focuses on the text Forgiveness. The chapter argues that Jankélévitch’s theory of forgiveness is “elaborated,” meaning “worked-out-from” the light of his metaphysical perspective. In its conclusion, this contribution, however, draws attention to a weak point that can be found in Jankélévitch’s connection between the theories of God as Love and of human forgiveness. The weak point lies in the fact that, in Jankélévitch’s presentation, reference to God’s forgiveness is absent. God does not forgive anyone because it is not someone (“quelqu’un”).10 The notion of personality and its analogical meaning is the crucial point where Jankélévitch’s link between the metaphysics of Love and the morality of forgiveness proves inconclusive.

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THE METAPHYSICS OF LOVE To understand Jankélévitch’s metaphysics of creation, it is essential to become familiar with Philosophie première. This is not only because Jankélévitch himself recognizes the centrality of this text, but primarily because it contains a clear definition of creation. In the sixth chapter, entitled La voie négative (The Negative Way), Jankélévitch writes that creation is the infinite and inexistent act of “making-exist” (faire-être).11 This short definition contains three key notions that Jankélévitch goes back over when he develops his metaphysics of creation; namely, the notion of an act, the notion of makingexist (faire-être) and, finally, the concept of acting-without-being (faire-êtresans-être). If we could synthesize what creation is according to Philosophie première, we would say that it is the inexistent—meaning “non-being”—act of bringing everything into existence. To explain Jankélévitch’s theory of creation and to justify his metaphysics as a metaphysics of love, it is necessary to present in detail each of these three terms, as well as their intimate connections. First, creation is an act. Even though this consideration could appear obvious and even meaningless, it summarizes the total sense of Jankélévitch’s metaphysical project. It announces that Jankélévitch aims to (re-)think the priority of Acting over Being. He proposes a concept of the Absolute, according to which the Absolute is pure activity, ἐνέργεια. Refusing the so-called metaphysics of things that only distinguishes being and nothingness, as well as the traditional Western interpretation of metaphysics that stays true to Aristotle’s concept of substance, Jankélévitch’s project consists of rediscovering and reaffirming the priority of the “Action”;12 (in) the beginning (there) is an Act. In other words, Jankélévitch’s first philosophy aims to think of the original dimension of reality as an act and, starting from there, presents the eminent Act, namely the Act that is the ontological source of every being. According to Jankélévitch’s definition of act, the Act par excellence is the Act that “establishes a Plus, or that builds something, or that creates every being and enriches the existence.”13 This means that the First Act is creation, precisely because creation is the primary activity consisting of “makinganything-exist.”14 Or, using Leibniz’s Latin neologism quoted by Louis Couturat,15 and used by Jankélévitch himself, creation is the “existentifians”16 act; it is the original and effective event that makes reality be, and makes it be exactly what it is.17 The notion of “effectiveness” (or “quiddity”) marks one of the most crucial points of Jankélévitch’s theory of creation and requires some clarification. First of all, it is pivotal to highlight that this term is inherited by Jankélévitch from several philosophical sources, such as Bergson’s philosophy of duration and Schelling’s positive philosophy. With this noun, which is already present

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in his first publications, Jankélévitch designates the pure fact that things are—what the Latin preposition quod means—regardless of what (quid) they are. Second, through this category, Jankélévitch also names the subsistence of the eternal laws that regulate reality, namely the essences. In this regard, what is effective is the actual existence of the normativity that makes reality intelligible. Effectiveness is the pure fact that beings are there and, at the same time, the pure fact that their existence is regulated by some eternal and incorruptible principles. Once Jankélévitch has presented creation as the effective act that originates reality and once he has clarified that effectiveness is the “exponent of reality,” thanks to which every being exists and is regulated by eternal principles, he goes on to formulate a decisive question: What does creation create? Creation is the “supreme positivity” (“la positivité suprême”)18 that creates all beings and, at the same time, their essences. To create means, first of all, to invent the existence of something in general or, according to the classical formulation used by Leibniz and quoted by Jankélévitch, it means to determine that something exists, rather than there being nothing. Creation is the act that, from nothing (ex nihilo),19 also invents and establishes the normativity inherent to every being. What Jankélévitch is excluding is that the original Act is preceded by anything. In other words, Jankélévitch refuses and aims to overcome the Platonic schema according to which the Demiurge shapes reality starting from some eternal archetypes that preexist.20 The reason for this refutation is made clear by Jankélévitch himself; it is essential to make and maintain this distinction to assure the originality of the First Act—to safeguard its absoluteness. Indeed, if creation was preceded by anything, including some eternal models as in Plato’s Timaeus, the First Act would no longer be the “absolute beginning.”21 It would not be the primary act, which is unconditional and original only if it is completely free from any form of relation and coercion. When he elaborates this concept of the Absolute, Jankélévitch retrieves Descartes’s theory of the creation of the eternal truths by God.22 This theory, in Jankélévitch’s system, becomes the necessary condition to guarantee the ontological meaning of the verb “to create,” as well as to maintain the absolute heterogeneity between creation and any other form of production.23 On this point, Jankélévitch also quotes the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, to demonstrate that, by defining creation as Berechith, Genesis has done honor to the absoluteness of the First Act.24 Through this biblical reference, Jankélévitch refuses not only the Platonic model, but also any other perspective in which creation would be a process beginning from a preexistent substratum.25 According to him, on the contrary, creation is the First Act, on the sole condition that it is preceded by nothing, namely that it is creation ex-nihilo.26 The Latin formula ex-nihilo, in turn, must be interpreted as absolute nothingness, radically different from Platonic

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χώρα or chóra.27 The noun chosen by Jankélévitch to designate the emergence of creation from nothing is Improvisation.28 In this light, he also uses terms like “super-existence” and “sur-essence.”29 By referring to Plotinus’s and Schelling’s languages,30 Jankélévitch stresses that, in those expressions, the prefix sur has a metaphysical meaning; the First Act is beyond (epekeina) Being and essences, because it is what creates any existence and any essence, without being anything of what it has created. What Jankélévitch is introducing through this linguistic observation is the concept of transcendence. The use of the term “decision” confirms it. Through the category of decision, in fact, he also emphasizes a further aspect which, so far, he has mentioned only briefly. Introduced at the end of the fifth chapter of Philosophie première, the notion of decision is used by Jankélévitch according to its Latin etymology; rather than being the activity of choosing among several possibilities, the actual decision is the fracture that separates, forever, being and nothingness.31 Many pages of Philosophie première make this clear;32 in most of them, creation is presented as the Act operating from nothing and, at the same time, as the metaphysical break that begins the history of the world. In other terms, Jankélévitch introduces the concept of “decision,” while he is presenting creation as the metaphysical “transition from nothing to everything.”33 If the notion of decision seems to underline, first and foremost, the unconditional character of creation, it is also possible to affirm that the use of this concept has a further purpose; namely, it is used to present creation as metaphysical Freedom. Two arguments prove this point. First, the vast majority of Jankélévitch’s pages on decision introduce a deeper perspective than the simple idea of fracture. The Divine decision is defined as “the incandescent point where deliberation happens instantaneously.”34 This expression makes it possible to reflect on the origin of the word “decision” in Jankélévitch’s system and, starting from there, to clarify the ultimate direction of his first philosophy. Regarding its provenance, the notion of decision is one of the elements that Jankélévitch inherits from Schelling. In his doctoral dissertation, published in 1933, Jankélévitch himself explicitly recognizes the central role of this concept in Schelling’s positive philosophy,35 which founds and legitimates the idea that “in order to obtain an effective universe, it is necessary to make the effective decision of creating it.”36 Second, when he presents creation as the decision happening in the “incandescent point” of the instant, Jankélévitch emphasizes the same aspect as Schelling. In the third version of The Ages of the World, Schelling affirms that, in God, everything happens like in lightning (wie im Blitz).37 With this in mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that the adverb “instantaneously” and the expression “the incandescent point,” both used by Jankélévitch, are his personal translations of the Schelling’s wie im Blitz. Jankélévitch’s concept

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of the divine decision as fracture is, once again, his creative reformulation of Schelling’s Scheidung-Entschließung.38 Now, what does this historical reenactment make clear? The answer to this question requires passing through a concise analysis of Schelling’s philosophical project. Starting from The Ages of the World, particularly from its 1813 version, Schelling links the theme of the divine decision to the issue of the freedom of creation. The notion of decision is the theoretical instrument that Schelling adopts to exclude the view that creation can be reduced to a necessary proceeding of the world from the Absolute.39 The third version of The Ages of the World, therefore, aims to demonstrate that God, in its Freedom, has decided to reveal itself, and the purpose of its revelation was to present itself as one Who was free to reveal itself or not.40 At the heart of Schelling’s project there is the radical freedom of God regarding the world and even regarding its own being. Already in 1933, Jankélévitch himself emphasized the connection between decision and freedom in Schelling’s positive philosophy. Consequently, if in Schelling the theme of the divine decision is deeply linked to the question of God’s freedom, and if Jankélévitch evokes this point in his metaphysical text, then it is possible to conclude that the question of freedom is also crucial in Philosophie première. Jankélévitch’s further considerations confirm it. Indeed, he adds that creation is not only Acting-without-being ex-nihilo, but it is also the act that, in itself, is nothing. Namely, Jankélévitch emphasizes the anti-substantialism of the Absolute and, in doing so, accomplishes a decisive theoretical operation; he makes God coincide with creation.41 God is presented by Philosophie première as the pure operation of making everything exist from nothing, not even from its own being. The Thomist assertion operari sequitur esse is completely inverted. This is made possible by the identification between God and Nothingness. Jankélévitch’s first philosophy is the progressive explanation of this paradox. God is not a thing, it is not Someone nor the Creator, and, finally, it is not even itself. First, Jankélévitch denies that the Absolute is a thing and, to justify this idea, he makes reference to several pages of Plotinus’s Enneads. In particular, he quotes Enneads III, 8, 10 where the One is defined as the principle of anything that is beyond everything that it is the origin of.42 Second, God is not the Creator either. If it was, according to Jankélévitch, God would be bound by something: it being the Creator. The priority of Being over Acting would be reaffirmed and, as a consequence, God would no longer be free of being or not being.43 It would no longer be the First Principle of reality, since there would be something—its Being—that existed before the Absolute itself.44 In Jankélévitch’s perspective, the original character of the Absolute is deeply linked to its freedom and vice versa, so that the only way to think of God as the First Act is to think it as acting-without-being.45 The Absolute

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is the intangible act of making anything exist that, in itself, is nothing. The ontological (in)consistency of this act does not consist of nothing but the emergence of any being from nothing. The notion of intangible, therefore, is used by Jankélévitch in regard to creation as the Act that originally brings everything into existence, while being nothing in itself—with the verb “to be” referring to the Aristotelian οὐσία or substance. Jankélévitch’s God is the pure operation that makes any creature arise from nothing, while remaining beyond any ontic reification. That is the reason why the most appropriate word to present creation, according to Jankélévitch, is the Latin expression translating the opening passage of Genesis: Fiat.46 In his first philosophy, the Absolute (or God) is pure operation, whose ontological density lies solely in the act of making all beings exist. In its operation, the Absolute is bound by nothing except itself and its unconditional freedom. That is why, according to Jankélévitch, the Absolute calls every being into existence for no other reason than its own overabundance and generosity. If there is nothing that could bind God, since God is the First and Absolute Principle that creates everything and remains beyond (epekeina) any creature, it means, therefore, that God can find the reason for acting in nothing else but itself. The only reason why God decided to create is because it wanted to. That is why Jankélévitch, echoing the Gospel of John, uses the category of Love when he refers to the Absolute. According to him, Love is the only philosophical concept able to explain the total absence of binding reasons within the Absolute. At the same time, it can clarify the unreasonable reason why God has eternally decided in favor of being. Interpreted by Jankélévitch from a metaphysical point of view, Love is the only “reason” that justifies an act without introducing any kind of obligation or bond for the agent. Only Love can be the motivation that makes God (the Absolute Freedom) create without being a constraint for it. In conclusion, Jankélévitch’s metaphysics can be synthetically described as a metaphysics of Love, founded and legitimated by the pages of Philosophie première, where Jankélévitch illustrates his interpretation of creation as acting-without-being. The Absolute is the primary creativity that, for no reason and originating from nothing, makes every being exist. THE THEORY OF FORGIVENESS The presentation of Jankélévitch’s first philosophy lays the foundation for a global and comprehensive understating of his moral philosophy. To avoid and overcome any field-based approaches, as well as to reestablish the unity of Jankélévitch’s ethics, it was essential to start with an accurate analysis of his perspective on God. This chapter aims to demonstrate that, according to

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Jankélévitch, the philosophical reflection on the moral dimension of human life consists of asking two unavoidable questions. The first concerns whether it is possible for human beings to resemble God, and the second concerns the condition of possibility and the effective fulfillment of that resemblance. In other words, the main questions of Jankélévitch’s morality concern the relationship with the Absolute; his texts on moral philosophy are nothing but the theoretical exploration of all the possible modes and inherent limits of that relationship. That is why the investigation of the metaphysics of Love elaborated in Philosophie première was an indispensable step toward the second part of this work, to justify a second hypothesis. Namely, there is an essential nexus between metaphysics and morality, which could be summarized by the following syllogism. The Absolute is Love; human beings are able to resemble God and they effectively do so when they act in the same way the Absolute acts; thus, human beings are like God when they love. If the major premise of this syllogism has already been explained, the minor one and the conclusion still have to be made clear. First, it is necessary to demonstrate that the idea of a relationship between human beings and God is the crucial point of Jankélévitch’s moral perspective. To do this, it is necessary to quote a pivotal passage from the tenth chapter of Philosophie première, where Jankélévitch explicitly formulates the following question. “Will the second creator [i.e., the human being], alter conditor, be able to prolong the divine creation beyond the seventh day?”47 In other words, Jankélévitch is asking himself and his readers whether human beings can have any experience of the Absolute, and whether, despite their finitude, they are able to participate in some way in the divine creation. Jankélévitch’s affirmative answer can be found, once again, in a significant page of Philosophie première; through some kinds of actions, human beings are able to accomplish “the miracle of the re-creation,” namely to continue the divine operation, with the word “re-creation” meaning the creative and mimetic reproduction of the original and radical act.48 That is when Jankélévitch introduces the second question that guides and accompanies all his reflection on morality; when does the human act concretely replicate the Absolute Act? Jankélévitch’s reply is found in his metaphysical conception. If the Absolute is an act and not a being, it becomes immediately clear that the only way to participate in the Absolute operation and to reproduce its dynamism is to accomplish an(other) act. That is, in their actions, behaviors and practices, human beings can experience God. If the Absolute is acting-without-being, the human act reproduces, like a miniature, the First Act only when it imitates the same logic as the Absolute. Human acts, therefore, are the finite images of the Absolute on condition that they are, equally and as much as possible for the limited human being, actingwithout-being. The concrete action in which this meontological paradox of

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acting-without-being occurs is Love.49 (Human) Love, which is “the tangent point of the human soul with the Absolute,”50 is the (certainly imperfect) image of the metaphysical overabundance, consisting of the “miraculous act” of creating. To justify this assertion, Jankélévitch formulates several arguments. First, when they love, human beings act. Refusing the superficial and naïve interpretation of love in terms of a sentiment or emotion, Jankélévitch shares, once again, Plotinus’s perspective on love. Eros is not passion, from the Greek πάθος or pathos, nor the quality of causing feelings in someone who is passively overwhelmed by it. Love, instead, is the powerful energy that makes human beings act for the good or, in Plotinus’s words, it is “ενέργεια πρὸς τὸ αγαθόν” (“Acting toward the Good”).51 It is what drives human beings to take initiative in favor of the good. Second, love is the human reproduction of the metaphysical act since, while it is obviously not a pure creation ex-nihilo, it is, however, an act of making something exist, in a certain way. According to Jankélévitch, who quotes Plato’s Symposium, in a first and immediate meaning, love is the creator, since it is the principle of human procreation.52 It is the energy that drives humans to overcome their singular existences and look ahead to the future. Moreover, when they love, human beings attribute value to the loved and, in doing so, they make it exist. Refusing any theory according to which love would be a sentiment caused and activated by the recognition of a quality inherent to the object of love, Jankélévitch affirms that the loved has value precisely because it is loved and not the contrary.53 Love makes the loved amabilis, it confers value, instead of being moved by something that would be, as such, worthy of love. Third, love is the complete consecration of the (loving) subject to the object of its love. When they love, human beings forget themselves, they renounce their own interests, needs, and egoistic and egocentric concerns for themselves, and sometimes even their life, to live for someone else. In this regard, according to Jankélévitch, it is possible to establish an analogy and apply to human love the same expression used in Philosophie première to describe the First Act. As the Absolute is nothing in itself but the activity that confers existence to all beings, love is the human act that mostly resembles the metaphysical “acting-without-being,” since, through it, human beings are completely absorbed in a dynamic of interaction, which has its heart in the existence of the loved. Love is the forgetting of oneself to make the other be; it is a movement away from the self “to become oneself wholly the other itself.”54 Therefore, the actual name of this self-renunciation motivated by love for another is sacrifice. For human beings, who are necessarily, yet primarily, centered on themselves, love requires a tireless effort of detachment from their self-reference.

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At this point of his argument, Jankélévitch takes a decisive step. After having justified the metaphysical priority of love among all other human actions and after having emphasized the dimension of sacrifice involved in every act of human love, Jankélévitch goes on to focus on forgiveness. He presents it as the most extreme form of human love and, as a consequence, of sacrifice. Forgiveness, indeed, is defined as an “agonizing sacrifice.”55 In this regard, Jankélévitch adds that “only love has the force to persuade us to sacrifice our grievances.”56 In his text published in 1971, forgiveness is presented as the hyperbolic form of love; it is the heroic exercise of love consisting of repaying evil with good. In other words, while love is not necessarily linked to any kind of fault, error, guilt, or imperfection that can be generally defined as “evil,” the hyperbolic character of forgiveness results from the fact that it is the very specific action that human beings can take precisely when they face a committed wrong. Forgiveness is a peculiar form of relationship established with a (repentant and even unrepentant) wrongdoer. To understand Jankélévitch’s perspective on forgiveness, it is essential to highlight that he starts by presenting three acts that are nothing but surrogate forms of authentic forgiveness. First, the oblivion; second, the intellectual excuse; and third, the “general liquidation,” resulting in dismissing the wrong. Beyond the detailed analysis of each of these actions, the common point that Jankélévitch emphasizes is the following: when human beings overcome the committed wrong in the name of the passing of time, or through an intellectual and detached comprehension of the situation that caused the suffered wrong, they reduce forgiveness to “a formality and an empty protocol.”57 In other words, they deny the specificity of forgiveness and its qualitative heterogeneity with regards to every other act of surmounting a wrong. Jankélévitch highlights that forgiveness must not be confused with oblivion, since time is no moral element. In this regard, he underlines the absurdity of the claim that time, as such, would regulate the moral and even legal questions of responsibility and guilt. “Age by itself is not a philosophical reason to forgive.”58 To overcome the wrong on the basis of the time is synonymous with forgetting instead of forgiving; the passing of time cannot change the moral qualification of the committed wrong, whereas forgiveness is precisely the act of re-qualifying the wrong, without denying its wrongness. Moreover, the intellectualist approach, which results in the recognition of the nothingness of the evil, cannot be authentic forgiveness either. In this case, what is refuted by Jankélévitch is the optimistic idea that there is no wickedness inherent in the will of human beings, so that forgiveness would just consist in recognizing that the wrongdoer has acted on the basis of a “counter-principle” or “transcendent hypostasis,”59 which was the instigator of the sin, with the sinner being only “a dupe.”60

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Finally, the general liquidation resulting from the combination of the two preceding models is the most superficial way of dealing with a wrong. It consists of declaring the sin null and passing over the misdeed without holding it against the guilty person. It is the miraculous pretension of disburdening the guilty person of their responsibility. On the contrary, forgiveness is the superhuman and supererogatory act of handling the wrong as if the evil had never been committed, although “it knows that it did come to pass, and whatever it costs.”61 Forgiveness, with radical and absolute lucidity, decides to accord an “intentional unmerited favour”62 to the guilty person. What is mostly paradoxical about forgiveness is that, when it is authentic, it is motivated by no reason; it is the unmotivated and unjustified act that changes hate into love. That is the reason why Jankélévitch describes forgiveness as a “grace,”63 with this word being used according to both its legal and philosophical meanings. Forgiveness is an act of (scandalous and unreasonable) freedom founded in a radical gratuitousness that has nothing to do with Mill’s principle of utility or Kant’s categorical imperative of duty. There is no reason that, literally, can force someone to forgive their wrongdoer. Justice or even vengeance are always two possible alternatives to forgiveness. That is why Jankélévitch affirms that, when they forgive, human beings reproduce the metaphysical grace consisting of acting-without-reasons and inventing the reasons in the very act of posing them. Only after having done so, the victim who has forgiven the guilty person can explain the (unreasonable) reasons of their (not owed) act. The similarity between the human act of forgiving and the First Act of metaphysical grace is their inherent liberty. If the reduction of creation to any kind of production would result in a misleading interpretation of its metaphysical priority and absoluteness, in the same way the identification of forgiveness into one of its three surrogates would mean “to suppress the liberty of forgiving, and along with liberty, the uncertain and charitable gratuity.”64 To forgive, therefore, is to make freely a decision in favor of a new era of reconciliation and peace that leaves behind the rancor, the suffering, and the evil, without forgetting them. It consists of inaugurating something new and unpredictable, starting from the rubble of the past, which becomes the foundation for a new edifice. As the metaphysical Act was the (eternal) decision in favor of something radically new (being instead of nothing), forgiveness is the powerful act of transfiguring the sense of the past wrong by turning it into the source of the present good. It creates a new configuration of the world in which new possibilities present themselves. This process of transfiguration is possible since forgiveness inaugurates a new relationship between the victim and the offender. According to Jankélévitch, not only can the wrongdoer be converted by the grace they receive—on the

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condition that the conversion of the offender was not the intentional reason for forgiveness—but the victim can also benefit from the grace of forgiveness. Forgiveness testifies to the victim of a superhuman power that renews, intensifies, and confirms their humanity. In other terms, forgiveness is a twopart phenomenon, since it is the spiritual transfiguration of both the person who forgives and the person who is forgiven. In doing so, forgiveness brings with itself the “joy of innovation,”65 like the metaphysical generosity that is the radical innovation that brings the creation of the world. This joy is the tangible and phenomenal aspect of the creative power of forgiveness, which, being able to return good for evil, gives both the victim and the offender the unpredictable opportunity to start a new life. Finally, when they forgive, human beings voluntarily transcend themselves and their natural desire for compensation for what they suffered. Forgiveness is the supererogatory and asymmetrical act that consists of the personal and strenuous renunciation of any rights, including even the right to justice, as well as of any legitimate claim of revenge or punishment. The victim abandons the idea of symmetry and balance, which, in Jankélévitch’s perspective, is typical both of any form of expiation that returns evil for evil—symbolically represented by the so-called law of retaliation—and of justice, which requires that the victim is recompensed. In the name of a superior principle, illustrated by Jankélévitch through several biblical references, including the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Prodigal Son, forgiveness returns good for evil, and, in doing so, it interrupts the symmetry between what the wrongdoer has done and what the victim responds to it. After all, this asymmetry of forgiveness consists of the fact that any right to be pardoned does not exist, nor any duty to forgive. Using the terms of Philosophie première, we can say that the victim who forgives reproduces the original transcendence, “which gives that which it does not have.”66 FINAL REMARKS In conclusion, the theory of forgiveness plays an important role in Jankélévitch’s philosophy as a whole, since it makes clear the reason why “morality, as soon as it ceases to be a pure cognitive deduction, and synonymous with duties, no longer distinguishes itself from metaphysics.”67 In other words, forgiveness is the concrete figure of Jankélévitch’s ethics that clarifies how essential it is to read his texts on moral philosophy in the light of his metaphysics. Without bearing in mind this intimate connection, we risk losing sight of the unity of Jankélévitch’s philosophy. At the same time, however, the nexus between the theories of God as Love and of human forgiveness marks a weak point. On one side, indeed,

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Jankélévitch’s morality is all about the relationship between the First Act (the Absolute) and the derived acts, as well as the effective fulfillment of this relationship. The passages describing human love as the finite act that most resembles the original Love, which is the metaphysical source of reality, make this point clear. In this regard, the presentation of human forgiveness in terms of sacrifice for love is a crucial step. If the syllogism concerning the relationship between (finite) love and (infinite) Love is valid—that human beings resemble God when they love—and if forgiveness is the very specific form of love consisting of the sacrifice of any desire for revenge and compensation, we should conclude that human beings get closer to God (also) when they forgive. On the other side, however, a major difficulty arises. In Jankélévitch’s presentation, any reference to God’s forgiveness is absent. The verbs “to sacrifice” and “to forgive” only appear when the human dimension is addressed. In Philosophie première, Jankélévitch clearly states that “only the misery of the creature requires the sacrifice of self.”68 In Jankélévitch’s perspective, God does not forgive anyone, or sacrifice itself for anyone. Forgiveness, however, was supposed to be one of the human acts able to make creatures like God: this is where Jankélévitch’s theory of forgiveness proves problematic. This difficulty has its roots in Jankélévitch’s conception of the Absolute. In Jankélévitch’s metaphysics, indeed, God is not someone (“quelqu’un”),69 it is not a person, hence there is no space for God’s forgiveness and its activity is not described by Jankélévitch other than as an ontological profusion, an overabundance of energy. It follows, moreover, that in Jankélévitch’s philosophy there is no space for any analogical meaning of the term “personality,” according to which the human person is made in the image of God’s Person and it is this image, along with the supreme sacrifice of God, that makes their relationship possible. If Jankélévitch perfectly emphasizes that the difference between creatures and the Absolute is unbridgeable because of the heterogeneity of their respective ontological status, he finally turns that difference into a veritable separation. After having referred to the Catholic tradition to present forgiveness, and after having described forgiveness as the act in which the similarity between the human person and God reaches its maximal fulfillment, Jankélévitch cannot explain what commonality is able to connect human beings with the Absolute, since it explicitly refuses to conceive God as a person. Consequently, that claimed similarity, which was supposed to occur in the act of forgiveness, remains unexplained. The absence of what could have made it effective—that is, the notion of personality and the principle of analogy, which is at heart of the Catholic theology, yet is absent in Jankélévitch’s metaphysics—turns out to be the reason for an insurmountable distance. After all, in Jankélévitch’s philosophy, forgiveness is nothing but a too human act.

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NOTES 1. See in particular: Davide Campanale, “Review of Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien,” Rassegna di scienze filosofiche 13, no. 4 (1959): 367–369; Adele Canilli, “L’ironia nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” II Pensiero 9, nos. 1–3 (1964): 105–124; Enrico Verondini, “L’odissea morale nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Giornale di Metafisica 16, nos. 3–4 (1961): 384–401; Bruna Fazio Allmayer, “La coscienza morale e il problema del riscatto e della austerità nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” I problemi della Pedagogia 13, no. 3 (1967): 471–489. 2. See: Franco Pittau, II volere umano nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch (Rome: Libreria Editrice dell’Università Gregoriana, 1972); Maria Luisa Facco, “Il ‘Traité des vertus’ di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Giornale di Metafisica 30, no. 4 (1975): 405–433; Giovanni Giulietti, ““Je-ne sais-quoi” e “Presque-rien” nel filosofare di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Filosofia oggi 4 (1981): 227–235; Enrica Liscaini Petrini, Memoria e poesia. Bergson, Jankélévitch, Heidegger (Naples: E.S.I., 1983); Maria Luisa Facco, Vladimir Jankélévitch e la metafisica (Genoa: University of Genoa, 1985). 3. See: Aimé Forest, “Review of Traité des vertus,” Revue Thomiste 52 (1952): 165–167; Madeleine Barthelemy, “Le ‘Traité des vertus’ de Vladimir Jankélévitch: étude critique,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 56, no. 4 (1951): 406–435; Jean Wahl, “La philosophie première de V. Jankélévitch,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 60, nos. 1–2 (1955): 161–244; Louis Vax, “Du Bergsonisme à la Philosophie Première,” Critique 11, no. 92 (1955): 36–52. 4. See: Monique Basset et al., Écrit pour Vladimir Jankélévitch (Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Jean-Pierre Faye et al., “Vladimir Jankélévitch,” L’Arc 75 (1979): 1–88. 5. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du “Presque” (Paris: PUF, 1954). 6. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Une vie en toutes lettres (Paris: Liana Levi, 1995), 325. 7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus (Paris: Bordas, 1949; Paris: Flammarion, 1968–1972). In its first edition, this text has more than 7,085 pages and includes several quotations from Greek and Latin authors, as well as a high number of references to poets and artists from all historical periods. 8. Jankélévitch, Une vie en toutes lettres, 332. 9. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Pardon (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967); Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 10. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 187. 11. Ibid., 103. 12. Ibid., 179. 13. Ibid., 165. 14. Ibid., 224. 15. See: Louis Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz. Extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque royale de Hanovre (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903), 534. 16. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 103.

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17. Ibid., 224. 18. Ibid., 102. 19. See: ibid., 218, 225. 20. Ibid., 218. 21. Ibid., 173. 22. The presence of the Cartesian theory of eternal truths in Jankélévitch’s philosophy is a result of several influences, such as Schelling’s, Boutroux’s, Brunschvicg’s, and Gouhier’s philosophies. 23. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 218. 24. Ibid., 195, 220. See: Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, The Ages of the World, in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart und Augsburg: Hrsg. von K. F. A. Schelling, Cotta, 1856–1861), vol. VIII, 332–334. 25. See: Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 187, 218–219, 223, 229. 26. See: ibid., 195. See: Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Darstellung des philosophischen Empirismus, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. X, 282. 27. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 205. 28. Ibid., 228. 29. Ibid., 103. 30. It is possible to affirm that Jankélévitch also made reference to Schelling’s Überseyende e Überwirkliche. See: Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII, 234, 238; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XI, 570; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XIII, 128, 148. Schelling also uses the notion of Überexisterende and Jankélévitch’s «superexistant» can be interpreted as its French translation. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XII, 58, 200; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XIII, 150; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XIV, 350. 31. Jankélévitch inherits from Plotinus and Schelling the idea that the choice among several possibilities is the lower level of freedom. See: Plotinus, Enneads, VI, 8, 20; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VII, 429. 32. See: Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 186, 188, 199, 202, 212. 33. Ibid., 196. 34. Ibid., 226. The idea of the original act as poesia is already present in Schelling’s philosophy (see: Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII, 333). 35. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (Paris: Alcan, 1933), 2–3. 36. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 179. 37. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII, 304. 38. Schelling connects two terms: Scheidung and κρίσις. See: Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VII, 404. 39. See: Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII, 244, 257, 308; Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. XIII, 306. 40. See: Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII, 300. 41. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 193. 42. See: Plotinus, Enneads, III, 8, 10; Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 143, 151, 182. 43. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 187.

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44. Ibid., 182–183. See: Enneads V, 3, 10 and Enneads VI, 8, 20. 45. See: Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 179, 187. 46. See: ibid., 186. 47. Ibid., 239. 48. Ibid., 174. 49. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’austérité et le mythe de la pureté morale (Paris: Sorbonne University Press, 1954); Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Pur et l’Impur (Paris: Flammarion, 1960); Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus, 309; Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 105, 249. 50. Ibid., 244. 51. Plotinus, Enneads III, 5, 9. 52. Jankélévitch, Le Pur et l’Impur, 306, 313; Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 219. 53. See: Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus, 84, 140, 172, 207, 213, 214, 309. 54. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 247. 55. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 64. 56. Ibid., 86. 57. Ibid., 106. 58. Ibid., 59. 59. Ibid., 57. 60. Ibid., 58. 61. Ibid., 99. 62. Glen Pettigrove, Forgiveness and Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 127. 63. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 142. 64. Ibid., 65. 65. Ibid., 99. 66. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 189. 67. Ibid., 54. 68. Ibid., 189. 69. Ibid., 187.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allmayer, Bruna Fazio. “La coscienza morale e il problema del riscatto e della austerità nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” I problemi della Pedagogia 13, no. 3 (1967): 471–489. Barthelemy, Madeleine. “Le “Traité des vertus” de Vladimir Jankélévitch: étude critique,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 56, no. 4 (1951): 406–435. Basset, Monique et al. Écrit pour Vladimir Jankélévitch, Paris: Flammarion, 1978. Campanale, Davide. “Review of Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien,” Rassegna di scienze filosofiche 13, no. 4 (1959): 367–369. Canilli, Adele. “L’ironia nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” II Pensiero 9, nos. 1–3 (1964): 105–124.

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Couturat, Louis. Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz. Extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque royale de Hanovre, Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903. Facco, Maria Luisa. Vladimir Jankélévitch e la metafisica, Genoa: University of Genoa, 1985. ———. “Il “Traité des vertus” di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Giornale di Metafisica 30, no. 4 (1975): 405–433. Faye, Jean-Pierre et al. “Vladimir Jankélévitch,” L’Arc 75 (1979): 1–88. Forest, Aimé. “Review of Traité des vertus,” Revue Thomiste 52 (1952): 165–167. Giulietti, Giovanni. “‘Je-ne sais-quoi’ e ‘Presque-rien’ nel filosofare di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Filosofia oggi 4 (1981): 227–235. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’austérité et le mythe de la pureté morale, Paris: Sorbonne University Press, 1954. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling, Paris: Alcan, 1933. ———. Le Pardon, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967. ———. Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du “Presque,” Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. ———. Le Pur et l’impur, Paris: Flammarion, 1960. ———. Traité des vertus, Paris: Bordas, 1949; Paris: Flammarion, 1968–1972. ———. Une Vie en toutes lettres: correspondance, Paris: Lia Levi, 1995. Petrini, Enrica Liscaini. Memoria e poesia. Bergson, Jankélévitch, Heidegger, Naples: E.S.I., 1983. Pettigrove, Glen. Forgiveness and Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pittau, Franco. II volere umano nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch, Rome: Libreria Editrice dell’Università Gregoriana, 1972. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm. Sämtliche Werke, vol. VIII–XIV, Hrsg. von K. F. A. Schelling. Stuttgart und Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61. Vax, Louis. “Du Bergsonisme à la Philosophie Première,” Critique 11, no. 92 (1955): 36–52. Verondini, Enrico. “L’odissea morale nel pensiero di Vladimir Jankélévitch,” Giornale di Metafisica 16, nos. 3–4 (1961): 384–401. Wahl, Jean. “La philosophie première de V. Jankélévitch,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 60, nos. 1–2 (1955): 161–244.

Chapter 2

Paradoxes of Virtue in Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Moral Philosophy1 José Manuel Beato

On the spark, however, it is possible to found an ethic.2 Vladimir Jankélévitch

The philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch consisted in a laborious and inspired attempt to articulate the problem of virtue(s) beginning from the experience of the irreversibility of time and the mobilization of will in the unique and unrepeatable “instant” of the concrete action. How does one meditate on the traditional “stable disposition” for good in the imponderability of the instant? How does one think the moral excellence without egocentric satisfaction, and its constancy based upon a stripped back and perpetually fresh start? This project and its paradoxes take Jankélévitch beyond Greek eudaimonism, Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, and contemporary contractualism. Much more than the notion of virtue, it is Jankélévitch’s entire moral philosophy that can be put under the sign of “paradoxology.”3 By paradox he means an oscillatory tension between two irreducible poles. No dialectical overcoming of these opposite claims via the syntheses of a third element or stage is achieved or seen as possible. Instead, it is discursive reason that is overcome by an entirely contradictory and irrational reciprocity, by the tearing and irresolvable tension of two disjointed evidences that only intuition can grasp.4 This chapter seeks to demonstrate and examine the paradoxical foundations of Jankélévitch’s virtue theory. To pursue this goal, I must address the following questions, which form the horizon of my analysis of the 1949 Traité des vertus, the main Jankélévitch’s work on ethics. These problems are as follows: first, Jankélévitch is, certainly, a “virtue theorist”—inquiring about the nature of virtue, but is he also a “virtue ethicist”—making virtue a central notion in a normative perspective? The response would seem to be 19

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affirmative, which would indicate that he surely is a true pioneer in the contemporary rebirth of “virtue ethics.” Second, if virtue implies the “principle of time” (the polarity of “instant” and “interval”), as Jankélévitch asserts,5 then we must ask how it overcomes this internal duality of becoming (devenir)? In fact, the metaphysical primacy of the instant must not be undervalued, even if Jankélévitch distinguishes virtues of beginning—like courage—and virtues of continuation—like fidelity. And third, if Jankélévitch’s ethics is primarily about creating and acting and not being—following his metaphysics—are virtues—as a manner of acting—on the side of dispositional potentiality, motivational intentionality, or full actuality? In the context of these interrogations, I propose the following definition of virtue in the thought of Jankélévitch: a virtue is a manner of wanting and acting, which, arising in a kairological or situational “instant” and driven by a loving intention, reverberates during an “interval” as a manner of being. VLADIMIR JANKÉLÉVITCH AS A “VIRTUE ETHICIST” For over four decades now, “virtue ethics” has been imposing itself as an alternative approach to normative ethics beyond deontology and consequentialism. The publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s challenging 1958 paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy,”6 is usually pointed out as the inaugural and decisive event in the contemporary revival of virtue ethics. Since the early works of Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre, we have seen the proliferation of diverse virtue-based theories and their application to bioethics, business, politics, sports, and environmental ethics, showing the fecundity of this distinctive approach to moral issues.7 However, at least one major indication allows and forces us to review this genealogy and historical statement: the publishing, of course, in 1949, of Traité des vertus by Vladimir Jankélévitch. How does one explain the absence of references to this essential work by so many contemporary authors working on this subject? The fact is that Jankélévitch is at the core of the debate launched by Anscombe and that some of her main concerns are present in his work as he clearly anticipates them. Starting with The Bad Conscience8 and going through the Traité des vertus one finds a critique of Kantian deontology and a rebuttal of utilitarianism. We also find an authentic phenomenology of moral conscience,9 focused on the notions of intention, obligation, and free will, which in its own way substantively responds to Anscombe’s call for the urgent need of a “proper philosophy of [moral] psychology.”10 And far more than what we find in so many virtue ethicists, Jankélévitch has a descriptive and systematic table of virtues, discussing each one as having a specific nature as well as noting the subtle relations between them. The traditional problems about the grounding and content, the unity and multiplicity

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of virtues, and whether or not virtue can be learned, are brought to the fore. Moreover, the inquiry into their cognitive, volitional, and affective dimension is pursued with fineness, erudition, and originality. But, paradoxically, the absence of reference to Jankélévitch’s work among the contemporary virtue ethicists is also due to the fact that Jankélévitch’s way of doing virtue ethics does not follow most ancient or present standards and slogans, being unique in its kind. It is not neo-Aristotelian and does not focus on the concept of eudaimonia (taken as personal well-being, flourishing, or fulfillment). It is not a form of eudaimonism governed by the telos of a “good life.” Moreover, it is not up to phronèsis—as “practical reasoning” or “deliberative wisdom”11—to be the key of virtues. It is up to “love”—as charity and self-sacrifice—which is so often supernatural and irrational, to be the root and unity of all virtues, to be the impulse and the motive of the right or good “intentional movement.” This does not mean yielding to any sort of emotional subjectivism or emotivism. In this sense, it also does not approach the tendency, represented by Michael Slote, toward a “virtue-ethical sentimentalism,”12 because feeling and emotion are not invested with a particular noetic or ethical function in Jankélévitch’s anthropology and metaphysics. The moral philosophy of Jankélévitch is not a form of “moral perfectionism.” Therefore, it is not “concerned with Being rather than Doing,” or with addressing the question of “what sort of person should I be?” instead of “what should I do?”13 However, we cannot say that his ethics is “act-centred” rather than “agent-centred,” because the intention is crucial. The agent is invested, in an immediate and inalienable way, with the “duty to do” (devoir faire): “the Good is something that must be done.”14 Thus, virtuous action is more important than the agent’s virtue (as wisdom, skill, and disposition). It is the active and creative effectivity of “doing” that matters: “to be truly, intensely, passionately, it is necessary, first and foremost, to do, act, and create.”15 So, moral virtues are not underlined as “excellences,” or as “admirable” dispositions necessary for the development and the perfection of the subject itself, but, rather, they serve a disinterested and selfless dynamics: “all virtues, in the measure in which they proceed from an intention without pretention or arrogance, are, thus, modalities of the forgetting of oneself.”16 Jankélévitch claims that the “Ego,” the “I,” is always the “organ-obstacle”—that is, the instrument and the impediment—of morality, which consists of a radically heterocentric conversion of self-will to the well-being of the other.17 Moreover, “bad conscience” lies at the heart of “moral conscience.” Thus, the virtuous conscience of a “virtuous being”—that is, aware of the rightness of the motives, ends, means, and guidance of the action it carries out—will fall into complacency and presumption. The “bad conscience” is the remorse of committed faults connected with the sense of moral fallibility weighing on “being.” Only the perpetual renewal of virtuous action can alleviate this remorse and weight.18

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Jankélévitch does not define virtues as stable or lasting personality dispositions, as “character traits.” Nor are the virtues associated with an ontologized naturalism, which makes them acquire attributes that allow the realization of the essence and the telos of the human being. On this point, Jankélévitch seems to contradict the whole contemporary neo-Aristotelian tendency, which insists on virtue as a trait. One example of such a conception of virtue is Julia Annas’s philosophy, which emphasizes the idea that a virtue is “a lasting feature of the person,” that it is “reliable and characteristic,” and a persistent “disposition to be a certain way,” that is, to act, to reason, and feel in certain ways.19 On Jankélévitch’s view, virtue—while being an effectivity or actuality—lives in the time of the good intention, concrete decision, and the effective action that arises from it. This occurs at the “decisive instant” that responds and corresponds to the event in the crucial and propitious occasion. So, it is circumstances that activate, stimulate, or reveal the virtues as good and efficient intentions.20 Virtue is much more about the way that circumstances challenge the actual traits and stable dispositions of character. Nothing seems to authorize Jankélévitch to deduce from a “virtuous” intention, decision, action or work, the presence of a cognitive, volitional, and affective disposition, existing in the agent in a stable, reliable, and predictable way. Instead, there is a “circular causality” between the “act” and the “disposition” whose axis is the “intention” and that the situation favors and mobilizes. For Jankélévitch, a “virtue” is an intentional movement of the person as whole—“with all his heart and with all his soul,”21 but it is “effectivity”—its full actuality—that counts. So, in fact, he seems to have an “occurrent-state view” of virtue, giving primacy to local, specific, and discrete virtuous acts in a concrete situation, over a “dispositional view.” The latter requires that we be able to identify virtuous character traits and persons independently of actual virtuous intentions, acts, motives or feelings.22 Thus, Jankélévitch escapes the classic “situationist critique” which denies the existence of reliable dispositions of personality—such as virtues or vices—that show “temporal stability” and “cross-situational consistency.”23 In fact, Jankélévitch’s notion of individual virtue is not dependent or reliant on the psychological concept of “character trait,” empirically sustained. Also, what follows from this account is that anyone can be virtuous, if willing to be so. To be virtuous—that is, to act virtuously, which means acting for the good of the other—it is enough to want it: one just needs to be “willing to will” (vouloir vouloir) at the right moment. One can claim that everyone is required to act virtuously, occasion by occasion. Therefore, from all and everyone, then, universally one can expect and demand virtue.24 To quote Jankélévitch: “it is true, paradoxically true, that to will is to be able, and that if our will is infinite, then our ability in this sense is no less.”25

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Jankélévitch’s doctrine of virtues is not naturalistic. Julia Annas underlines the fact that contemporary virtue-based theories tend to assume a “naturalistic” or “essentialist” account.26 On the one hand, the acquisition or development of virtues enables one to attain the “good life” while fully accomplishing the specific determinations of man/woman as a social and rational being. On the other hand, this essentialism—of a universalistic nature—contrasts with the recent dawning of a “pluralistic” relativism in taking greater account of the historical, cultural, social, and ethnic contexts of the moral virtues. This leads to descriptions and analysis in the context of Islamic, Confucian, Indian civilizations, and so on. Jankélévitch avoids this antinomy: his whole morality rests on the idea of “supernaturality”, not in the sense of a reference to divine transcendence, but in the sense of overcoming the “natural” inclinations or aspirations: instinct, utility, pleasure, or happiness. Morality is supernatural without being, however, “counter-natural,” or against nature.27 The second and true “nature” of humanity does not consist in the subjugation or annulment of the first one, but in its overcoming, in a form of agnostic spirituality. For Jankélévitch, the realm of morality pertains to an “other order”; one that classical eudaimonism or naturalistic essentialism can never inaugurate. In this way, on the one hand, the “ought-to-be” is never deduced from “being” or “what is”; the normative is never derived from the descriptive. On the other hand, Jankélévitch unambiguously assumes that the “matter” (or quiddity) of moral action depends on sociohistorical and ethnoanthropological determinations, but that the virtue of acting relies on “intention”—that is the “manner” (or quoddity) of the will that generates the action. Jankélévitch invokes the injunction of Pindar and Nietzsche to “become who we are.”28 It implies a dynamic of “fulfillment” that involves the highest oneness of the individual—his/her selfhood or ipseity—and the accomplishment of the human in us—our humanity. In this way, perhaps our fulfillment is beyond the opposition of “should-be” and “being,” and the dynamics of virtue accomplishes this overcoming. But none of this is understood in a eudaimonist sense, where the ultimate end and perfection are joined and attained in happiness. “Becoming who we are” is about the integrity and sincerity of the moral agent over time, as a human person, precisely, about virtuousness per se. JANKÉLÉVITCH’S MAIN CONCERN OR FUNDAMENTAL INTUITION Vladimir Jankélévitch meditates upon the problem of virtue(s) from the experience of the irreversibility of becoming and the mobilization of will in the unique and unrepeatable “instant” of the concrete and opportune situation: the

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Kairós. It is up to the elusive purity of loving intention to propel the virtuous action that, courageously and drastically, seeks to capture the “propitious occasion” and create the good. How is one to comprehend the traditional “stable disposition” for good or right action in the imponderability and unrepeatability of the occasional and collisional instant of the event, which is the pulsatile fraction of moral time? How is one to reconcile the authenticity of intention and the continuity of duration? How is one to think moral excellence without egocentric satisfaction, and its constancy from a perpetual fresh start? Such are, in my view, the great paradoxes that underly the thought of Jankélévitch. On the metaphysical level, primacy is given to “doing,” “making-be,” or “creating,” instead of simply “being,” which arises out of the prevalence of “quoddity” (the pure effectivity or “that-ness” of a thing) over “quiddity” (what a thing is). Moreover, Jankélévitch follows the famous sentence of Book VI of Plato’s Republic: “the Good is beyond essence, exceeding it in dignity and power” [509b]. The Good is not of the order of “being” or “knowing,” because it is the creative power that gives being and essence to all knowable things, transcending them in a “demonic hyperbole.”29 So, “the Good” is what in humanity is similar to such a creative power. The main goal is to search for the inner impulse of moral action, the foundational virtue or virtues of “good will”: the intentional movement where duty and love are bound. Below and beyond codes and commandments, primacy is given to the “good intention” that seeks and knows what to do and assumes the duty to do it here and now. The issue is at the level of a “willing will” that fights against the inertia and compactness of selfishness, the tricks of monadic Machiavellianism. Jankélévitch thematizes the problem of the “lesser evil” or “necessary evil” inherent in a concrete action and a “consequent will” that assumes the means necessary beyond the angelic features of ends. Hence arises his critique of a “moral purism” that leads to Pharisaism or paralyzes our concrete action. What follows is a reassertion of the value of effort and detailed merit, which, however, can never be capitalized on, but which can only live in pure innocence. For Jankélévitch “morality is neither inscribed on tables nor prescribed by commandments.”30 The project of a virtue-based ethics arises in his work already in 1929, when Jankélévitch was preparing his thesis on the “bad conscience.” He mentions that “gracious virtue” is the only response to the “bad conscience,” and, through that perspective, he foresees a possibility “in reviving the Greek moralities of excellence that the bourgeois spirit of Kant has destroyed since the nineteenth century.”31 Jankélévitch conducts then a renewal of the question of virtue(s) for which he sketches out a descriptive table. But, above all, he pursues its nature between natural dispositions, constructed “habitus,” mirror games of the volitional consciousness, the instantaneity of the good intention, and the effectiveness of actions. The “catalogue”

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of virtues he raises includes courage, fidelity, sincerity, modesty, humility, justice, equity, and, finally, love. Jankélévitch is thus, obviously, a “virtue theorist.” Let us now consider whether he is also a virtue ethicist, by taking into account the criteria of the dominant neo-Aristotelian paradigm of virtue ethics, as represented by Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Julia Annas.32 It consists of five assumptions. First, virtue is a character trait (hexis/habitus) of excellence, which is acquired and developed by practice. We can learn how to be virtuous and improve our moral performance. Second, practical wisdom—phronèsis— is crucial for the excellence of character and moral action. It is a knowledge or understanding that enables the proper use and articulation of all other virtues. Third, Eudaimonia—“happiness” or “flourishing”—is the end that virtuous life aims to achieve. The possession of virtues is a necessary condition for eudaimonia. Fourth, virtue ethics is agent-centered: the focal point is what one is, or becomes, instead of what one does, or the consequences of one’s actions. And finally, fifth, virtue ethics is naturalistic, that is, it is a form of essentialism linked to the idea of “natural goodness” and the flourishing of a human qua human. Virtue allows the subject to be good as a human being. As our previous overview has shown, according to these criteria, Jankélévitch is not a “virtue ethicist.” However, a wide variety of virtue ethics can be found in the philosophical tradition and have also recently emerged: “agent-based,” “exemplarist,” or “target-centered” perspectives, Platonist and Stoic approaches, and so on.33 There are also versions inspired by the interpretations of such figures as Hume or Nietzsche qua virtue ethicists. Therefore, as Christine Swanton has emphasized, we must adopt a more inclusive definition and pluralistic criteria. Indeed, “virtue ethics should be seen as a family of moral theories with several genera and species.”34 According to Swanton, a theory is virtue ethical “if virtuous notions are sufficiently central in that theory.”35 In this sense, Jankélévitch most certainly is a virtue ethicist. I cannot discuss here all the affinities that exist precisely between Jankélévitch’s ethical theory and contemporary virtue ethics of a non-Aristotelian kind. But I will note two points. Similarly to Michael Slote’s approach, primacy is given to motives and intentions over character. As is the case in Christine Swanton’s perspective, attention is given, through the notion of intention and “consequent will,” to the goals or targets of virtues. In fact, virtue concepts can be applied directly and not just derivatively to actions: what matters is the “success in hitting the targets of relevant virtues.”36 Thus, Jankélévitch anticipates, by more than ten years, the philosophical gesture of Anscombe and the rise of the contemporary virtue ethics movement. For Jankélévitch, values and duties, far from being hierarchized in harmonious logos, exist scattered and conflicting, clashing with each other in a “shredded firmament.”37 In the same way, one faces the irreducible and

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competitive claims by each and every selfhood insofar as they form a “plural absolute.”38 Given these opposing and incommensurable claims, it is important to identify the meta-empirical and meta-logical impulse of the Good. Neither instinct, nor pleasure, nor happiness, nor utility can form the basis, the motives, or the criteria for morality. Love, as the synthesis and root of all the virtues, is the dynamic and open foundation of ethics, the pneuma—that is, the living spirit or breath of morals. The Good is not an archetype, an ideal model, resulting from a supreme objective value. It is something that must be done (quod), by me and nobody else, here and now; however I am not able to know a priori what to do (quid).39 Furthermore, Good and Doing refer tautologically to one another, for “good is both the thing to do [. . .] and the pneumatic fact of doing it.”40 So, two fundamental aspects must be noted: first, “it is the manner of doing and, specifically, a certain way of well-doing, which is the good”;41 and, second, to do good or to act well is to create the Good. Moral action is demiurgical and poetic improvisation, below and beyond normativity. It is this emphasis on the “manner” and “intention” of doing over of the “matter” of moral action that leads to the idea of “virtue.” In order to comprehend the tone and style of the work, it is worthwhile to dwell on the opening paragraph of the second volume of the Traité: The unconditional imperative, being the commandment of loving the other— this person, this thou facing me—is in some way the synthesis of Quod and Quid, of the form empty of matter and the lack of content. Doing our duty [. . .] is a virtue, and the manner is already a matter [. . .]; the love for the other is rather the hypothetical matter; but as a duty, this manner is also a quodditative materiality and, somehow formal; this virtue-duty is at the same time the form of categorical effectiveness and both the generic and material form of quidditative relations. [. . .] there would be between the relativism of the effort and the absolutism of perfection an “absolute relativity” which is the virtue itself.42

The “law of love” is not only universal and categorical but also concrete, because it is seized by an “I” in the face of a “thou,” which are both effectivities. Love grounds a virtue that imposes itself as a duty, and which answers the question “what should I do?” It is love that allows the overcoming of the antinomy of the matter of acting versus the manner of acting: solving the radical disjunction of quod and quid. There is no virtue without effort, and the purity of intention is an absolute that a consequent will (a will aware of consequences) learns to relativize, by articulating ends and means, in the face of the good that concrete action has been able to achieve. Though the grounding of ethics is below and beyond rules and observances, a strong “deontic” dimension shapes virtue. Neither a catalog of prescriptions

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nor the characterological cast of virtues can determine or exhaust the form and content of this “imperative” dynamics. Duty is superlative and obligation becomes hyperbolic: “since duty is not a definite task, it extends as far as power does: beyond duty there is still and always duty, to infinity.”43 From this, two points follow. First, the task of morality is infinite and could not give way to an “excellence” understood as “perfection” and “fulfillment.” Not only are “moral works” always precarious and insufficient, but, moreover, “what is done is yet to be done!” And second, “[o]ne ought [to do] everything one can,” for everything possible must be realized in the dynamics of a power grafted onto the infinite seed of “will.” “One can [do] everything one wants,” because the “will to will” is the inaugural gesture of all virtue.44 THE VIRTUE(S): BETWEEN INSTANTANEOUS INTENTION AND LASTING DISPOSITION The debate is all about enquiring into whether “there is a Virtue beyond virtuous doing, and a frequent habitus beyond the semelfactive45 performance”46 of the good or right action. In other words, how can a lasting disposition be credited as beginning from an instantaneous intention and an accomplished action? Indeed, “even normalized in habit, virtue is continually miraculous and subsists only in a precarious and almost unsustainable tension of the will.”47 It is a “disappearing-appearance!”48 Jankélévitch criticizes the commonly received notion of virtue as hexis (ἕξις) or habitus. He emphasizes that, even within a teleological process, the traditional notion of virtue—as a steady disposition towards good—can lead to a static, contemplative, and aesthetic conception of morality.49 Jankélévitch criticizes “eudaimonist virtuism,” “virtuous happiness,” and the “majestic temporal excellences.”50 What really matters is not the accomplished perfection or the plenitude of being, but rather “the transitive relation to the law defined in the intention and measured by our effort.”51 In the Latin sense, virtus means “acting according to the laws of [one’s] own nature,” therefore involving neither effort nor ethical deliberation. In Spinoza’s Ethics, virtus is nothing other than essentia, as potentia or potestas efficiendi, as Jankélévitch reminds us.52 Virtue manifests the Conatus as the “endeavor to persevere in [one’s] own being.”53 In St. Thomas, also mentioned by Jankélévitch,54 virtue is the ultimum potentiae, the maximum that humanity can aspire to, that is, the full realization of human possibilities in its natural and supernatural aspects.55 For Jankélévitch, morality is based on a de-ontologized or me-ontological metaphysics: the “ontic minimum” is the condition of the “ethical maximum.”56 Virtue is not about having—in the sense of possessing a property

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or attribute—nor about being, as a force or power that would be a necessary expression of a certain substance. Virtue, for Jankélévitch, exists in the glimpse of the good intention, in its consequent volition and concrete benevolent action, which is to say, in willing and doing. Jankélévitch writes: “Even for Aristotle a moral disposition only becomes virtuous if it exists in act (ἐνέργεια); that is, it is actualized at the time of an event or crisis.”57 If virtues are “principles of action,”58 acts are preferable and we know that the Stagirite’s ethics inherits the metaphysical primacy of enérgeia over dynamis. Also, it is the repeated actions that build up the disposition.59 The act makes the virtue germinate, which, in turn, generates the act that, exercising itself repeatedly, consolidates, roots, and magnifies the virtue. Jankélévitch understands the relation between “act” and “disposition” in the perspective of a “circular causality.” In fact, “the disposition is neither before nor after, but it is given at the same instant as the act in a dynamic synthesis.”60 For Jankélévitch, it seems difficult to admit the stability or chronicity of moral dispositions, the capitalization of merit, or the permanent continuity of certain qualities of the person.61 If a virtue were an aptitude built into personality, a natural tendency, or a learned and stabilized second nature, dried out by habit or automatic behavior, it would involve no effort, and therefore no moral merit—so it would cease to be virtuous. Merit lies in the relation between constant improvement and effort. So, “merit is the inverse ratio of perfection in act, that is, the more the agent is ‘virtuous,’ the less virtuous he is.”62 If virtue turns into an artful virtuosity, that is, a performance skill or a narcissistic excellence set in its own good conscience, then virtue is no longer virtuous. Fragile and precarious, virtue is a volitional movement and the action that arises from it in the instant. But the sudden emergence of virtuous intention and action, this appearance in the moment of the occasion, this improvisational outbreak, cannot lead to a kind of moral instantaneism or phenomenism, as an inability to go beyond the actual instant or given phenomenon.63 Indeed, morality pursues continuity and duration. Instant and interval are the two elements of time. Each instant constitutes the propulsion of duration made of mnemonic retention and prevenient prospection: the instantaneous virtue irradiates or resonates into duration, inaugurates an interval. Jankélévitch says that “[v]irtue involves the principle of time.”64 This means that it involves the duality of the instant and the interval, inherent attributes of becoming, which should be, beyond a disaggregating movement, a fruitful duration. Basically, in order to configure a virtue in the moral subject, the passage from instant to interval should be accomplished. Virtue, in order to exist according to traditional and modern conceptions, should be “chronic.” The “ethical regimen” should be that of virtuous continuity as opposed to “aesthetic intermittency.”65 The “moral life” must be an everyday

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life: the whole of life. But conscience and action are constantly sent back from instant to interval and from interval to instant. Each one is the organobstacle of each other.66 Jankélévitch wants to emphasize the idea of a perpetual renewal, constant commitment and continued effort, for, in fact, in morals nothing is acquired, and everything is to regain and remake anew in each situation. Paradoxically, what is done is, or remains, yet to be done.67 “Intention” and “operation” do not result in stable and reified “moral works” that the agent can contemplate. Moral progression is a constant restart, and virtues are an ideal of continuity, an asymptotic limit made of an infinite discontinuity. The moral life consists of a perpetual impetus and creation against the dissolution of time. VIRTUE AS VIRTUALITY AND VIRTUOSITY Neither “the myth of actual excellence” nor that of “latent potentiality” in a permanent regime seems to satisfy the philosopher of the je-ne-sais-quoi as to the characterization of the nature of virtue(s).68 In man/woman, as a moral agent, the “power-to-be virtuous” is not absolutely guaranteed and never fully actualized in being virtuous. Neither is the chronic disposition assured, nor does the virtuous act consubstantiate a virtuous attribute, nor, by force of reason, is the complete realization of virtue promised. The possibility is only revealed in effectiveness, or the power in the act: virtue is, in the end, an unguaranteed potentiality that only manifests itself in the Kairós of the event. On the one hand, its occasional manifestation is not the actualization of a “power to act” inherent in the subject as a property. Possibility and potentiality are, therefore, distinguished. Moreover, its own phenomenalization in act is not to be confused with the necessary actualization of an already given capacity. This is all the more the case if we remember what was said above: that to act virtuously one simply needs “to want to want-it,” and that one can expect virtue from everyone. On the other hand, this is not about the simple superiority or priority of “actuality” in the Aristotelian sense, because, as we have seen, for Jankélévitch, “in morality, what is done remains to be done,” that is, what matters is the “doing” and not the “already done,” which is always disproportionate compared to the “to-be-done.” The duality of action and potency, possibility and effectiveness, and the link between both need to be discussed here. It is, however, curious to note that Jankélévitch does not use in a consequential way the term “virtual”—much praised by Bergson—to characterize the possibility and/or potentiality of “virtue.” In Bergson’s understanding, there is more in the real than in the possible (which is usually understood as

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a retro-projection of the real in the past as “not impossible” and not yet happened). Against this conception of the possible as “a mirage of the present in the past,”69 Bergson develops the notion of “virtuality.”70 In the relation between the possible and the real, the real must resemble the possible, while in the relation between the virtual and the actual, the actual is originated by differentiation and creation. What is virtual, when actualization occurs, increases the real. The notion of virtuality then allows us to conceive the potentiality beyond the idea of the “preformation” of the “non-impossible.” Virtue as a virtuality can emerge beyond formal or material possibility inherent in human habits, character, or well-trained skill. Beyond normativity, ethics is a field of creative action and “it is the very mystery of creation to operate in the void and in the nothing of any property.”71 Virtue implies ethical creation: inspiration and improvisation. Thus, virtue is a particular form of non-aesthetic and non-complaisant virtuosity, one which seeks the good between the dissensions of norms, the dispersion of duties, and the incommensurability of values. Intentional impetus does not make duty a forced movement but a “grace.” It is the “grace” of “miraculous supernaturality” that levitates upon the gravity of selfish inclinations. Paradoxically, this does not imply any particular skill or special competence. Anyone who really wants to act rightly and do the good can, from the “will to will,” do so. Moral virtuosity is within the reach of everyone who struggles against the inertia and compactness of selfishness. FROM VIRTUES TO “PURE LOVE” AS A REGULATIVE IDEA The movement of Jankélévitch’s morals is played out in the transition from “judicial Logos” to “pure love,” where rational ethics gives rise to the asymmetry and disproportion of charity and sacrifice. It is not an ethic of the “happy medium,” “golden mean,” or proportionality, reasonableness, and comfort that arises out of “practical reasoning,” but rather an extremist and maximalist ethics.72 However, Jankélévitch does not propose a “moral of sentiment” because the “love” that is at issue here is all in the realm of Doing and Creation, rather than affectivity. Jankélévitch portrays an ethical use of love—love as a virtue. The motto is succinct and clear: “The law of the Good [. . .] is of the order of love,”73 and “love is the truth and the life of all virtues.”74 Love “commands what to do and says that I am the one that must do it, right now.”75 The loving inspiration thus solves the above formulated a​ poria between the quod and quid of morality. Indeed, the “only unconditional imperative, sufficient and categorical,”76 simultaneously formal and material, relative and absolute, is

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the “commandment to love the Other, this person, the thou facing me.”77 Love is the source of good and the inspiration that gives meaning and pneumatic unity to the table of virtues: courage, fidelity, sincerity, humility, and equity are nothing without love. Love is the source, the pneumatic unity and corollary, of all the virtues. In this sense, it is the “virtue in all virtues.” But what kind of love is this? It is a disinterested and unmotivated love. Jankélévitch takes as his ultimate reference, regulating or limit ideal, the “pure love” of François Fenelon, which means: The love of God for himself without reference to our beatitude; its impetus is due to its asymmetry and non-reciprocity, that is, to the graciousness and unilaterality of the relation that, in uniting the creature to the absolutely-Other, prevents the adipose degeneration of the ego.78

From this perspective, the “I of love” rarefies itself, the lover (loving subject) strips him or herself back in true ecstasy.79 Indeed, “self-esteem is not the center of diffusion of benevolence” nor is philautia the condition of the love of others.80 This love is gracious—absolutely disinterested and miraculous; it is supernatural, superrational, and maximalist—moving the entire soul; it is extremist—that is, it can be taken to the extreme of self-sacrifice. Love as a virtue is selfless, it does not expect any rewards, it lives in selfforgetfulness, in a free and gracious spontaneity without depending on any reciprocity. Love qua virtue, distinct from desire, esteem, admiration, is unmotivated. It does not seek for reasons in any kind of value, or justify itself in terms of the qualities of the Other. It is oriented toward the unique and unrepeatable selfhood, to the ipseity of the person. It aims at the pure “fact or act of Being” of the “other” as “thou,” that is, the “superlative near-far” beyond all predication and adjectivation.81 This ultimate dignity and supreme value of human ipseity—absolutely universal and yet absolutely unique and priceless—allows one to ground an ethics in love, because, from the perspective of the ipseity—absolutely unique and yet absolutely universal—everyone deserves to be loved in the same unconditional love. Virtue arises from an élan of charity against the inertia and the compactness of the ego, an ecstatic movement of gift and renunciation of the “I” before the “thou,” in an unconditional abnegation which has its maximum limit in the sacrifice of one’s own life. The loving subject must show lightness and rarefaction to become a pure, heterocentric movement and a loving intentionality. Therefore, it is the “minimum of being” that gives birth to the “maximum of love.” That is to say that the “ontical minimum” is the condition of “ethical maximum.”82

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THE CONSEQUENT INTENTION OR THE MEDIATIZATION OF THE INSTANT Jankélévitch, in his Traité, keeps exploring forms of virtue that respond both to the instant—like courage—and the interval—like fidelity. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that the miracle of “pure love,” superlative, extremist, and maximalist, happens only as the fulguration of an instant that is a “disappearingappearance.” The “wholly-other-order” of the ordo amoris is only given in the spurting spark of a gnostic, fleeting glimpse (entrevision) and in a drastic, purifying conversion.83 However, the cutting edge of this graceful fulguration irradiates the entirety of duration and echoes or reflects itself in remembrance and hope. The infinitesimal and imponderable grace of the virtuous “instant” spreads over the duration and gravity of the “interval.” The pulsating instant propels and at the same time weaves the continuity of the “becoming.” This “virtue ethics” focuses neither on the perfection of the agent nor on a fascination with the work performed. Since “moral works” are precarious, always unfinished or incessantly to be remade, since complacency perverts the agent and merit is never capitalized, everything rests on “intention.” As an “acute and precise movement of the will,” intention is good or bad immediately, in a prevenient, categorical, and non-hypothetical way.84 Jankélévitch is precise: “Intention is the living soul and root of all excellence, which radiates value, and makes virtues virtuous.”85 It is necessarily recognized that the whole tragedy of morality results from the tension and disproportion between intention and act. However, it is the “intention” that launches the “must-do,” and the “intentional future” is the time of morality par excellence.86 Something is, however, central: the ethics of intention is neither frivolous, nor angelic, nor is the morality inspired by pure love “purist.”87 The “good will,” although moved and decreed by a “will to will,” is not a “Platonic vague desire” but, instead, it is a “serious intent” that does not slip into a “purism of ends-without-means.” Although propelled by the virtuous instant, it aims immediately, through the duration, and therefore assumes mediation: the paradoxical, but realistic, commitment of the “organ-obstacle.” The will must be “consequent”: “whoever wants the ends wants the means ante finem, and accepts post-finem all the consequences of one’s decision.”88 Herein lies the “infernal aporia” of moral becoming: to assume the necessary means to an end is to experience the trial of the concessions of the “lesser evil” as a “necessary evil” to the realization of the Good.89 CONCLUSION The moral philosophy of Jankélévitch—based on love as a virtue—is, by all accounts, paradoxical and challenging. If being is about the “interval,” and

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acting is about the “instant,” then the entirety of the dilemma of “virtue” is about living in that oscillatory tension. Such tension is the unstable metaphysical junction of ethics with ontology. There is no reliable “disposition” without the perpetual renewal of concrete intentions and effective actions. Moreover, a “virtue” is always a virtual virtuosity—based not on a specific and developed skill but upon moral initiative and creativity, and sustained by the “will to will.” Written between 1937 and 1946, published in 1949, the Traité des vertus anticipates by more than a decade the debate launched by Anscombe, and, at the same time, it foreshadows and resolves some of the usual criticisms of contemporary virtue ethics. Paradoxically, it settles the tripartite division of normative ethics: it searches for virtue without being eudaimonist, it pays attention to the consequences of actions without being utilitarian, and it is deontological—with a self-imposing “law of love.” NOTES 1. Funded by Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (F.C.T. SFRH/BD/92466/2013). I am grateful to Prof. Andrew Kelley for the patient reading and generous review of this chapter. 2. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Quelque part dans l’inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 110. Unless stated otherwise, the translations of direct quotes from Jankélévitch are all mine. 3. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale (Paris: Seuil, 1989). 4. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1966), 127. 5. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II: Les vertus et l´amour, vol. 1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 32. 6. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19. 7. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 8. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience. 9. Also, A. Philonenko alludes to “a phenomenological description of moral consciousness” in Jankélévitch. Alexis Philonenko, Jankélévitch: un système de l’éthique concrète (Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2011), 174–75. 10. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Virtue Ethics, eds. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 30, 40. 11. Following António de Castro Caeiro’s proposed translation. Cf. Aristóteles, Ética a Nicómaco, trans. António de Castro Caeiro (Lisboa: Quetzal, 2015), 15 passim. 12. Michael Slote, “Virtue Ethics and Moral Sentimentalism,” in The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, ed. Stan Van Hooft (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 53–63. 13. Rosalind Hursthouse, “Normative Virtue Ethics,” How Should One Live? ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 19.

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14. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I: Le sérieux de l’intention (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 218. 15. Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale, 123. 16. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus III: L’Innocence et la méchanceté (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 405. 17. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 15–16. 18. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 167–68. 19. Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009), 8–9. 20. “The intention is the virtue surprised at its birth.” Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 194. 21. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 135. 22. I here mobilize the distinction established by Thomas Hurka, “Virtuous Act, Virtuous Dispositions,” Analysis 66, no. 1 (2006): 69–70. 23. Gopal Sreenivasan, “The Situationist Critique of Virtue Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed. Daniel C. Russel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 290–311. 24. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 184–85. 25. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Le pardon,” in Philosophie Morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 998; see also: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 26. Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 525–28. 27. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 117–18. 28. Section “Devenir ce qu’on est” of Traité des vertus II, 233–43. 29. Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale, 58–59; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 32. 30. Jankélévitch, Quelque part dans l’inachevé, 79. 31. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Une vie en toutes lettres (Paris: Lia Levi, 1995), 177. 32. Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy; Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Annas, Intelligent Virtue. 33. These are, respectively, Michael Slote, Linda Zagzebski, Christine Swanton, Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence C. Becker. See Glen Pettigrove, “Alternatives to NeoAristotelian Virtue Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virtue, ed. Nancy E. Snow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 359–76. 34. Christine Swanton, “The Definition of Virtue Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed. Daniel C. Russel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 337. 35. Ibid., 334. 36. Ibid., 331. 37. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus III, 18–19; Le Paradoxe de la morale, 155. 38. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus III, 19. 39. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 219. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.

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42. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 7. 43. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 130. 44. Ibid. 45. Something that only happens once. 46. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus III, 5. 47. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 124. 48. Ibid. 49. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 12. 50. Ibid., 8. 51. Ibid., 9. 52. Ibid., 183. 53. Definition VIII, Part IV, Proposition XX, and its demonstration. Bento de Espinosa, Ética (Lisboa: Relógio d´ Água, 1992), 360, 378. 54. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 183–84. 55. Josef Pieper, On Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 25. 56. Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale, 118. 57. Ibid., 11. 58. Aristóteles, Ética a Eudemo, trans. António Amaral e Artur Morão (Lisboa: Tribuna da História, 2005), 1220a7. 59. Aristóteles, Ética a Nicómaco, trans. António de Castro Caeiro (Lisboa: Quetzal, 2015), 1103a34. 60. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 54. 61. Ibid., 17. 62. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 126. 63. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’austérité et la vie morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1956), 176. 64. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 32. 65. Ibid., 12–15. 66. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux (Paris: Flammarion, 2016), 144–47. 67. Cf. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 125–26. 68. Cf. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 14, 17. 69. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant: essais et conférences (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), 111. 70. Gilles Deleuze, Le bergsonisme (Paris: PUF, 2004), 100. 71. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 140. 72. Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale, 5. 73. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 265. 74. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 7. 75. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 265. 76. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 7. 77. Ibid., 349. 78. Ibid., 201. 79. Ibid., 200. 80. Ibid., 188.

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81. Ibid., 208. 82. Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale, 119. 83. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II, 239–42; Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Pur et l’Impur (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), 284–91. 84. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 194, 212. 85. Ibid., 213. 86. Ibid., 180. 87. Jankélévitch, Le Pur et l’Impur, 234–35. 88. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 201; Le Pur et l’Impur, 90–94. 89. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 209.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Annas, Julia. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University, 2009. ———. “Virtue Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, edited by David Copp, 515–36. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Anscombe, G. E. M. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19. ———. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” In Virtue Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, 26–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Aristóteles. Ética a Eudemo. Translated by António Amaral and Artur Morão. Lisboa: Tribuna da História, 2005. ———. Ética a Nicómaco. Translated by António de Castro Caeiro. Lisboa: Quetzal, 2015. Crisp, Roger and Slote, Michael, ed. Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Espinosa, Bento de. Ética. Lisboa: Relógio d´ Água, 1992. Foot, Philippa. Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Hurka, Thomas. “Virtuous Act, Virtuous Dispositions.” Analysis 66, no. 1 (2006): 69–76. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ———. “Normative Virtue Ethics.” In How Should One Live? edited by Roger Crisp, 19–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’Aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux. Paris: Flammarion, 2016. ———. The Bad Conscience. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. La Mauvaise Conscience. Paris: Aubier, 1986. ———. Le Paradoxe de la morale. Paris: Seuil, 1989. ———. “Le Pardon.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch: Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab, 991–1149. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. ———. Philosophie première. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986.

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———. Le Pur et l’impur. Paris: Flammarion, 1993. ———. Quelque Part dans l’inachevé. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. ———. Traité des vertus I: Le Sérieux de l’intention. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 2. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Traité des vertus III: L’Innocence et la méchanceté. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Une Vie en toutes lettres: correspondance. Paris: Lia Levi, 1995. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Pettigrove, Glen. “Alternatives to Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Virtue, edited by Nancy E. Snow, 359–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Philonenko, Alexis. Jankélévitch: un système de l’éthique concrète. Paris: Editions du Sandre, 2011. Pieper, Josef. On Hope. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. Slote, Michael. “Agent-based Virtue Ethics.” In Virtue Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, 239–62. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. ———. “Virtue Ethics and Moral Sentimentalism.” In The Handbook of Virtue Ethics, edited by Stan Van Hooft, 53–63. Durham: Acumen, 2014. Sreenivasan, Gopal. “The Situationist Critique of Virtue Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by Daniel Russel, 290–311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ———. “The Definition of Virtue Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by Daniel C. Russel, 315–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Chapter 3

“I can’t beat it” Dimensions of the Bad Conscience in Manchester by the Sea1 Marguerite La Caze

In this chapter, I read Vladimir Jankélévitch’s work on the bad conscience and forgiveness beside the film Manchester by the Sea,2 a meditation on remorse and the difficulty of self-forgiveness in the person of Lee Chandler (played by Casey Affleck), a man who lives a monastic life as a janitor in Boston, after the tragic death of his three children in a house fire.3 Many discussions of the film so far have focused on its depictions of despair and grief, aspects of it that are certainly important.4 However, a focus on grief neglects the ethical dimensions of the film that Jankélévitch’s intense articulations of the solitary character of remorse and of the offering of forgiveness can highlight. His accounts demonstrate the immense complexity of self-forgiveness and the difficulty of accepting the generous forgiveness of others, even in situations where the tragedy that has occurred is not the result of a deliberate, intentional, action. The drama of the moral life Jankélévitch explores is enacted in this film.5 Lee’s remorse dwells in the irreversibility of time and the irrevocability of our acts that Jankélévitch explains, and goes further in being a remorse that cannot be overcome. The film also enables us to question features of Jankélévitch’s view: that we can undo the consequences of our act or deed, and that self-forgiveness is a conceptual impossibility, rather than sometimes an existential one. I consider how Manchester by the Sea examines the bad conscience through the experience of one person’s incapacity to forgive himself despite the forgiveness of others. First, I briefly discuss a crucial distinction Jankélévitch makes between deed and action and how it reflects on the film.

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ACT OR DEED AND ACTION (INTENTION) IN JANKÉLÉVITCH Jankélévitch makes a strong distinction in The Bad Conscience between an act or deed and an action that is defined by its intentions. He argues that we can undo the consequences of our act, but we cannot undo the action itself: [I]f the misdeed itself is repressed into what is non-actual, even if this would only be because all the consequences are reparable and all its traces are erasable, the fact of having committed it, itself, is incurable, unforgettable, and dependent on a free initiative of our responsibility; the act is bygone, but the action which is to the act like the intention is to the work . . . the action is the imperishable and incurable element of remorse.6

He continues this line of thought in Forgiveness, where he describes action as the “ethical spark of the intention and a metaphysical knot that we could call the quoddity {thatness} of the misdeed.”7 For Jankélévitch, it is this aspect of what has happened in the case of a wrong that cannot be undone, unlike the material consequences, although he concedes that “[t]he victims of the infamy will not come back to life.”8 The distinction is perhaps exaggerated, since very few acts can be reversed or properly repaired, and much of what we do seems to sit between an intended action and an accidental or negligent deed. In fact, Jankélévitch himself seems to take negligent acts as swept up into the realm of action, when he says that “we readily declare as irresponsible whoever does evil without knowing it” and that “I am wrong for being unaware.”9 As we can see, this complexity between act and action is what propels Lee or rather keeps him from “moving on”—that he did not deliberately will evil is no comfort to him. While Lee has not had an evil intention or willed an action, he has done something that cannot be undone, cannot be repaired, either in its consequences or in itself. There is even an element of egotism in his action or recklessness in getting so drunk when his partner and children are trying to sleep. While he did not do anything deliberately to harm them, his acts (and omissions) were what lead to the children’s deaths.10 We see in a searing flashback that after having a loud party with friends, he heads off to a local store to buy more beer, not checking that the fireguard is in place to protect the open fire from setting the house alight. When he returns the worst has already happened: all three small children, two young girls, and a baby boy are dead and only Randi (played by Michelle Williams), his partner, survives the fire. Is Lee right not to forgive himself or is his an “obsessive remorse” that Jankélévitch refers to,11 a sign of a character flaw, like that of Lord Jim?12 In the next section I will consider this question of self-forgiveness.

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REMORSE AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF SELF-FORGIVENESS FOR LEE Self-forgiveness and the accompanying experiences of atonement and redemption are shown in Manchester by the Sea to be impossible for Lee Chandler to take up by looking after his sixteen-year-old nephew Patrick after the death of his brother Joe. Lee was shocked to find that his brother had appointed him as Patrick’s guardian in his will. The film follows his struggle with the idea and finally Lee uses the phrase “I can’t beat it” to explain why he will not adopt Patrick. He cannot beat the “it” that is his remorse and overcome the irreversible event of the death of his children. The film portrays his remorse through his actions, his reactions to events, and through music, played in a muffled sound to convey his state of mind after the tragedy. The filming of the town itself, mostly in winter, also portrays Lee’s frozen state. In his account, Jankélévitch identifies remorse and the bad conscience, which is not a response to an external law: “[i]t is the crime itself that is our torture.”13 Conscience is a kind of latent sanction that reveals itself after an unjust action, telling us “what should have been done.”14 Jankélévitch distinguishes conscience from a “moral sense” by its post-facto character. Conscience appears to resemble a moral sense when we anticipate and contemplate the bad deed. Remorse has to be distinguished from nostalgia and regret, as they involve a desire to relive something from the past, whereas remorse means the painful sensation of not being able to undo what we have done.15 For Jankélévitch, regret is a form of desire, for something of the past, although that aspect makes them dissymmetrical; regret is “but a timid remorse.”16 The pain of remorse is all-enveloping and consuming, taking over our lives. In his minute description of remorse, Jankélévitch isolates its phenomenological character of gnawing, burning, and haunting as the feeling of “sinning continually” and reliving the past.17 This describes Lee’s state, in which he cannot allow himself to enjoy life or a new relationship or even to fully experience resentment against the tenants who complain about his “attitude” as a janitor. Lee’s character is also more complex, in that his anger in beating people up in bars appears to reveal a sense in which he blames the world as well as himself.18 Instead of self-forgiveness, Lee practices self-punishment. After the fire, Lee is interviewed by the police and we see the scene of what occurred. The police release him following his confession of drunkenness and negligence, on the assumption that the forensics will support his story. He says “Is that all? Are you just going to let me go?” and they say “We’re not going to crucify you.”19 This comment expresses the police’s judgment that Lee is excused: he did not intend the fire, it was a “horrible mistake” that anyone could make, and the loss of his children is suffering enough. As Lee is leaving

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the police station, he grabs a gun from one of the police officers to kill himself, but they wrest it from him. His attempt could be interpreted as simply a desire to end his suffering, but at that stage his seeming disappointment at not being arrested suggests a concern for punishment. Instead of being punished by the state, he moves to Boston and creates his own jail and sentence, living in a spartan basement room, and working as a janitor. He cannot return to the innocence of life before the tragedy. There is one wonderful flashback to Lee and Randi’s earlier life in the film, where we see the happiness and love of their life together. It is a portrait of absolute love. Lee returns, slightly drunk, from a fishing trip, and greets the children and Randi. Randi is sick in bed, flicking through a magazine, and keeps trying to push Lee away, telling him to take a shower. He takes the baby out of the crib to cuddle him, against Randi’s protests, and calls the baby “handsome.”20 This portrait shows all that was lost in the fire, their close connection, the love between all of them, and is a sign of the depth of Lee’s character. This scene in the film implicitly connects the capacity for love with the capacity for remorse. Jankélévitch hints at this connection in The Bad Conscience, saying that “love [. . .] is the soul of virtuous inspiration,”21 and, quoting Verlaine, that “remorse is in love.”22 He also compares the suffering of remorse with pure love “in that they are both as useless as they are disproportionate to their causes.”23 By useless, he does not imply meaningless, but rather that they do not fit into any kind of utilitarian calculation. Remorse and love are not grounded in each other for Jankélévitch, but they are analogous: “[I]s there not a profound analogy between attentive charity, which anticipates all the reappearances of scruples, and attentive conversion, which alone renders possible the conscious reappearances of repenting?”24 This singular scene, seemingly without point, represents what Jankélévitch calls “the exceptional unicity and semelfactivity of every occasion.”25 The semelfactivity is that of what took place only once cannot be repeated or returned to—that family, that laugh, that cozy room, and that afternoon. As Jankélévitch argues, time is irreversible and Lee’s entire life is altered by what happened.26 Lee continues to punish himself and to refuse to start life up again, either by starting a new relationship or by becoming his nephew’s guardian.27 He is truly living in the hell of remorse Jankélévitch describes.28 After the fire, he is burnt by remorse, as Jankélévitch says, “[a]ll the burn and all that is incurable of remorse lie in the impossibility of integrating that which we cannot, however, renounce.”29 For Lee, he cannot think of what happened without pain or as part of life. He is both frozen, like the winter ground, and burning with pain. Lee feels, as Jankélévitch thinks we ought, remorse even though he did not have a wrong intention, but was negligent. Jankélévitch writes: “I am not wrong for harming, but I am wrong for being unaware, wrong for being myself.”30 In The Bad Conscience, he argues that

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the pain of remorse will strike us even in these situations, and will need to be faced with the same possibility of a moral conversion and the same acceptance of the pain. Jankélévitch also maintains that remorse is something that affects our whole self, as shame is thought to,31 and so Lee cannot put what he has done in the past and separate it from who he is now. Furthermore, Lee is not seeking redemption for himself or forgiveness from others through his actions. While he is not punished for his negligence, he feels the full force of his failure as part of who he is. That aspect of his former character is portrayed in his loud, reckless partying on the night of the fire. Moreover, the stultifying community Lee grew up in seems to share his self-condemnation. When he applies for a job working with old acquaintances, one says to the other: “[d]on’t let me see that man in here again.” It is not entirely clear whether they believe he is guilty of his children’s deaths, or whether it is the fights he frequently picks in bars that have turned them against him, or both. Whatever the explanation, he is a pariah to most of the community, which, it is implied, will never forgive him. Lee, for his part, accepts their view of him, although his occasional drunken bursts of aggression might suggest otherwise. Another feature of Lee’s existence is that he cannot be threatened; he has suffered the worst that life has to offer, so there is nothing that can be taken away. When his boss at the apartment block threatens him for arguing with the tenants, his reaction is an almost bored indifference. Equally, Lee cannot be tempted; the film toys with us through a shot of his face as he overhears the tenant whose tap he is fixing confiding to a friend how she thinks she is in love with him. The look on his face is hard to read: Is he amused, interested, repelled? When we gather that the friend advises her against a relationship with a janitor, advice she accepts, we see no change in his expression. Then it becomes clear that Lee is indifferent. Even the news of his brother Joe’s death does not seem to affect him in the way it affects others. He calmly begins to make the arrangements for the funeral; but we also see his tears over his brother’s body. Lee could be seen as like Jankélévitch’s man of uncertainty, who is present qua passive spectator in the unfolding of the film.32 The severity of Lee’s judgment of himself is upheld by Jankélévitch’s description of how we understand ourselves: “If indulgence is often more comprehensive than rigor is with regard to the Other, then it is not the same with regard to oneself: It is rigor that is lucid and scrupulous, and indulgence that is complaisant and approximating.”33 Lee’s rigorous self-laceration seems to be endorsed here. Jankélévitch shares Lee’s view concerning self-forgiveness, although for different reasons. He does not believe that we can forgive ourselves, because forgiveness is something that must be offered to another. Lee’s claim that “[h] e can’t beat it” could suggest that he would like to beat “it” (his remorse) and

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is unable to. However, the film implies rather that he does not find himself to merit or deserve the measure of peace that self-forgiveness might bring. Only a renunciation of love, happiness, and luxury will do. On Jankélévitch’s account, self-forgiveness is a kind of conceptual and psychological impossibility, whereas for Lee, the impossibility is existential, even though what happened was not a deliberate act on his part. The argument Jankélévitch gives for the impossibility of self-forgiveness is that forgiveness must involve two people. He writes: “[T]rue forgiveness, which is at the margins of all legality, is a gracious gift from the offended to the offender. True forgiveness is a personal relation with another person.”34 Jankélévitch describes remorse as an intimacy with the self that cannot be escaped.35 Therefore, on his account, Lee’s non-forgiveness, at least in the beginning, makes sense: his self-relation lies in his suffering remorse. In The Bad Conscience, Jankélévitch suggests that forgiveness, a gift to the other, may play some role in the moral conversion through remorse and he says that moral forgetting, to forgive something of ourselves, is “a most difficult art.”36 However, in Forgiveness, he argues that forgiveness does not involve “decay through time, intellective excuse, and liquidation.”37 The first is forgetting, the second looking for mitigating circumstances, and the third is a kind of Nietzschean setting aside. Instead, forgiveness is a kind of “miracle.”38 So self-forgiveness is not just difficult, but impossible. For Jankélévitch, temporal forgiveness or forgetting is able to ward off the problem of rancor, but only in a superficial way,39 and the film challenges the ease of forgiveness in its relation to remorse. Clearly for him, such forgetting would not be a true forgiveness that must relate to the other. The only way out for the remorseful is through that moral conversion followed by repenting and penitence,40 which is not precisely self-forgiveness but is a kind of redemption and transformation. I will consider that possibility further on in my paper. The remorse is itself a sign of moral conversion, what Jankélévitch calls a “beneficial pain,” like a fever needed to recover from an illness.41 Lee has changed in some ways. We see a kind of care that was not there before the tragedy, a fear of another accident, when for instance, Patrick almost gets out of the car while it is moving, or when he falls asleep but is woken by the smell of food burning. However, a possibility that Jankélévitch does not discuss is that of a remorse that cannot and perhaps should not be overcome, a wound that never heals, which is evident in Lee’s experience. While time is an essential element in atonement “for the misdeed that was committed” as for forgiveness,42 time alone is not enough and is not enough for Lee.43 Nor can he excuse himself or put aside his remorse—even the simulacra of forgiveness are not available to him. Jankélévitch, however, does not think we must dwell in suffering remorse; he argues instead that if “the desperate person [. . .] is

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sufficiently sincere, [he] spontaneously redeems himself all alone.”44 But Lee is not searching for redemption, he is just going on living. Jankélévitch also suggests that “the goal of the repentant person is certainly not to love but to be reconciled with himself.”45 But even this more modest goal seems too strong to describe Lee’s attitude to himself. The implacability of his remorse can be seen even more clearly if we consider the offering of forgiveness from the one person whose forgiveness must matter most, Randi’s. RANDI’S GIFT OF FORGIVENESS The possibility of forgiveness is allowed in Jankélévitch’s work, although it has to be of a very specific kind, and I will consider how Randi’s forgiveness of Lee relates to his conception. What Lee has done is not unforgiveable; in some sense it could have happened to anyone; he just did not check that the fire had a screen in front of it before he went to the late-night store. Nevertheless, his carelessness has the irreversible and irrevocable nature of an action or a “hapax”—a unique event. Their three children and their former life are irreplaceable, and time cannot be reversed. As Jankélévitch notes, “The loss of one of these irreplaceable persons is no better compensated twenty years after his disappearance than the day itself when it happened.”46 Their loss leaves a void and leaves us inconsolable. Randi’s new baby Dylan from her second marriage, who Lee dutifully admires when they meet, does not replace the children they have lost or erase the loss that they share as parents. The two types of forgiveness discussed in The Bad Conscience are negative forgiveness, which is to excuse evil, and positive forgiveness, which “comes from the heart,” acknowledges the wrong, and is a form of charity or love for the individual.47 The person suffering from remorse experiencing a “relative purity of the impure is to remain a sincere and suffering bad conscience of the bad impulse and thus to merit a forgiveness for which it would not have sought.”48 In Forgiveness, true forgiveness for Jankélévitch is an event, a gracious gift, and a personal relation with another.49 He argues that negative or impure forgiveness is forgetting, excuse, or self-healing (liquidation), as I explained in the previous section. Because Jankélévitch does not believe that we are virtuous once and for all, we are also not condemned forever by our misdeeds.50 He conceives of this pure forgiveness as “a forgiveness-limit that is a hyperbolic forgiveness and that forgives without reason.”51 The view of forgiveness advocated is extreme, in that he goes further than, for example, Jacques Derrida,52 in separating forgiveness and justice by arguing that forgiveness “renounces justice itself!,”53 whereas Derrida argues that we must negotiate between unconditional and conditional forgiveness.54 Jankélévitch

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sees remorse as more harsh than justice; it punishes more severely, it “is utterly unjust” and consists in “excessive torments” as in Lee’s case.55 Furthermore, forgiveness is beyond justice, as it means that a person could forgive regardless of legal justice. Nevertheless, remorse and forgiveness have a relationship to each other, as I will clarify. Randi’s forgiveness is this kind of genuine forgiveness, first, because she has been through the period of rancor necessary to forgiveness before coming back to love.56 It also exhibits the other features of forgiveness, which is not total self-abnegation: “Forgiveness simply asks us, where an offense is concerned, to renounce spite, passionate aggression, and the vindictive temptation, and where sin is concerned, it asks us to renounce sanctions, tit-for-tat considerations, and the most legitimate exigencies of justice.”57 Now I will describe how Randi’s forgiveness is an event, a loving gift, and a relation to the other. Only a forgiveness that is equally an event rather than a disposition can match the action and the loss, Jankélévitch argues.58 While the film does not show us the moral conversion of Randi, the moment of forgiveness, we can infer that it has occurred; it shows it in an elliptical fashion. Although Lee cannot forgive himself, we then see that Randi is finally able to forgive him. It is a forgiveness that cannot be fully accepted even though it is genuine. The first scene involving Randi does not involve her screen presence: we only hear her voice when she calls to ask Lee’s permission to attend Joe’s funeral. He agrees, and we hear her “Thank you. Thank you,” which is clipped and short yet somehow full of emotion. Her forgiveness is present before it is seen in their accidental meeting on the street some time later.59 Jankélévitch ties forgiveness to love, saying that love “is [. . .] the soul of virtuous inspiration”60 and we can see that in Randi’s response to Lee when she encounters him. Forgiveness and love are not identical, although we might come to love someone we forgive or forgive someone we love more easily: “[f]orgiveness is gratuitous like love, even though it itself neither is love nor inevitably changes into love.”61 Forgiveness implies a charitable relation to the other. Randi tells Lee that she loves him, although she says, “maybe I shouldn’t say that” and asks him if they could ever have lunch. “Lunch” is a word laden with the burden of her love for him; she cannot ask him to get back with her, so it acts as a substitute for all her unfulfilled and unfulfillable hopes. He responds first with “You mean us, you and me?” Lee’s response to her overture is that he does not think so—they cannot have lunch—and that he has to go—“I gotta go”—and that “there’s nothing there.” Randi denies his claim: “That’s not true” as she can see something in Lee that he cannot see in himself. She is also remorseful for the way that she treated Lee after the death of their children, saying “I should burn in hell for what I said to you,” which we can interpret as her own request for forgiveness. And she begs him not

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to “just die,” which he denies he is doing. Even though Randi has remarried and had another child, she still loves him. And while Lee does not respond by saying he loves her, he does respond to her “maybe I shouldn’t say that” with “you can say that,” and thanks her for everything that she said and says that he wants her to be happy. It is not really an acceptance of her forgiveness, but it is not a total repudiation either. Randi’s forgiveness of Lee is not the false forgiveness Jankélévitch outlines of forgetting, excusing him, or setting aside what he did.62 Her love enables her to see Lee beyond the tragedy and she offers him her forgiveness as a gratuitous gift in saying that she loves him.63 His self-denial could have played a role in that forgiveness, with Randi seeing his remorse and how he has punished himself. But Randi does not necessarily know about that—the basement room he originally furnished like a prison cell, the humiliating treatment by his boss, or his rejection of all attempts to flirt with or seduce him. Instead of bargaining for forgiveness, Lee lives with his remorse alone, while Randi offers forgiveness as it should be, “grace is offered uniquely to those who have not sought it out.”64 Jankélévitch sees this approach to forgiveness as the true moral one. Randi’s forgiveness also has what Jankélévitch calls the third mark of forgiveness, after the event and love, of being a personal relation to the other, not her own healing, which her remarriage and new child are separate from.65 Randi’s forgiveness exemplifies the forgiveness Jankélévitch prefers: “[f]orgiveness forgives the guilty person even though he is guilty, precisely because he is guilty, because at bottom and in the last analysis he maybe is innocent, and all of this contradictorily and at the same time!”66 In the film she never utters the words “I forgive you,” because she does not need to; her statement, “I love you” is enough.67 For Jankélévitch “[t]he word of grace is often pronounced in silence”; forgiveness can be expressed in tears, a smile, a flutter of the eyelids, or a kiss.68 Randi’s tears when they meet express her forgiveness as well as her suffering. The personal forgiveness articulated by Jankélévitch that can be expressed in these ways is in contrast to public or political forgiveness, which could be performed as a speech act.69 Furthermore, Randi’s forgiveness is in opposition to the unforgiving view of the townsfolk of Manchester-by-the-sea, even though as the person who has suffered the loss of her children, it is her prerogative to forgive or not forgive. As Jankélévitch says, “[T]he one forgiving has need of all his courage in order to sacrifice not a part of his possessions but his being itself, and even more to brave social taboos, to challenge the duty to punish, and to support himself in so-called moral dilemmas.”70 Loving the “wicked” ex, betraying her new marriage, and the view that she should ostracize him like her peers are all social taboos that Randi braves.

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Moreover, Randi’s forgiveness fulfills another aspect of Jankélévitch’s account that relates remorse and forgiveness without making them dependent on each other. In fact, according to him, while forgiveness should not seek to redeem or transform the other, equally the remorseful should not seek forgiveness. As he puts it “[t]here is then a relation between forgiveness and the transfiguration of the guilty person, just as there is a relation between moral shame and redemption: but this relation does not need to be devised; and this relation is entirely undeliberated and indirect.”71 Lee does not seek Randi’s forgiveness or try to be redeemed by her, and she does not try to transform him, she just offers her forgiveness. Her love is extended unilaterally, which Jankélévitch believes shows its merit, because “when love is asymmetrical there is an additional chance that we are dealing with a disinterested lover.”72 His way of seeing it is that forgiveness is not a change of mind; rather it is a complete change in “the whole orientation of our relations.”73 For Randi, it is a different relation to Lee, to the deaths of their children, to the views of those around her, and even to her second husband. It is to see Lee in a different light, rather than to excuse him for what he did. However, instead of fully accepting the forgiveness offered by Randi and being transformed by it, Lee gets drunk and again lashes out at others in a bar. There is none of the “joy” of forgiveness or consumption of remorse and despair in their exchange.74 It does not break “the enclosure of remorse” or posit “the foundations of a new era.”75 In this sense Randi’s forgiveness fails: it does not save a lost soul or revive the dead person, in Jankélévitch’s haunting metaphors.76 Instead Lee makes us see Jankélévitch’s description of remorse rings true: “remorse is a monologue and a solitary rumination: the prostrated sinner stagnates in his own past and holds a grudge against himself, and depends only on himself.”77 Lee’s own reaction to the meeting with Randi is what brings about his final decision not to become Patrick’s guardian. Lee certainly does not seek forgiveness from anyone, least of all Randi. But is Lee wrong not to properly accept Randi’s forgiveness? It could be a case of ingratitude, as Jankélévitch suggests can sometimes be the situation.78 However, it seems like Lee cannot wholeheartedly accept her forgiveness because he cannot forgive himself.79 This is so even though Randi’s forgiveness in relation to their shared loss is and must be the key to Lee’s possibility of self-forgiveness. Even Jankélévitch suggests that forgetting must come when he says that “forgetting is an unyielding process” and that consolation is “ineluctable”; it will “sooner or later [. . .] console the inconsolable.”80 However, at least in the course of the film, Lee cannot be consoled. While Jankélévitch is discussing the possibility of forgetting the affronts of others, he is not considering that remorse for one’s own action does not necessarily become “parrotry and drivel” over time.81 Lee’s holding on to remorse is not a front he puts on for others, not obsessive in that way, but a deeply felt pain that he tries to hide from others.

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Does Lee forgive Randi for what she said to him? He still thinks of her as his wife, since he refers to her that way and then corrects himself, saying “my ex-wife,” when stating that she needs to be contacted about Joe’s death. We could infer from this slip and other hints that Lee feels the same way about Randi, that he still loves her, but cannot enjoy this, even to the extent of having lunch, as she suggests. However, there is a sense in which the encounter with Randi “unfreezes” his emotions, as we see him sobbing in the arms of George’s partner the next morning. In considering forgiveness as uniquely tied to love, Jankélévitch suggests a reason why Randi can forgive Lee, but Lee cannot forgive himself. He contends that “[t]he sacrifice of self-esteem is easy only when we do it out of love for someone, love for the other being incomparably more dynamic than amor sui.”82 Even if we think that often people forgive themselves too easily, we can see that a person who accuses themselves is in a different position from the other, and self-love may allow self-preservation, but not forgiveness. While for Jankélévitch the remorse that comes from despair gives the “full meaning” to forgiveness, there’s no causal relation between the two, which we can see in the disconnection between Randi’s forgiveness and Lee’s remorse.83 The “distress, the insomnia, and the dereliction of the wrongdoer” Jankélévitch advocates is what makes sense of her forgiveness, without Lee being able to redeem himself.84 CONCLUSION: HOPE AFTER DESPAIR Finally, I wish to consider whether we should take Manchester by the Sea to provide us with a completely bleak portrait of the bad conscience. There is no conversion of the person and spontaneous joy or true consolation through remorse, as Jankélévitch says is possible, in that Lee stays in his remorse.85 The conversion is a complete change that is made through remorse that is not seeking excuse or forgiveness.86 In a sense Lee never gets beyond the stage of punishment and suffering to going on to do good deeds. Instead he stays in the pain that Jankélévitch believes purifies us.87 His anger as well as his incapability of being redeemed by Randi’s forgiveness shows that. Nevertheless, we can say that Lee tries to repent, to show he is sorry, through the way he lives his life. He is also not paralyzed by his suffering, so his remorse is not obsessive in that sense. What creates continuity in his life is his practical ability to fix things, so while he cannot put the pieces of his life back together, he can help others by fixing their broken showers and leaky taps. In Jankélévitch’s terms, he continues repentance: “A moral life, that is to say, burning regret accompanied by the wise proposal to do better in the future by courageously taking on the suffering.”88 Lee’s life is suffering but not all suffering. His enduring remorse shows that it is not only deliberate actions

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that create this immense suffering and so questions Jankélévitch’s sharp distinction between act and action. The film dramatizes the way in which our ethical lives are experienced in the space within that distinction as much as at its edges, as well as how the consequences of our past acts affect our present lives. Thus, it is not just the intention that matters. Furthermore, Lee’s inability to forgive himself challenges Jankélévitch’s idea of self-forgiveness as a conceptual impossibility by demonstrating the existential character of a lack of self-forgiveness as well as its subtle difference from reconciling with one’s negligent deed, or carrying on, as Lee does. In that sense Manchester by the Sea both sheds light on Jankélévitch’s account of remorse and proposes its own philosophy of the bad conscience, in some respects in a more nuanced way. Manchester by the Sea does not offer a portrait of redemption, but it does give us humor and some sense of hope. Lee sells some of Joe’s old guns so that they can replace the motor in their beloved fishing boat. Ending the film with Lee and Patrick going fishing together allows for some degree of joy in life, and there is plenty of humor even in the most difficult moments. There is also a kind of compromise in that Lee will continue to see Patrick and rent a larger place so Patrick can visit him in Boston. While being made Patrick’s guardian does not lead to his redemption (and in fact his friend George adopts Patrick), the expectation of responsibility for him that his brother Joe showed provides a connection to life, a reason to go on. He shows himself capable of meeting that demand to some extent in providing advice and comfort to Patrick. Lee feels remorse but he cannot go beyond that to forgive himself or even reconcile with himself, such is the burden of his deeds, and cannot really even accept the forgiveness of others, but can go on living. NOTES 1. I am grateful to participants in the Vladimir Jankélévitch in the Twenty-First Century Symposium, Australian Catholic University, 2018, for their discussion, and especially to Magdalena Zolkos for her comments and suggestions, as well as colleagues at the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions and FilmPhilosophy conferences 2018. 2. Kenneth Lonergan, “Manchester by the Sea” (2016). The film won two Oscars, for best original screenplay and best actor for Casey Affleck. His other films are “Margaret” (2011) and “You Can Count On Me” (2001). 3. Manchester-by-the-sea is a real town in Massachusetts. 4. Anthony Lane, “Manchester by the Sea and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2016; Sam Lansky, “In a Tragedy, Casey Affleck Finds Triumph,” Time.com, 2016; A. O. Scott, “Review: Manchester by the Sea and the Tides of Grief,” The New York Times, November 17, 2016.

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Michael Koresky does mention shame and guilt as well as sadness. “The World is Full of Weeping,” Film Comment, Nov/Dec, 2016, 52. 5. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley, vol. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 41–42. 6. Vladimir Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 56. The Bad Conscience was originally published in 1933 and revised in 1951 and 1966. Forgiveness was published in 1967. Hegel makes a similar distinction in The Philosophy of Right, between the legal action involved in abstract right and the moral action that concerns conscience; G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). It is important to note that (at least the first version of) The Bad Conscience was published before Forgiveness so the later discussion of forgiveness is more fully articulated. 7. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 45. 8. Ibid., 44. 9. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 30. 10. As Fiasse notes, even when the action is not intentional, if the consequences are terrible, we have to be sorry for them. Gaëlle Fiasse, “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked,” Philosophy Today 56, no. 1 (2012): 9. 11. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 20. 12. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale (London: Penguin, 1957). 13. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 37. Differently from “to repent,” in French and English, remorse is something we have rather than do. Ibid., 85. 14. Ibid., 40. The pain of remorse, according to Jankélévitch, is a kind of “halfadhesion: something that does not succeed at becoming wholly objective nevertheless has stopped belonging to the unconscious of the pure subject.” Ibid., 64. For the idea of conscience as judging both before and after actions see Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: George Bell and Sons, 1978), 335, n1. On the conscience see Søren Kierkegaard, Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. David F. Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1941). 15. Jankélévitch concedes that he may have made the distinction between regret and remorse too sharp, but he then reiterates his view that regret is more dreamlike in comparison. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 56. As Looney notes, Jankélévitch uses Kierkegaard’s categories of the aesthetic for regret, and the ethical for remorse. Aaron T. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 240. 16. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 45. 17. Ibid., 44. Lord Jim is a good example of someone suffering such remorse. Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale. 18. Fleming calls this behavior “the fisticuffs version of donning a hair shirt.” Colin Fleming, “Manchester by the Sea,” Cineaste, February 12, 2017, 52. Lee’s punching his hand through a window is a more obvious example of this cruelty solely to the self.

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19. Scott claims that because Lee is white, he has “an ironclad entitlement to the benefit of the doubt.” Scott, “Review: Manchester by the Sea and the Tides of Grief.” However, Cameron Todd Willingham was wrongfully executed for murdering his three children in Texas, although he was innocent in the same way. The fire occurred in 1991 and he was executed in 2004. David Grann, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” The New Yorker, September 7, 2009; Maurice Possley, “Jury Clears the Prosecutor Who Sent Cameron Todd Willingham to Death Row,” The Marshall Project, November 5, 2017. He was white, so it is not necessarily an issue of race that Lee is let off in the film, as Scott argues. A documentary film, “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” has been made about the case. Joe Jnr. Bailey and Steve Mims, “Incendiary: The Willingham Case” (2011). Another film, “Trial by Fire,” directed by Ed Zwick, based on the New Yorker article about the case, was released in 2018. Grann, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” Furthermore, another (white) couple, Heather and Ernest Franklin, have been charged with murder when their son was found dead after their house burned down. David Hermanovitch, “Ernest Franklin Trial Pushed to 2019,” WBNG.com, November 7, 2018. 20. This is a compliment he repeats later for Randi’s new baby, Dylan. 21. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 7. 22. Jankélévitch is quoting Verlaine, Ibid., 16; emphasis mine. 23. Ibid., 94. 24. Ibid., 161; emphasis in the original. 25. Ibid., 59. 26. Ibid., 51. 27. Perhaps Lee’s brother thought of becoming Patrick’s guardian as a possible redemption for Lee. 28. Ibid., 55. 29. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 47. 30. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 30. 31. Ibid., 85. 32. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 41. 33. Ibid., 78. 34. Ibid., 5; emphasis in the original. Jankélévitch notes, however, that it is not entirely gratuitous, as one has to do something wrong first. Ibid., 124. 35. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 25. 36. Ibid., 145. 37. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 5. 38. Ibid., 48. 39. Ibid., 36. 40. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 119. 41. Ibid., 114–15. Here Jankélévitch is using Henri Bergson’s notion of an “organobstacle,” a constraint that is also enabling. Ibid., xviii, 101, 72. See his discussion of the term in Henri Bergson, trans. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 138–39. 42. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 27. 43. For forgiveness, time does not involve conversion, the gift of forgiveness or the moral relation to the other. Ibid., 34–38. That is because time does not have a moral meaning in itself.

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44. Ibid., 121. 45. Ibid., 124. 46. Ibid., 43. 47. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 145. 48. Ibid., 165. 49. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 5. 50. Ibid., 111. 51. Ibid., 119. 52. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and MichaelHughes (London: Routledge, 2001). 53. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 119. 54. Fiasse finds both Jankélévitch and Derrida’s views too extreme, in thinking of forgiveness as forgiveness of the wicked or evil respectively, and that instead we should allow for the role of apologies and repentance. Fiasse, “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked,” 6. I argue similarly concerning Derrida’s work on forgiveness in Marguerite La Caze, Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (New York: SUNY Press, 2013). 55. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 94, 98. 56. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 22. Looney sees Jankélévitch’s concept of forgiveness as a duty or normative ideal that cannot be reached. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 202–07; see Forgiveness, 1. So we might think of Randi’s forgiveness as exemplary but not perfect. In contrast Kelley argues there can be no duty to forgive, although it is a virtuous act. In Ibid., 41. 57. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 120. Nevertheless, Jankélévitch does not advocate forgiveness of the Nazis, either in “Pardonner?” or Forgiveness because they do not express their dereliction. See Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” trans. Ann Hobart, Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996); Forgiveness, 157–58. Fiasse sees his work as having a tension in it. Fiasse, “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked,” 7. However, this tension is explicit and intentional, as Jankélévitch holds gratuitous forgiveness and the unforgivable evil together without trying to resolve it. Forgiveness, 162. 58. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 123. Forgiveness is not limited in degree or time, and is “an intention of perpetual peace.” Ibid., 154. 59. At Joe’s funeral, we see Randi give Lee a sideways look that can be interpreted as a look of love. 60. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 7. 61. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 107. 62. Ibid., 5. 63. Ibid., 37. Jankélévitch calls it a “gift without something being given.” Ibid., 128. He also suggests that sin is an “organ-obstacle,” or “the form in which we discover another person.” Ibid., 125. 64. Ibid., 121. 65. Ibid., 37, 61. 66. Ibid., 147. Kelley suggests, speaking of the love found in forgiveness in Jankélévitch’s view, that “would perhaps the only ‘response’ to undeserved or unmerited or, literally, ‘gratuitous’ remorse be yet another type of gratuitous act?” Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself,” Sophia 52 (2013): 183.

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67. Her friend is also obviously aware of Randi’s feelings, and how important the chance encounter is to her, as she quickly excuses herself so that they can be alone. 68. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 118, 155. 69. See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 485. 70. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 128. 71. Ibid., 121. 72. Ibid., 141. 73. Ibid., 152. 74. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 169, 171. 75. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 122, 127, 150. 76. Ibid., 149. 77. Ibid., 121, 151. 78. Ibid., 152. 79. In his article on self-forgiveness, Kelley argues that for Jankélévitch, selfforgiveness is both too egoistic and conceptually incoherent because forgiveness requires another. Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself,” 177. See my paper arguing that self-forgiveness is possible, even on Arendt’s account of forgiveness. The forgiveness of others enables us to forgive ourselves through their comfort and support. Marguerite La Caze, “Self-Forgiveness and Arendt: In Search of a Magic Spell,” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 24 (2015). 80. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 24. 81. Ibid., 25, 153. 82. Ibid., 87. Jankélévitch takes a position like Arendt’s (1998, 243) that we forgive the person, not their wrong as such. Ibid., 143. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). 83. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 121. 84. Ibid., 157. 85. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 171, 172. 86. Ibid., 127; Forgiveness, 55. 87. Ibid., 41. 88. Ibid., 39.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Bailey, Joe Jnr., and Steve Mims. “Incendiary: The Willingham Case.” 2011. USA: Yokel. Butler, Joseph. The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. London: George Bell and Sons, 1978. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim: A Tale. London: Penguin, 1957. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge, 2001.

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Fiasse, Gaëlle. “Revisiting Jankélévitch’s Dichotomy: Between Excusing the Ignorant and Forgiving the Wicked.” Philosophy Today 56, no. 1 (2012): 3–15. Fleming, Colin. “Manchester by the Sea.” Cineaste, February 12, 2017, 51–53. Grann, David. “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” The New Yorker, September 7, 2009. Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hermanovitch, David. “Ernest Franklin Trial Pushed to 2019.” WBNG.com, November 7, 2018. https​://wb​ng.co​m/new​s/loc​al-ne​ws/20​18/11​/07/e​rnest​-fran​klin-​trial​ -push​ed-to​-2019​/. Accessed March 4, 2019. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. The Bad Conscience. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Henri Bergson. Translated by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ———. “Should We Pardon Them?” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 552–72. Kelley, Andrew. “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself.” Sophia 52 (2013): 159–84. Kierkegaard, Søren. Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Human Life: Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Translated by David F. Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1941. Koresky, Michael. “The World is Full of Weeping.” Film Comment, Nov/Dec, 2016, 48–52. La Caze, Marguerite. “Self-Forgiveness and Arendt: In Search of a Magic Spell.” Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy 24 (2015): 38–63. ———. Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics. New York: SUNY Press, 2013. Lane, Anthony. “Manchester by the Sea and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.” The New Yorker, November 28, 2016. Lansky, Sam. “In a Tragedy, Casey Affleck Finds Triumph.” Time.com, 2016. Lonergan, Kenneth. “Manchester by the Sea.” 2016 USA: Universal Studios. DVD. ———. “Margaret.” 2011. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures. ———. “You Can Count On Me.” 2000. USA: Hart Sharp Entertainment. Looney, Aaron T. Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Possley, Maurice. “Jury Clears the Prosecutor Who Sent Cameron Todd Willingham to Death Row.” The Marshall Project, November 5, 2017. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Scott, A. O. “Review: Manchester by the Sea and the Tides of Grief.” The New York Times, November 17, 2016. Zwick, Edward. “Trial by Fire.” 2018. USA: Flashlight Films.

Chapter 4

An Enduring Audience Jankélévitch and Plotinus Tim Flanagan

Whatever the broader challenges, complexities, and even frustrations of arranging another’s manuscripts for publication, the added editorial difficulty of providing a posthumous organization to any individual’s work was something even further compounded in the case of Plotinus, Porphyry explains in the introductory essay to the collection that would become known as the Enneads, by the fact that whenever his former teacher “had written anything he could never bear to go over it twice; even to read it through once was too much for him, as his eyesight did not serve him well for reading.”1 And yet, beyond any contingent or congenital limitations of embodiment, what makes this contemporary account of Plotinus so remarkable is the sense in which he is said to have “worked out his train of thought from beginning to end in his own mind, and then, when he wrote it down, since he had set it all in order in his own mind, he wrote as continuously as if he was copying from a book.”2 Indeed, the significance of Plotinus’s committing his thoughts to writing by means of such an unbroken and intensely sustained composition is something reiterated a few lines later when Porphyry relates how this process of transcription was one that remained unaffected by discussions with the “many hearers”3 that made up Plotinus’s seminars in Rome: Even if he was talking to someone, engaged in continuous conservation, he kept to his train of thought. He could take his necessary part in the conversation to the full, and at the same time keep his mind fixed without a break in what he was considering. When the person he had been talking to was gone he did not go over what he had written . . . . He went straight on with what came next, keeping the connection, just as if there had been no interval of conversation between.4

Regardless of any academic reckoning of the sources of the individual treatises that comprise the Enneads (whether such consideration is given 57

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in a modern philological register,5 or phrased according to the doxography received from antiquity)6 the question of exactly what it was that inspired Plotinus to write what he did—or rather, the question of Plotinus’s putative experience of this inspiration—is one that, following the philosophical project of Vladimir Jankélévitch, merits attention since it attests to a uniquely ontological unity between mind and world. And yet, given the intrinsic ambiguity of its “material” (which is to say, in the case of Plotinus’s interlocutors, auditory) manifestation—the unity of this inspiration should not itself be read as following the writing that it happened to inspire. Indeed, just as the elusive although encompassing—or even inescapable (ambient)—character of such a unity is often noted as the remarkable feature of Plotinus’s philosophical project, the same could be said to resound in Jankélévitch’s investigation of a certain operation (one that is poetic rather than logical) which he describes in spiritual terms, following Henri Bremond,7 as a “charm.” But although this integral notion has attracted considerable attention in scholarship on Jankélévitch, the concerted sense in which Plotinus’s work here echoes within and inspires that of Jankélévitch has received relatively less attention.8 In other words, what yet remains to be heard is the singularly instrumental role of the ancient thinker’s thought in what is often taken to be the exclusively modern investigation into the inexpressive ground that is involved in whatever can be expressed, the investigation into the imperceptible element of perception—that is, into what Jankélévitch describes in the final chapter of his study on the ineffable as the silence by which there is anything to hear at all.9 REVERBERATIONS OF A HIGHER ORDER A key to the actual form of this peculiar unity (one which could well be referred to as an “absent-presence”)10 and, indeed, the very experience it might be said to occasion, can be found in Jankélévitch’s enduring interest in Bergsonian philosophy. This much is evident from an early review essay where Jankélévitch considers how the “harmony” which provides for the health and well-being of individual organisms is something that is at once also rendered “cacophonous” by the unfolding of time itself.11 For amid this din, he explains, something of a “musical biology” can still be thought in terms of certain odd expressions such as “kinetic melody, symphonic innervation, muscular orchestration.”12 As the essay explains at length, however, the etymological basis that a great many concepts from the natural sciences have in Greek thought (especially in disciplinary biology and psychology) should themselves be understood in light of a broader understanding.

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For instance, the process that “the name Synéidesis (συνείδησις)” (consciousness) is intended to describe—the “essentially teleological force” of a certain biological awareness, or “autoregulation of instincts”13—might rather be one better described via the “the Plotinian term παρακολούθησις” (conscious awareness).14 Indeed, the subtle inflection that this term receives in the treatise on “On Well-Being” does well to echolocate the form of experience that Jankélévitch’s philosophical project sought to articulate.15 There, in a well-known passage, Plotinus describes how certain elementary or integral features of experience often dissipate under the scrutiny of a more direct recognition, that is, when an attempt is made to render explicit what is (and must remain) implicit in experience: One can find a great many valuable activities, theoretical and practical, which we carry on both in our contemplative and active life even when we are fully conscious, which do not make us aware [τὸ παρακολουθεῖν] of them. The reader is not necessarily aware that [παρακολουθεῖν ὅτι] he is reading, least of all when he is really concentrating [. . .]. Conscious awareness [τὰς παρακολουηήσεις], in fact is likely to enfeeble the very activities of which there is consciousness [αἶς παρακολοῦσι].16

Like the daydreamer whose awareness of things “sees-through” what is most acutely in front of him—indeed often with regard to (or perhaps on account of being inspired-by) “something else”—for Jankélévitch, the sheer fact of an organism is something that exhibits a certain poetic unity which draws upon (or follows from) but ultimately exceeds, and as such cannot be explained by, the logic of any material order. Accordingly, it is in this way that the uniquely intellectual component of such an insight or awareness is further surveyed in Jankélévitch’s later and more extended reading of Bergsonian thought, when, in the eponymous monograph, he describes how such an intuitive vision, ideally perpendicular, if we may say so, to the geometric plane of things, is rightly opposed to an entirely optical vision that spreads across the outer face of the real. The effort to understand is profound because it is made to seize life in its voluminous plenitude and in its reliefs, not in a flat actuality. It is to penetrate, no longer to just to turn round about [non plus de tourner autour].17

As would be developed further in Music and the Ineffable, of significance here is a certain “plenitude” which should not be confused with the more intentional character of things that is structured by the “geometric plane” of “optical vision.” For if there is something oblique (or rather, “ideally perpendicular”) to the perspective or point of view involved in this outlook it is owing to the sense in which it is one no longer oriented by points of recognition for experience but rather is one sketched upon whatever is reflected or projected-back within

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experience. This much Jankélévitch explains in his contrast between “penetrating a plenitude” and “turning round about”; for whereas the latter proceeds according to a what is already familiar or at least recognizable, the former enjoys no such frame of reference. In other words, the claim here is that experience obtains less as a given or fully developed point of view with regard to things but rather as that development of relations and variations between things themselves by which any perspective can be given at all. Learning to waltz, for example, to take a well-known description in Bergson’s own work,18 requires not so much the assimilation (or codification) of universally identifiable parts following the analysis of certain movements, but rather the apprehension of the movement itself as a variation or reorganization of other more familiar modalities (such as walking). Moreover, what this later engagement with Bergson affords is a further glimpse of the Plotinian perspectives that ultimately comprise the unity of this higher order. For as indicated by the footnote, the phrasing Jankélévitch italicizes here (autour in the original French) is taken from the Greek equivalent περί (about) employed in Plotinus’s respective treatises “On Nature, Contemplation and the One” (περιπλανώμενοι at III, 8, 6) and “On the Good, or the One” (ἔξωθεν περιθέοντας at VI, 9, 3). While on the face of it this Plotinian heritage in Bergson is hardly remarkable (certainly III, 8, in its account of the silent relation between action and contemplation, was a treatise of sustained interest for Bergson), what does merit consideration here in Jankélévitch’s reading is the way in which this non-resembling sensibility—a penetrative opening up or creation of perspectives rather than a mapping of points of view—is something that not only scrambles individual sensations but so too attests to the activity of a certain reflective form in what is otherwise thought to be passively received. For Jankélévitch, then, and following Bergson,19 if there is a Kantian moment to philosophy it is because neither sensations themselves nor an understanding of them can be given in advance of the other.20 Indeed, such a moment, like waltzing, must remain critical (which is to say, more Kantian than the transcendental philosophy proposed by Kant himself, whose project of conditioning was all too often modeled on the conditioned rather than on conditions themselves); a philosophical moment whose uniquely philosophical insight is one that gives form its content, as it were, with real encounters rather than with the in-principle versions of whatever these encounters can possibly or legitimately be said to be.21 For in thinking, just as in learning a foreign language,22 the intellectual structures that can be seen to provide for any articulation of things at all should be understood as appearing only after the fact—and, as such, should themselves be considered not so much as factual but rather as useful, perhaps even necessary or indispensable, fictions generated by thought itself.23

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BERGSONIAN ECHOES In this way, the import of Bergsonian thought for Jankélévitch is that it allows the continuity of experience to be thought as something that is as much active as it is passive since the form of sensibility that is involved here is one that is to be understood as genetic rather than as original, productive rather than primordial. The reason for this is that its unity is not an organization that is, straightforwardly enough, there—awaiting (or presupposed by) thought—but rather it is an organizing unity whose activity comprises its own thought— which is to say, a unity “superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products.”24 Tracing the development of Bergson’s work, Jankélévitch details how the great insight of Matter and Memory was to have traced the involvement of a certain “circuit” in intellection which provides for the problematic relation between sensation and understanding to be thought in such a way other than via the “vicious circle”25 so often encountered in thinking about the mind. The circuitry of intellection does this, Jankélévitch explains, by drawing upon the vitalist (or hyperbolic) principle of memory to think thought beyond or outside the terms of either emergence or preformation—that is, to think thought neither as something “obtained,” in the end, nor “already there,” at the start. Memory does this by unfurling along certain signs which, crucially, are not causes of experience in their own right; rather, these signs “serve to initiate, trigger, and orient, the interpretive current”26 by which sense is made of things. While such a current would seem to grant mental faculties an activity of their own—an autonomous circuitry, not in any way “grounded” by “material characters and sounds”27—it is important to stress that the circuitry established by Matter and Memory is in fact both afferent or centripetal while at the same time efferent or centrifugal. In other words, and reprising the transcendental project inaugurated in Kant, the model of experience proposed here is no more something that issues from the mind to the world than it is something that is visited upon the mind from the world; rather, experience is the tensile relation of thought that is generated between mind and world. Indeed, this is why, Jankélévitch explains, the combination of these “two inverse currents” detailed in Matter and Memory, gives way in Mind-Energy to a single, “preperceptive,” “dynamic schema”28 whereby intellection comes about as the operation of the manifold that it unifies. In other words (perhaps, once again, even in Kantian terms, although the very task here is to rethink the very form of conditioning that attends the Critical philosophy) it could be said in this way that understanding does not follow from what we perceive, rather what we perceive is given by a certain provocation that our understanding itself undergoes,29 which is to say that our understanding is always

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already active—not by virtue of what comes to it from without, but owing to the encounter of its very activity with its own internal limits. This is why Jankélévitch clarifies in the chapter on silence from his study of the ineffable: Bergson showed that it is impossible to suppress one category of perceptions without reconstituting another in some way [. . .]. Effacing one sense always entails the accession, even the enlivening, of another: plenitude alternates and is displaced, but is never radically annihilated. Thus, silence is in turn a relative or partial nothingness and not absolute nothingness.30

If, in considering the claim of this chapter more fully, there is indeed something paradoxical to this formulation, to wit that silence is instrumental to our hearing, it is because it proposes to grant silence a valency that it is rarely afforded. Indeed ordinarily, as Jankélévitch explains, silence is considered to be a lack—a “Manichean”31 nothingness, out of which noises and sounds somehow appear. And while a deduction of this kind can indeed be given in the phenomenological order of things, to claim that these same grounds actually suffice for the ontological order of things is, as Jankélévitch explains on the chapter’s opening page, to confuse “metaphysics with metaphor.”32 Instead, and with a nod to aspects of Greek thought to be found in Schelling, if not in Platonism itself,33 Jankélévitch considers whether there is indeed something to the “nothingness” that silence is ordinarily taken to be. In this way, which is to say beyond the interminable “beginnings” of pre-Socratic metaphysics,34 what this account of silence adduces is a priority of things that “is” (or rather, a priority of things that becomes) at least as much cognitive as metaphysical, as much transcendental as speculative—and, in any event, productive rather than primordial. To be sure, the experience of silence is by definition one where nothing is heard. But this experience cannot itself be accounted for according to any analysis (or “audit”) whereby there is first nothing and then something—that is, whereby something emerges from nothing. Things must rather be understood in such a way that while there is indeed a reduction or a suspension of sorts in any experience of silence, what this involves is not so much a conditional bracketing (an authentic, primordial or ecstatic presence) but rather the ongoing genesis of conditions themselves. Silence, then, is not what is interrupted but is itself the interruption that provides for what is heard. So it is that intramusical silences or sighs—the numbered rests, subject to the chronometer, carefully timed—aerate the mass of musical discourse according to the exact rule of the metronome, since music can only breathe when it has the oxygen of silence.35

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Silence, then, is not the experience of something prior to what we hear but, rather, is what is experienced (“heard”) as the suspension of noise: it is that which “suddenly comes into being just before a concert, when the conductor’s baton suppresses the cacophony of instruments and, with the first beat [temps] of the first measure, releases a harmonious symphonic torrent”; in other words, this is to say that “noise is not suspended silence, but conversely silence is a cessation of noise and a solution of continuity.”36 Once again, the reason for this is that the awareness or recognition of the conditioned (the “experience” of silence) does not betoken some condition (an actual absence, or not-being, of sound) since the experience of silence, the experience of an absence of noise is “itself,” simply, or rather merely,37 its own (awareness of a) limitation upon the “empirical fact of the continuum,”38 rather than something that issues deductively from a corresponding principle of nothingness— it is, although in a different manner, the transcendental limitation upon that continuation of things in which “noise constitutes a sonorous foundation,” the “continuous pedal point” or “obstinate fundamental bass . . . more imperceptible than the sound of the sea.”39 And lest this seem, not least of all in its mental imagery, to indulge uncritically that hallmark of the monadological scheme of things decried by Critical philosophy, Jankélévitch clarifies how silence is one of the “negative measures” whose positive quality was affirmed by Kant, in opposition to Leibniz (the man of “reduced [petites] perceptions”). Nothingness, one might say, has no properties. One nothing cannot be distinguished from another nothing. How could they be distinguished without having qualities or a manner of being; that is, without at least being something? Two nothings are only a single, same nothing, a single, same zero. But silence has differential properties: and as a result, this particular nothingness is not nothing at all—in other words, it is not (like Parmenides’ nothingness) the negation of all being; it is not a nonbeing that totally annihilates or contradicts total being.40

Accordingly, the position here might best be described as post-Kantian in that it undertakes to chart the imperceptible involvement of certain perceptions which are simply not apperceived and which, in so doing, displace the primacy of that awareness (or interestedness) so as to adduce the ontological priority of the real conditions for conscious experience; this is why, emphasizing its non-intentional nature, Jankélévitch claims that “the negation that is silence suppresses or attenuates those aspects of experience that are most showy or ostentatious. To seek silence is to seek a meta-empirical Being, a supersensory realm more essential by far than the realm occupied by existence, which roars at high volume, with a booming voice.”41 In other words, and in a transcendental recalibration of the elements of experience, just as the very act of reading comprises an intrinsic awareness that is “conscious

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but not pre-occupied” (παρακολουθεῖν)—an awareness which would dissipate if remarked upon—so too the experience of sounds and noises involves a silence that, by definition, is not heard (indeed cannot be heard!) and yet which nonetheless provides for that awareness of things by which whatever happens to be heard is heard. Crucially, then, what is involved in silence is not something that is itself substantively auditory, no more than the awareness “of” reading is itself literary (or even, by extension, literate). If there can be said to be a resemblance between the conditioned (experience) and what conditions (organizing principle) then this is only something distended rather than anything prescribed or deduced; a certain contemplation, an intuitive (or “day-dreamed”) awareness that develops following reflections upon what is actually encountered. This is why in the final chapter from Music and the Ineffable, and once again with regard to the eighth treatise of the third Ennead, Jankélévitch explains how human beings in a contemplative state [Les hommes recuiellis] can hear in silence, just as animals with night vision [les nyctalopes] can see in the dark. Plotinus himself who otherwise dismisses the noise made by logos, Plotinus, author of Περὶ θεωρίας seeks silence not to put a stethoscope to its chest and divine some inaudible language, supernatural speech, a secret voice, but to contemplate a great spectacle, θέαμα, θεώρημα.42

PLOTINIAN PALAEOGRAPHY Let’s suppose we are grappling [aux prises] with translating a difficult text, an obscure Greek one, for example. When the text is understood [est compris], it seems to us the hermeneutic movement relies on [a pris appui] words to give them a value since initially only words seem to be given immediately: our eyes see signs, not what is significant.43

Although scarcely hidden away in an obscure Greek text, the discussion of “the nature of the musician”44 from the opening chapter of the treatise “On Dialectics” might nonetheless itself be taken (in the manner of the French pris) to be quite difficult. Given the treatise’s stated disinterest in “what is called logical activity about propositions and syllogisms”45 (not to mention the broader issue of how so-called discursive and nondiscursive thoughts are to be formulated)46 questions of interpretation may well seem to be entirely appropriate, even a necessary sine qua non, for reading the Enneads. And yet the complexity of the “hermeneutic movement”47 felt so acutely in the high speculation of Plotinian thought is no more independent of, or prior to, seemingly simpler (even material) palaeographic considerations than silence is from sound.

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In short, which version of the text is to be read? Concretely, the difficulty here involves the manner in which “the musician”48 is understood to be affected by beauty. Armstrong gives the relation as follows: We must consider him as easily moved and excited by beauty, but not quite capable of being moved by absolute beauty; he is however quick to respond to its images when he comes upon them, and just as nervous people react readily to noises, so does he to articulate sounds and the beauty in them.49

Similarly, for their part, the recent Cambridge translators render the same passage as: We should certainly posit him as someone easily moved and transported in the direction of that which is beautiful, but less able to be moved by beauty itself. He is though, ready to respond to what are in a way impressions of Beauty that he encounters, and just as the fearful are towards noises, so is he primed for sounds, that is, for the beauty in these.50

In his 2016 French translation, however, Jean-Baptiste Gourinat gives: Il faut poser qu’il est facilement ému et transporté de passion pour le beau, mais par trop incapable de se mettre en mouvement de lui-même, alors qu’il est enclin à se laisser émouvoir par le tout venant de ce qui lui arrive pour ainsi dire d’empreintes.51

Of significance here is that in both English translations, the Greek παρ᾿ αὐτοῦ is assumed to refer to beauty. Gourinat, on the other hand, reads this reflective relation as obtaining for the musician him- or herself.52 In other words, then, whereas both the Harvard and Cambridge editions would have to understand movement here simply as a redundant or empty predicate of beauty (something that beauty is not), Gourinat’s reading realizes a weak predicative force of movement which is to be said, however softly, of the musician-as-subject. Importantly, however, if this can be said to afford an agency of sorts to the musician, it is neither a pure spontaneity nor a mere reactivity, but rather a (transcendental) form of sensibility whose conditions of genesis are quite literally traced from the world and upon the world. This is why, as explained in a footnote to his translation, Gourinat works out from Jankélévitch’s insistence that the effect of beauty on the musician should not be read as ektupôn but rather as tupon.53 The reason for this, he explains in the commentary, is that “ektupos designates an embossed relief, in the form of a bump, and not an indentation and relief, denoted by tupos.”54 The difference, then, is that whereas the former would simply be a material deposit, the latter implies the valency of something immaterial—the

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presence of an absence, an effective limitation “hollowed out” of the sonorous continuum. Written under the supervision of Émile Bréhier, it is in this way that Jankélévitch’s 1924 study on the third treatise of the first Ennead, the twentieth in Porphyry’s chronology, would anticipate many of the themes of his later thought. Indeed, in the conclusion to that work, Jankélévitch notes the internal relation of Bergsonian thought to that of Plotinus with regard to the dialectical ascent so characteristic of the unity of Platonism. Describing the “purely internal reform by which we would find realities immanent to our individual thought,”55 Jankélévitch emphasized the sense in which the unity of self that is to be realized in thought is one that emerges through the world rather than in spite of it.56 In other words, in place of a heroic surpassing or overcoming, the consciousness involved in this reflection is one that is selfsufficient and yet not always immediately present, familiar or even recognizable to itself.57 It is in this way, Jankélévitch explained, that there is no need, therefore, to seek out of himself the treasure of spiritual purity: he is there invisible and present, in every consciousness, beneath the superficial bark of concepts and propositions; it suffices for Bergson as for Plotinus to know how to break the adventitious gangue that imprisoned him. The Dialectic is fundamentally self-reflection and not surpassing oneself [repliement sur soi et non dépassement de soi], Selbstüberwindung.58

If “the musician” is to undertake this purification of the material world toward the realization of a higher unity, toward the beautiful itself, then this is neither by way of a purely hermetic spiritualism nor by means of a sheer receptivity to things encountered, but rather by an active spontaneity. What this involves is something that figures as an inner response to the (exterior) solicitations of matter, one which includes in its apperceptions the merely apparent silences of sounds that are not heard—sounds which, nonetheless, are ultimately integral to the roaring reality that is the unity of experience. NOTES 1. Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Books,” chapter 8. In Plotinus, Enneads. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Porphyry are to Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong. 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966–1988). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., chapter 7. Plotinus’s seminars, Porphyry details, were “open to anyone who wished to come” (Ibid., chapter 1). They were garrulous, even confused, and literally unscripted; “Plotinus for a long time continued to write nothing, but began to base his lectures on his studies with Ammonius. So he continued for ten complete

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years, admitting people to study with him, but writing nothing. Since he encouraged his students to ask questions, the course was lacking in order and there was a great deal of pointless chatter, as Amelius told us.” Ibid., chapter 3. 4. Ibid., chapter 8. 5. “Plotinus has gathered the legacy of eight centuries of Greek philosophy into a magnificently unified synthesis” (Maria Luisa Gatti, “Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition and the Foundation of Neoplatonism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10); “one can find for every passage in Plotinus sources and precedents but the essence of his system is contained in its comprehensive meaning, and cannot be reduced to a mosaic; his true originality stands in its overarching design, not in the parts of which it is made.” Ibid., 14. “There is still some purely philological work to be done on the Enneads: there are quotations, references, and echoes of previous writers still to be detected and analysed,” as one leading commentator recently noted, “more work . . . may bear fresh fruit.” Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus on Intellect (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 16–17. 6. Amid the many hagiographic associations, Porphyry claims more explicitly how Plotinus’s writings “are full of concealed Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in particular, is concentrated in them.” Plotinus, Enneads, chapter 14. 7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 125. 8. To be sure, Arnold I. Davidson gestures, but only in passing, to the Plotinian inspiration for this theme (“The Charme of Jankélévitch,” in Music and the Ineffable (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), x; although charm features throughout the essays by Michael Gallope et al., “Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 215–256, no reference is made there to Plotinus beyond a bibliographical entry in the list of works by Jankélévitch. Pierre Hadot (“L’ ‘Amour Magicien.’ Aux Origenes de la Notion de ‘Magia Naturalis’: Platon, Plotin, Marsile Ficin,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’etranger 2 (1982)) further details the broader philosophical significance of charm and music in Plotinus. 9. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 130–155. 10. “Localizable neither in the subject nor in the object, charm is entirely in the enchanting operation itself, that is to say in the (instant) meeting between the subject and the object. Indeed, this is rather an absent presence, both omnipresent and omni-absent. It is a praesens which is before us, before the actual being, and which is therefore given to us as an object of consciousness only in its preterization, that is, in its ineffectiveness. Existence barely existent, if not nonexistent, the je-ne-saisquoi reveals itself to us only as an apparition disappearing.” Élisabeth Grimmer, “De l’Effectivité ou la Présence Absente de Schelling chez Jankélévitch,” Archives de Philosophie 73 (2010): 276; my translation. 11. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Bergsonisme et biologie, à propos d’un ouvrage récent,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 36, no. 2 (April 1929): 258–259; my translation. 12. Ibid., 264. 13. Ibid., 258.

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14. Ibid., 264. “Just as a living organism implies characteristics that all other organisms have as well, so the totality of problems is present in each of the tasks separated by reflection. Yet the stress shifts as we move from one problem to the next. It is not entirely clear where one begins, where another ends. What is certain, however, is that going from one to the other, we have changed worlds and climates. In each problem we thus come across all problems, yet we do so according to a particular perspective (the way each treatise of Plotinus’s Enneads or each short work by Leibniz reiterates, from various points of view, the total system).” Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, eds. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott, trans. Nils F. Schott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 23; Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), 28–29. 15. The most recent and authoritative English translation renders παρακολουθεῖν here as “consciously aware.” Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson, trans. George Boys-Stones et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 81. It must be said that the literature on this term, let alone its associations, in Plotinian scholarship is vast since the problem it engages is largely coextensive with the project of the Enneads themselves; for present purposes, of note is a recent survey of cognate terminology which describes the term as “a higher-order consciousness, which involves a second-order state directed toward a first-order state. The second-order state ‘follows along’ with the first-order state (the original meaning of parakoloutheô is ‘to follow’).” D. H. Hutchinson, Plotinus on Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 42. 16. Plotinus, Enneads, I.4.10. 17. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 89; 109. 18. Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy: Essays and Lectures, trans. H. Wildon Carr (New York: Holt, 1920), 216–218. 19. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 356–362. 20. “Someone who closes his or her eyes to experience blindness continues to hear; someone who stops his or her ears to experience silence continues to see; and if struck blind and deaf with a single blow, still feels heat, perceives scent, and is granted coenesthesic impressions [les impressions cœnesthésiques].” Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 137; 170. 21. “One of the most profound and important ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason is this: if metaphysics is possible, it is through a vision and not through a dialectic . . . . The most obvious result of the Kantian Critique is thus to show that one could only penetrate into the beyond by a vision . . . . He definitively established that if metaphysics is possible, it can only be through an effort of intuition. Only, having proved that intuition alone would be capable of giving us a metaphysics, he added: this intuition is impossible.” Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992), 139–140. 22. Consider the immersive or “direct” approach to language learning. “Instead of requiring us to have read a whole grammar book before we begin to speak— for we speak not only with adjectives, nor only with prepositions, nor only with

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pronouns— these methods seek to give us the totality of the sentence from the outset and then deploy it with increasing precision.” Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 13. 23. “The matter and form of intellectual knowledge (restricted to its own object) are seen to be engendering each other by a reciprocal adaptation, intellect modelling itself on corporeity, and corporeity on intellect. But this duality of intuition Kant neither would not could admit.” Bergson, Creative Evolution, 105; cf. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (Mineola: Dover, 2001), 93, 234. 24. Ibid., 105. 25. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 90. 26. Ibid., 91. 27. Ibid., 90. 28. Ibid., 92. 29. “The intelligibility of noetic things derives from the implicit or explicit system that justifies them to reason. Their meaning radiates from the explanation that relates them one to the others” (Ibid., 93); “the true starting point of the mind is in the signified itself or, better, in a certain pre-existing idea that we labour to confront with the signs perceived by our senses” (Ibid., 90); “[i]n reality, we do not go from sign to meaning but from meaning to meaning via signs.” Ibid., 91; italics in the original. 30. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 137; 169–170. 31. Ibid., 154. 32. Ibid., 130. This is why “there is no proportional relationship between a given being’s true importance and the volume of sound it emits, between its ontological weight and its phenomenological acoustic volume. Any being’s degree of Being is not always in direct consequence to its phenomenal glare.” Ibid., 149. 33. In this respect, understanding the materiality of silence would involve considering the discussion “On What Exists Potentially and What Actually.” Plotinus, Enneads, II.5. While such consideration cannot be undertaken here, the question of the very “form” of silence would involve discussion, from the fifth chapter of that treatise, of “that which is truly a falsity” and especially “what is really unreal”—the phrasing ὄντος μὴ ὄν, as Armstrong points out in his translation, reprising Sophist 254D1. 34. If, in all their ideally form-less audacity, the Enneads could be said to signal the “closure” of metaphysics, Derrida contends in an essay first published in 1967, this “would not occur around a homogeneous and continuous field of metaphysics. Rather, it would fissure the structure and history of metaphysics, organically inscribing and systematically articulating the traces of the before and the after both from within and without [les traces de l’avant, de l’après et du dehors] metaphysics. Thereby proposing an infinite, and infinitely surprising [surprenante] reading. An irreducible rupture and excess can always be produced within an era, at a certain point of its text (for example, in the ‘Platonic’ fabric of ‘Plotinism’). Already in Plato’s text, no doubt,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 172; Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972), 206, italics in original. 35. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 136.

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36. Ibid., 133; 164–165, translation modified. Abbate’s translation gives “mais à l’inverse le silence est une cessation du bruit et une solution de continuité” as “but silence is noise than [sic] has ended, and the suspension of continuity” (Ibid., 134). In so doing, in proposing a “suspension” in this way, the “cessation of noise” denies the continuité which obtains as une solution of noise—a continuation whose sonority is not extinguished on account of its being imperceptible; the “suspension” of noise is more of a subtending than an intermission. “Silence was the backdrop suspended under Being [la toile de fond sous-tendue à l’être]. But now, it is noise that constitutes a sonorous foundation, suspended under silence [le fond sonore tendu sous le silence]” (Ibid., 134; 167). 37. “‘Pure’ and ‘mere’ are not equivalent, interchangeable designations. What characterizes purity is that even though it stipulates separation and isolation, it is ultimately self-sufficient and consequently definable from itself. By contrast, what is said to be ‘merely’ something is only negatively delimited; it is only what it is in distinction from, and with respect to, something else. It is defined only by way of derivation [. . .].” Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19, emphasis added. 38. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 134; 166. 39. Ibid., 135; 167. “Making infinite gradations in the nuances of imperceptibility, Debussy deliberately attenuates his decrescendos to the point where almost-nothing and nothing become indistinguishable . . . archangel wings brushing featherbed clouds would make more noise than the violin’s shivering bows, and threefold pianissimo ‘ppp,’ fourfold, a thousand-fold ‘p’ or a hundred-thousand-fold ‘p’ would convey no more than the faintest idea of an infinitesimal ‘piano.’” Ibid., 144–145. Indeed, in this way, “Jankélévitch emphasizes that for Plotinus there is more at stake than the difference between being and nothingness, therefore more than is sometimes supposed to be at stake in the question why there is anything at all and why things have the forms that they do. This principle which answers these questions cannot have any form. If it did, we should have in consistency to ask those questions over again. Yet if the principle which explains everything has no form, how can it escape being anything other than nothing? But the origin of anything cannot be nothing. It must be a something. Of this something we can say only that it is an almost nothing, something I know not what. It is because it is an amorphous almost nothing that it is a something I know not what. The producer or the creator of first positor, Himself Lui-même, cannot be known.” John Llewelyn, Appositions—of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 74–75. 40. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 136–137; 169. 41. Ibid., 145. 42. Ibid., 150; 185 translation modified. 43. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 90; 110. 44. Plotinus, Enneads, I.3.1. 45. Dialectic, Plotinus explains, “does not know about propositions—they are just letters—but in knowing the truth it knows what they call propositions . . . but it hands over petty precisions of speech to another discipline which finds satisfaction in them.” Ibid., I.3.5. This point develops what could well be described as the “contempt”

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[mépris] for logic (Leroux, “Logique et dialectique chez Plotin: Enneade 1.3(20),” 189) from the previous chapter whereby dialectic “leaves what is called logical activity, about propositions and syllogisms, to another art, as it might leave knowing how to write. Some of the matter of logic it considers necessary, as a preliminary, but it makes itself the judge of this, and considers some of it useful and some of it superfluous, and belonging to the discipline which wants it.” Plotinus, Enneads, I.3.4. Whereas Kant’s tempering of philosophical dialectic will seek the grounds that reconcile “the agency of words alone” (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), A735/B763) with axioms that might be exhibited in intuitions—a “canon” for the “organon” (Ibid., A12/B26; cf. Axviii)—Plotinus’s account emphasizes the ontological rather than epistemological register of the dialectic, explaining that it “must not be thought to be a tool [ὄγανον] the philosopher uses. It is not just bare theories and rules [κανόνες]; it deals with things and has real beings as a kind of material for its activity” (I.3.5). Whatever contrast might be proposed here can of course only come into view upon a full survey of each thinker’s sustained response to various Peripatetic and Stoic conceptions of logic (Kant’s programmatic interest in “analysis,” as well as in “categories” and “predicates” would be further examples) and yet, notwithstanding Kant’s formulation of his inheritance, the difficulty with such a survey is that while “one of Aristotle’s greatest achievements is the creation of formal logic, curiously enough Aristotle has no expression matching ‘logic’ as it is used either in modern philosophy or by his ancient commentators.” Annamaria Schiaparelli, “Plotinus on Dialectic,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91, no. 3 (2009): 253–287, 268. 46. “A minor flurry of scholarship has arisen over the issue of whether Plotinus equates non-discursive with non-propositional thought.” Sara Rappe, Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92. 47. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 90. 48. As Armstrong explains, midway between the lover [ἐρωτικός] and the philosopher [φιλόσοφος], the musician [μουσικός] is one of the three characters discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus (248D3) that figure in the “intellectual purification and ascent” described in so many of the Dialogues, not least of all the Republic and the Symposium. To be sure, whereas for Plato these “are three different descriptions of the same kind of person [. . .] in Plotinus they are instead three distinct people.” “Introductory Note” on Plotinus, Enneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966–88), 150–151. 49. Plotinus, Enneads, I.3.1; emphases added. 50. Plotinus, The Enneads, 64; emphases added. 51. Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, Plotin. Traité 20: Qu’est-ce que la dialectique? Bibliothèque des textes philosophiques; Les écrits de Plotin (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2016), 59–60; emphases added. 52. I thank Prof. Gourinat for his correspondence clarifying the commentary and translation on this point; I assume responsibility for the subsequent developments of this position. 53. Ibid., 60.

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54. Ibid., 111. 55. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Plotin “Ennéades” I,3: Sur la dialectique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998), 124; my translation, emphasis in original. 56. “. . . the intelligibles co-existing at the bottom of us with the adventitious impressions.” Ibid. 57. If there is model of causation here, it could be said to be one that “involves . . . no positing of any principle beyond the forms that are themselves present in the effect.” Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 173; Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1968). In this way, it could be said, there obtains here an empty form of reflection, a reverberation or what Deleuze describes, following the account so integral to Bergson in the eighth treatise from the third Ennead, as a “turning [retournant].” Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 171; 155. In other words, there is at once a recognition by a formal understanding and a transformation of that form which understands; “[a] double genesis, of the given and what receives it: the effect that receives determines its own existence when it fully possesses what is given to it; but it does not fully possess it except by turning toward the giver” (Ibid.). 58. Jankélévitch, Plotin “Ennéades” I,3: Sur la Dialectique, 124

BIBLIOGRAPHY Armstrong. “Introductory Note.” In Enneads, Plotinus, 150–151. Translated by A. H. Armstrong. 7 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966–88. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan, 1911. ———. Mind-Energy: Essays and Lectures. Translated by H. Wildon Carr. New York: Holt, 1920. ———. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle A. Andison. New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992. ———. Time and Free Will: An Essay On the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola: Dover, 2001. Davidson, Arnold I. “The Charme of Jankélévitch.” In Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable, Carolyn Abbate, trans, vii–xii. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990. ———. Spinoza et le problème de l’pxpression. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1968. Derrida, Jacques. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1972. ———. Margins of Philosophy. Translated with Additional Notes, by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982. Emilsson, Eyjólfur Kjalar. Plotinus on Intellect. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Gallope, Michael, Brian Kane, Steven Rings, James Hepokoski, Judy Lochhead, Michael J. Puri, and James R. Currie. “Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Philosophy of

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Music.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 215–256. Gasché, Rodolphe. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Gatti, Maria Luisa. “Plotinus: The Platonic Tradition and the Foundation of Neoplatonism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, 10–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Gourinat, Jean-Baptiste. Plotin. Traité 20: Qu’est-ce que la dialectique? Bibliothèque des textes philosophiques; Les Écrits de Plotin. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2016. Grimmer, Élisabeth. “De l'Effectivité ou la présence absente de Schelling chez Jankélévitch.” Archives de Philosophie 73 (2010): 267–283. Hadot, Pierre. “L’ ‘Amour Magicien’. Aux Origenes de la notion de ‘Magia Naturalis’: Platon, Plotin, Marsile Ficin.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’etranger 2 (1982): 283–292. Hutchinson, D. H. Plotinus on Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. “Bergsonisme et biologie, à propos d’un ouvrage récent.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 36, no. 2 (April 1929): 253–265. ———. Henri Bergson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. ———. Henri Bergson. Edited by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. Translated by Nils F. Schott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ———. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. La Musique et l’ineffable. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983. ———. Plotin “Ennéades” I,3: Sur la Dialectique. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan, 1933. Leroux, Georges. “Logique et dialectique chez Plotin: Enneade 1.3(20).” Phoenix 28, no. 2 (Summer 1974): 180–192. Llewelyn, John. Appositions—of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Plotinus. Enneads. Translated by A. H. Armstrong. 7 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966–1988. ———. The Enneads. Edited by Lloyd P. Gerson. Translated by George BoysStones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R. A. H. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Rappe, Sara. Reading Neoplatonism: Non-Discursive Thinking in the Texts of Plotinus, Proclus, and Damascius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Schiaparelli, Annamaria. “Plotinus on Dialectic.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91, no. 3 (2009): 253–287.

Chapter 5

Speaking in the Night On the Non-Sense of Death and Life Aaron T. Looney

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed [. . .]. Thought. —All the dignity of man consists in thought [. . .]. But what is this thought? How foolish it is!1 (Pascal, Thoughts, VI, 347 and 365)

Pascal speaks in the night, Jankélévitch writes.2 In words that resemble a docta ignorantia, Pascal speaks, without certainty and without consolation, about the limits of thought and the significance and insignificance of humans as thinking beings. In his prolific reflections on death, Jankélévitch, too, speaks in the night, mining the incomprehensibility of death for what it gives us to think about life.3 Death is a central theme throughout Jankélévitch’s oeuvre. His 1966 book La Mort spans roughly 500 pages and draws on the history of philosophy and religion as well as on art, literature, and music from antiquity to the twentieth century. La Mort is a tour de force, touching on many themes surrounding death: the angst and shame of death, aging, capital punishment, love, loss, the longing for an afterlife, and the lament of ever having been born. Jankélévitch takes his readers on an adventure into terrain typically avoided, breaking taboos that shroud death in a mystical veil or keep death out of sight and out of mind. Notably, though, he does not discover new land, much less another country. No particularly novel insight into the phenomenon of death emerges from his writings. However, this assessment need not be read as a condemnation of his work or a judgment on its ultimate vanity. Perhaps his variations 75

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on themes readily recognizable from our lived experience are the point and the achievement of his meditations. He indicates such an intention, repeatedly reminding his readers that it is possible to know what one knew, to know again what one already knew, and even to know for the first time what one experiences every day. As Christina Howells writes, “La Mort may be seen as performing what it describes: Jankélévitch has not so much told us anything we did not know before about life and death, but in the course of his analyses he has taken us on an intellectual and emotional journey that will have inevitably changed us to some degree.”4 His meaning is in the message, and his message is a simple one. Jankélévitch suggests that the sense of death and of life is “something simple, infinitely simple, so extraordinarily simple.”5 In contrast to his many book titles that positively sing, frequently announcing leitmotivs for the rhapsodic thought that follows, the work’s monosyllabic title, La Mort, signals the simplicity of Jankélévitch’s approach and subject.6 The sense of death, he contends, is to be found only in life, and it is as simple as saying “hello” and “good-bye.”7 Our comprehension of death is simple because there is nothing to think in death. Death is the limit of thought and marks the end of the thinking being. Quite simply, thought always arrives either too early or too late.8 For Jankélévitch, a larger philosophical problem is the traditional tendency to render death as a general concept or a category in the language of common logos. There can be no answer to the essential question, “What is death?” But if we inquire into the meaning of death, the question arises, “for whom?” The philosopher or the physician? The person living or the one dying? The mourners or the person lost? If death is not an abstract concept or a category, how can we speak of la mort in a monolithic sense? Should we not instead speak of les mortes? The meaning of death is inherently plural, even in its meaning for me as a scientist, a newspaper reader, a lover, and a friend. Jankélévitch suggests that death conjoins multiple viewpoints: egocentric, ethical, and objective.9 He proceeds by exploring death from three perspectives: a firstperson perspective (my death), a second-person perspective (your death), and a third-person perspective (the death of an other or others). Jankélévitch’s thanatology comprises, as Matteo Cestari observes, “a strongly perspectival phenomenology of death.”10 While the third-person perspective considers death a natural fact according to a general law, my death and your death signify what Jankélévitch means by ipseity, haecceity, or semelfactivity to describe the singularity of the individual. Although death entails our common destiny, the leitmotivs in Jankélévitch’s philosophy of death are concerned with its personal and exclusive character. “Each death is unique,” as Jacques Derrida writes about the death of his friend Gilles Deleuze.11 Jankélévitch’s perspectival phenomenology accords the first-person perspective an epistemic primacy. Each death is unique because it concerns the

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individual confronted with his or her own death. In this regard, Jankélévitch’s thinking is closely aligned with Heidegger’s. What is distinctive about Jankélévitch’s thanatology, however, is his investment in the epistemic and ethical relationship between the death of I and the death of you. As the occasion for Derrida’s remark suggests, the death of a beloved is also unique. Jankélévitch believes that the death of the second person—a you—can concern me almost as much as my own death does, and it equally can reveal the truth of mortal life to me. Simply put, each death is unique because it is the death of a unique being. According to Jankélévitch, death reveals life to us in its “quiddity” or “thatness,” in its gratuity, radical contingency, and singularity.12 Connecting ethics and metaphysics, he claims that the wholly otherness of death, its negation of individual life, is a source of wonder. It is not a problem to be avoided, solved, or overcome; it contains no secret for us to divine or discover. Jankélévitch witnesses the mystery of death in the full light of day—in the “sublime evidence” that things are, these persons are, and this thing or that person has been.13 His plea is that we boldly embrace the mortality, contingency, and singularity of life without certainty and without consolation. DEATH, THE WHOLLY OTHER Jankélévitch’s meditation on death is a celebration of wondrous life. Whereas Plato teaches that philosophy entails learning to die, a notion that is echoed by Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne,14 Spinoza claims that “a free man thinks of nothing less than of death;” his wisdom is “a meditation on life.”15 It is with Spinoza in mind that Jankélévitch confesses that he never thinks of death. His confession is not without irony, however, for he immediately adds that death is “the problem par excellence and in a certain sense, the only problem.”16 It is the problem par excellence because it problematizes the sense and value of life. It is the sole matter because our attitude toward death is inseparable from our attitude toward life. Jankélévitch’s response to the problem, which quickly recedes into mystery, is to return to the beginning of philosophy to what Plato conceives as the source of philosophy: wonder, thaumazein.17 However, in returning to the roots of philosophy, Jankélévitch goes against Plato and the occidental metaphysical tradition, suggesting that they disavow death and, in doing so, diminish the wondrous character of life. Plato’s Socrates, especially in Phaedo, serves Jankélévitch as both dialogue partner and counterpart. As heir of Parmenides, Plato grants primacy to the ontic Logos, equating being and intelligibility. Only what is can be thought and said; what is not at all is utterly inconceivable and unsayable.18 Consequently, either the non-being of death is inconceivable and inexpressible, or it is conceivable solely on the basis of being. The latter position

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summarizes Socrates’s argument for the immortality of the soul. According to the logic of identity, the soul as the source of life cannot admit its opposite, death, without ceasing to be a soul, and what does not admit of death is itself indestructible.19 Jankélévitch’s main issue with this argumentation is its emphasis on the continuity and homogeneity of being. He agrees with the idea that, from the positivity of being and its inherent conatus essendi, life will carry on; being will continue to be. That idea is not unique among philosophers. We all more or less, explicitly or implicitly, struggle with the question of Ionesco’s dying king: “Why was I born, if not forever?”20 Why should that which at one time began to be not continue to be infinitely or eternally? Jankélévitch asserts that, within being itself there is no reason why that which is should cease to be.21 Being does not allow us to think of death. In opposition to Plato’s meditations on death, which presuppose being and thus inevitably amount to meditations on life, Jankélévitch posits the unthinkability and inexpressibility of death. He refers to death as “wholly other,” epekeina,22 signifying that death is beyond thought and language, beyond or outside the categories of being. Jankélévitch stresses the monstrosity and absurdity of death, its alterity and nothingness.23 According to Jankélévitch, “the Greeks” trivialize death by seeking strategies for immunizing the living from the scandal of death.24 From Homer and Virgil to Dante and from Socrates’s death in Phaedo to the Republic’s myth of Er, the poets and philosophers have written eschatological novels that naturalize the beyond as an extension, inversion, or sublimation of this world.25 Death, Socrates argues, should be welcome because it liberates the soul from the body, bringing it in closer proximity to truth and, therefore, truer being. His discourse proceeds unperturbed by the cup of hemlock. He moves from a myth of the afterworld to the present, then back to an expectation of seeing his conversation partners again in the beyond. His teaching of palingenesis and the migration of the soul treats death as a “journey” or a simple change of residence. He transforms the pathetic tragedy of the separation of friends into a consolation by making an “Au revoir” of an “adieu.”26 Jankélévitch posits death as an event in contrast to the Greeks’ perpetuation of being. In the language of Kierkegaard, death entails a leap. In Jankélévitch, the leap of death is linked to the rupture of the instant. Without itself appearing in the interval of time, death is an event that appears only to disappear. Jankélévitch calls it almost-nothing (presque-rien), a “disappearing appearance” (apparition disparaissante). When death enters, life exits. “The almostnothing (presque-rien) of the instant of death is the threshold that separates the nothingness of the beyond from worldly being, life from death.”27 In missing the non-mediating instant of separation, the Greeks and their descendants fail to acknowledge the essential finitude of thought and existence. While maintaining the distinction between body and soul, Jankélévitch sees the two

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as intimately conjoined. In this manner, he refutes the substantial soul-body dualism that underlies Plato’s optimism about an afterlife.28 Thought takes place only in an embodied thinking being, Jankélévitch insists, and death is simply the end of the living being in its pyscho-somatic unity.29 For Jankélévitch, death’s scandalous character is defined by its disruptive nature and utter opacity. Every death, he contends, is sudden, contingent, and ultimately violent: nex, brutal abruption.30 The appearance of death constitutes the final disappearance of a life. Without extension or form, death cannot possibly designate an elsewhere, another life. Instead, it is pure negation, nowhere, the absence of life.31 It is not a beginning of a new and other duration; it is without time. According to Jankélévitch, the instant of death demarcates the boundary between time and nothingness; it is the indivisible cut between vital plentitude and lethal emptiness. Jankélévitch detects a blurring of the distinction between life and death even in the thought of the ascetic philosophers like the Stoics Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and their Christian heirs. The ascetic philosophers believe that each day should be lived as if it were one’s last, thus making out of life a continual death.32 Like Plato, they equate living with learning to die, as if one could approach death, approximate it, or subdivide it into little deaths; and like Plato, they praise the possibility of learning to die, as if one could prepare for death, work on getting better at dying, much as one gets better at playing the violin by practicing. Jankélévitch is certain, however, that there can be no approximation of death and that there is nothing to learn from it or about it. It is nothing. Life is life, and death is not. In his agnosticism, Jankélévitch allows that religion forms a bond between this side and beyond, but he expects philosophers to acknowledge the awful separation of life and death and to reject any analogy that links them.33 For Jankélévitch, this philosophical respect for the absolute dissimilarity of life and death—that is, for the wholly otherness of death—is the precondition for recognizing in death the principle for life. The consciousness of death, he writes, exerts a retroactive power to define our finitude.34 Because death is certain but the hour is uncertain (mors certa, hora incerta), the human situation regarding the when of death proves to be “elastic.”35 We may hope that our lives will be prolonged through the development of technology, the advancement of our medical understanding, and the willful commitment to better, healthier living. A positive connection between death and life lies in our capacity to postpone its arrival or, in the words of Dylan Thomas, to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” It also exists in our awareness of the fragility, transience, and immanence of life. Jankélévitch contends that art and philosophy demonstrate “the retroactive effect of the limit” by illuminating the extraordinariness of banality and the wonder of existence.36 Jankélévitch also attests that embracing the fragile finitude of human existence

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can lead to a life lived more intensely, seriously, and fully. Insofar as death is arbitrary and uncertain, it is an evil that should be passionately fought. Insofar as it is a certainty, Jankélévitch sees in death a positive condition for life. Like Pascal and Heidegger, Jankélévitch asserts that our relation to our own death is what distinguishes us humans from animals.37 There is a certain irony in that we are aware of and subject to our demise. We are encouraged to rebel against its uncertainty and helpless to prevent its certainty.38 Following Pascal, Jankélévitch situates human life inside and outside of death, but his focus is on the temporality of human existence. THE ASYMMETRY OF BIRTH AND DEATH Jankélévitch’s first philosophy approaches life from its beginning and his thanatology from its end. He views human life as a series of entrances and exits and the substance of life as the intense and vibrant in-between. The miracle of life, for Jankélévitch, consists of becoming between the events of birth and death, the two wonders of existence. The wholly other of death is thus not only the negative limit of being; it also underscores the wholly other character of contingent facticity—namely, that there is something rather than nothing and that there is someone rather than no one. Jankélévitch appears to be close to Jean-Paul Sartre on this point. For Sartre, “death is a pure fact as is birth. It comes to us from the outside and transforms us into the outside. At bottom it is in no way distinguished from birth, and it is the identity of birth and death that we call facticity.”39 Arguing against Heidegger’s ontological analyses of being-toward-death, Sartre concludes that death is “nothing but a certain aspect of facticity and of being-forothers. . . . It is absurd that we are born; it is absurd that we die.”40 Following a dominant strand of Western philosophy from Epicurus to Feuerbach and Wittgenstein, Sartre considers death insignificant. Since it comes from outside of existence, it has nothing to do with existence.41 In an epicurean vein, Jankélévitch, too, claims that death plays hide-and-seek with consciousness: where I am, death is not; and where death is, I am no longer. At any moment, only one of the two is possible: consciousness or death.42 Upon closer examination, however, Jankélévitch’s position subtly differs from Sartre’s.43 Jankélévitch emphatically denies a symmetry between birth and death, much less an identity. Sartre views birth and death as two bookends of facticity—one emerging from nothing and the other returning to nothing. Their apparent symmetry thus depends on a spatial image. The circularity of Sartre’s logic is reminiscent of the one Nietzsche decries at the beginning of his Twilight of the Idols: “In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is worthless.”44 According to Sophocles’s Oedipus at

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Colonus, it is best never to have been born.45 Schopenhauer traces this dismal view back to Herodotus, the father of history, as if it were the verdict on all of history.46 The absurdity of passing from nothingness to being, only to return to dust and ashes or nothingness seems to commit life itself to vanity. “Meaningless! Utterly meaningless!” says the son of David in Ecclesiastes (1:1). Voltaire, Hume, Leibniz, and Goethe among others have each put their spin on this narrative that life is not worth repeating or even worth living.47 To be fair, Sartre, like Jankélévitch, seeks to establish responsibility and meaning in between birth and death, but his use of a spatial metaphor that frames life as boxed in between the single absurdity of birth and death demonstrates his theoretical remove. In short, Sartre appropriates a third-person perspective on death. According to Jankélévitch, Sartre misses the significance of the story in-between. Temporally, birth and death are neither exchangeable nor symmetrical. Far from identical, they are incomparable because the life between changes everything.48 Whereas birth begins with the promise of a future and is full of potentiality, death abruptly concludes a past. The lived life does not only accentuate the difference between natality and lethality, however. It also pertains to the qualitative difference between never and never again. Breaking with Sartre, Camus, and Schopenhauer, Jankélévitch maintains that the asymmetry of birth and death becomes all the more distinct after death and that an immanent immortality is not solely reserved for the philosophers, poets, politicians, architects, and others whose ideas and actions extend beyond their death in their works. Jankélévitch believes that a certain weak immortality obtains for every person. Even if we leave no visible trace, we do leave an inextinguishable trace through the very fact of having lived, he suggests. Linking existence and eternity, Jankélévitch sees in the singularity of each human life an eternal truth that has a beginning and that will one day die, an immortalis moritura.49 The fact that each individual is singular and unique is a fact that not only will not be but also cannot be repeated.50 Each person has the character of a hapax, and the singularity of the ipseity of each individual is sealed with irrevocability. The fact of once having been who one is makes it such that one will never not have been. The having-been and the having-done (having sinned and having loved) constitute what he calls an eternal event a parte post. The irreversibility of death seals the irreparable character of lived experience. Contemplated from a third-person perspective, this notion may offer little consolation within the vanity of existence. Conceding that it is indeed almost nothing (presque rien), Jankélévitch bears witness to the brevity and insubstantiality of individual human existence. Each person is almost-nothing, almost-never, almost-no one, but always almost. For Jankélévitch, the almost (presque) separating human life from nothingness is decisive.51 To never again feel the warmth of the sun, never

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again smell the sweet fragrance of spring, or never again hold loved ones in a tender embrace is altogether different from never having done so—never having lived, never having loved. THE SECOND PERSON: BETWEEN HEIDEGGER AND LEVINAS For Jankélévitch, the philosophical analysis of death serves to rehabilitate a philosophy of particularity.52 Death particularizes each of us, he claims, and it is this claim that provides the basis for comparing him to the other twentieth-century philosopher of death, Martin Heidegger. Like Heidegger, Jankélévitch privileges the first person’s approach to death, highlighting that everyone dies alone and that it is my death that concerns me. Matteo Cestari laments this privileging of the first-person perspective in Jankélévitch’s thought, concluding that he therefore neglects the “essentially social and relational character of death.”53 Emmanuel Levinas, who elevates ethics, instead of ontology, to first philosophy levies the same critique at Heidegger, his former teacher. At the heart of the debate between Heidegger and Levinas is the question, whose death is first, mine or the other’s? Although Jankélévitch undoubtedly does privilege the first-person perspective, he sees in the second-person perspective a bridge from the anonymity of the third-person perspective to the tragic subjectivity of the first-person perspective.54 Moreover, his perspectival phenomenology develops its most poignant contours in the second-person perspective by demonstrating the possible connections between the various perspectives.55 For Jankélévitch, the intermediate death of the you links the distance and indifference associated with the death of others with the immediacy of one’s own death, which is je-meines. According to Jankélévitch, the death of a friend or beloved causes me to realize my own mortality. My relative or my friend is the first other, the closest alterity. In other words, I approximate death in the proximity of the death of one close to me. Her death or his death is almost like my own; it affects my entire being. Levinas thus strikes the heart of Jankélévitch’s analysis when he writes, “We encounter death in the face of the other . . . . The death of the other: therein lies the first death.”56 In contrast to Levinas, however, this death, for Jankélévitch, presupposes an intimate relationship. Jankélévitch asserts that it is only with a second-person perspective that we can apprehend all three temporal aspects of death—before death, the moment of death, and after death. On this point, his distance from Heidegger is clear.57 In Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, death enables the possibility of having one’s being as a whole. He does not conceive the end of death as the end of a living human being; rather, he conceives the human individual,

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Dasein, as being-towards-death (Sein zum Tode).58 Death is not an event in the world but a possibility we run toward or anticipate as what concerns us. It is thus on the basis of care (Sorge) that Heidegger grasps death, and his explication of care (Sorge) reveals it to be the constitutional structure of Dasein, entailing “being-ahead” (Entwurf, Vorlaufen), “already-in” (Geworfenheit), and “being-together-with” (Mitsein, Verfallenheit).59 In care, the three temporal dimensions—future, present, and past—are apprehended in Dasein; that is, in the individual self. Dasein thus temporalizes itself, ecstatically holding together the dimensions of time. In contrast, proceeding from an existentiell conception of time, Jankélévitch claims that the three temporal positions of before death, the moment of death, and after death can be apprehended only when it is your death (the death of the first-other). Your death can be in my past; I can be there for you when you die; and I can anticipate your death. This link between personal perspectivity and temporality requires brief elucidation. It is possible to have a second-person and third-person perspective, according to which I view your death as a natural, consummate fact. This view, which Heidegger identifies with das Man, is, for Jankélévitch, a posthumous, retrospective attitude toward the other’s death and thus a past perspective. However, for someone who survives the death of a beloved, your death may be accepted as a natural fact or as a mournful reminder of someone past, and perhaps as a source of abiding love. Whereas Heidegger derides as pseudo-experience the act of being there when the other dies, Jankélévitch asserts the importance of bearing witness to the death of the other.60 He suggests that the death of someone close is the nearest we may come to experiencing death.61 Even if I cannot conceive of what impenetrable death is or what it means, simply being there for the other in the form of witnessing, supporting, and caring is not without value, even as a limited realization of my own possibilities and impotence. Both Jankélévitch and Heidegger agree, though, that the future perspective of death is the privileged site of the first person. My death, as a future possibility, concerns me. As my ownmost possibility, to use Heidegger’s term, it is the possibility of the impossibility of my existence.62 Jankélévitch, however, goes further to explore the relationship between my death and your death. In that relationship, your death may concern me as much as my own. The possible death of a beloved other creates a feeling of Angst. My anticipation of his or her death—the looming and contingent threat of his or her nonbeing—is a feeling I may find the courage to embrace without fleeing or seeking finite and illusory security. Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), Jankélévitch suggests, remains a uniquely individual event but one that, in the case of the beloved, applies equally to a philosophy of you.63 In writing about death, Jankélévitch always returns to his primary concern, which is what the death of the other means for me. And here his distance from

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Levinas is most evident. For Jankélévitch, the separation of my consciousness and my death can be bridged by the death of an intimate other. Death can be thought, he writes, if death and consciousness are divided between two heads.64 To put the matter in existential terms, the two heads cannot be randomly selected; they must be intimately related. In his mind, John Donne is mistaken when he writes, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” It is only the death of a you—a mother or father, a friend, or a neighbor—that diminishes me in my very being. While the you is other, not every other is a you. For Jankélévitch, it is the personal relationship to the other that makes his or her death different from the distant and rational death of others. Levinas, on the other hand, portrays the face of the other as irreducible to an I-You relationship. For him, the I-You relationship remains bound to the primacy of the subject (the I), to a language of intimacy (as opposed to separation and transcendence), and to an ethics based on symmetry and reciprocity (instead of asymmetrical responsibility up to the point of substitution for the other).65 Where Jankélévitch sees the relationship with the first-other as one of love, Levinas largely disavows love in order to establish responsibility. The death of the other, for Jankélévitch, is my loss; for Levinas, it is my responsibility. “Ultimate nearness,” Levinas claims, is “to survive as a guilty one [. . .]. In the guiltiness of the survivor, the death of the other [l’autre] is my affair.”66 It is impossible to imagine Jankélévitch making such a claim. It is nearness, Jankélévitch suggests, that makes me suffer your death almost like my own. At the center of Jankélévitch’s philosophy of death is love; the beloved other’s death partly entails my own death because part of me dies with the death of the beloved. I am forever changed, not just because the other is my beloved but also because the other is an inestimable haecceity, an incomparable hapax, literally unique in the history of the world.67 Love, for Jankélévitch, is not self-centered but directed toward the who of the other in his or her absolute singularity. Thus, death reveals love, allowing the inconsolable to weep for the irreplaceable.68 Like Levinas, Jankélévitch identifies the death of the other beloved as the first death, but he believes it is first because it mediates my own death to me. I realize that what happened to you will—I do not know when or how—happen to me.69 While “my death is destined to remain an undetermined state for me . . . , your death is the only, limited possibility I have to come to grips with my death,” as Cestari puts it.70 It is not the case, as the Stoics believe, that the realization of one’s own mortality comes as a rational deduction from the universally valid law that “everybody dies.” Instead, the realization is a “sudden intuition (intuition instanée) I have when someone close to me dies.”71 This is especially the case, Jankélévitch observes, when one’s mother or father dies. Their death, formerly an intermediacy, suddenly has immediacy: now I am in line.

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The death of the first other entails, therefore, an existential experience of death, but, according to Jankélévitch, the death of a second person is also a metaphysical event.72 In the death of the beloved we are awakened from our ontological complacency to the “gratuity and profound peculiarity” (gratuité et de l’étrangeté profonde) of being itself. It is often upon the death of a beloved person that we first apprehend the contingency of existence, which casts its shadow on our birth and our time on earth. What we take to be selfevident is not self-evident; what we, in a dogmatic slumber of being, take to be given and stable is groundless. The people we love, the times we share, are gifts, not givens. In Jankélévitch, the death of the beloved other reveals the radical contingency of existence. This death shatters our dumb trust that life will continue and opens us to the long-forgotten wonder of the everyday, the normal, and the natural. Jankélévitch thus finds metaphysical meaning in the natural and banal. From the quiddity (whatness) of things flows a supernatural message that exposes everything in its that-ness (quoddity). The fact that there is something rather than nothing is a mystery without depth, he writes.73 There is nothing behind, below, or beyond immanent, finite life. Things are as they are, but now, by means of what he calls a “thaumaturgic grace” (grâce thaumaturgique), things are seen and apprehended in the wonder of their existence.74 Jankélévitch confirms what Pascal intuits: the uniqueness of personal existence and the quodditas of the universe, the ipseity of the person and the quodditas of being are connected in the question of why there is something and not rather nothing.75 This metaphysical insight does not belong solely to philosophers. Death makes metaphysicians of us all, insofar as “the mark par excellence of a metaphysical spirit consists in the capacity to be astonished by that which is the least astonishing.”76 This capacity to be astonished, Jankélévitch asserts, characterizes humanity.77 Through thaumaturgic grace, we value life and others all the more because of their vulnerability and uncertain future. The ipseity of every I and every you is simply that it is, and it is this one and no other.78 Beyond the length of memory, the facts of having-been and having-loved resist the wear of time. They are irreversible, irrevocable, and ultimately inextinguishable. The death of the other reminds us to live and love intensely, knowing that the having-been and having-done is all that will remain. ALAS . . . WHY? Interspersed throughout La Mort like visible sighs is the interjection “alas,” hélas. It is as if Jankélévitch is interrupting his written text to speak, to interrogate the limits of reason: yes, but still. If it were only so! To what avail?

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We, as humans, have the intellectual capacity to pose the question “Why?” but we lack the ability to answer it.79 Recalling the death of his father, he asks what does his death mean? The fact that such a humble man lived and died makes no sense, he concedes. One cannot understand it. Jankélévitch’s philosophy of death is not rationally satisfying or emotionally comforting. The supernatural message of that-ness, he suggests, is senseless.80 We ultimately cannot answer the question “Why?” because we cannot grasp the sense of our life as a whole; our life is not whole until we die. Kierkegaard writes that life may be understood by looking back, but it must be lived forward.81 This is the lesson at the heart of Jankélévitch’s teachings on futurition. Jankélévitch writes that the structure of human temporality makes it impossible to achieve Heidegger’s dream of having the whole of existence in anticipation. We may project possibilities, but human becoming remains ongoing and indeterminate until the very last breath.82 For as long as one is alive, the significance and value of the past is unfinished and redeemable.83 With death, life ends abruptly and prevents us—writers/actors—from reading or seeing our own play. Death ends the possibility of self-realization.84 The closed book of one’s own life, in which the whole meaning is contained, is open only to other, later readers. The question of what my life means as a whole can be answered only by others who know what my life meant for them. For Sartre, this estrangement from oneself underscores that “hell is other people.” Jankélévitch takes solace in the thought that other people can provide valued testimony after we die. Our life as a whole may be senseless to us, but we can find sense in the interval of life! Jankélévitch recognizes significance in the pursuit of goals, activities, and happiness in the days, months, and years.85 We discover and cultivate direction for our lives, mostly through improvisation. In Jankélévitch’s thought, becoming is characterized by an “ateleological absurdity.”86 However, within the interval of life, life is full of meanings. Jankélévitch prioritizes the meaning in life over the meaning of life. His reflections focus on the plurality of meanings we create rather than on any singular meaning inherent in life. For Jankélévitch, death is the negation of meaning and being, yet, paradoxically, dying is the precondition for living. In this paradox, death is the non-sense that gives sense to life by negating sense:87 Death retroactively makes the sense of life clear. Certainly, there is a sense of the continuity in this life that reveals the non-sense of cessation; but, in turn, the non-sense of cessation renders manifest the sense of continuation: the shocking absurdity of death, the scandal of definitive annihilation paradoxically consecrates the posthumous meaning of lived life. Properly speaking, this posthumous meaning is not really intelligible: this posthumous meaning is itself the sense of non-sense.88

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Death is what Jankélévitch calls an organ-obstacle. It is that which ends life and that which, by limiting life, gives form to life. A person lives under the precondition of mortality. That which lives is that which can die, as Jean Wahl expresses it.89 Jankélévitch takes this notion a step further: the retrospective effect of death is what makes life worth living. “The blank wall of death, beyond which consciousness simply cannot penetrate, throws the individual back into life and designates life as his proper field of concern,” George Pattison explains.90 Death makes us aware of the irreversibility of time, motivating us to take time more seriously.91 For Jankélévitch, our prescience of death impassions and dramatizes our lives.92 It is what motivates us to live life fully. Paul Valéry summarizes Jankélévitch’s perspectival phenomenology in his poetic lines: “Une difficulté est une lumière. Une difficulté insurmountable est un soleil” (“A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun”).93 Viewed from Jankélévitch’s third-person perspective, death poses a problem to be solved. It lights the path of science and technology, if not to overcome, to at least postpone death as long as possible and improve the quality of our lives in the in-between. Seen from Jankélévitch’s first and secondperson perspectives, death is like a sun illuminating the fragile richness of existence. Death reveals there is nothing new under the sun, but it also renews life, filling banality with originality in the repetition of experiences and loves. For Jankélévitch, death is the unsolvable mystery, creating a sense of wonder so that we may fully embrace life. NOTES 1. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, VI, 347 and 365., trans. William Finlayson Trotter, Mary Louise Booth, and Orlando Williams Wight (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910), 120. “The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.” 2. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Penser la mort? (Paris: Éditions Liana Levi, 1994), 54. 3. Cf. Franςoise Schwab, “Avant-propos,” in Penser la mort? (Paris: Éditions Liana Levi, 1994), 11. 4. Christina Howells, Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late TwentiethCentury French Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 109. 5. Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant: Essais et conférences (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 119, quoted in Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du presque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 226–227. Cf. Ibid., 54. Unless stated otherwise, the translations of direct quotes from Jankélévitch are all mine.

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6. “Die Sorge lebt zwischen Heute und Morgen,” in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 19, 2005, Nr. 243, p. L26, accessed on July 23, 2018. 7. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mort (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1977), 467. 8. Ibid., 37–38. 9. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 53. 10. Matteo Cestari, “‘Each Death is Unique’: Beyond Epistemic Transfiguration in Thanatology,” in Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan: Representing, Practicing, Performing, eds. Massimo Raveri and Andrea De Antoni, C’Foscari Japanese Studies 6 (2017), 55. 11. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. and trans. Pacale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 193. 12. For the distinction between a “problem” and a “mystery,” which Jankélévitch adopts from Gabriel Marcel, see, for example, La Mort, 423; Penser la mort? 59. For his distinction between a “mystery” and a “secret,” see, for example, Le Je-ne-saisquoi et le presque-rien 2: La Méconnaissance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 232; and Penser? 38. 13. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 466. Jankélévitch is at heart a metaphysician, and the question at the heart of metaphysics is the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Although the substance of this question can be traced back to Greek antiquity, Leibniz was the first to formulate it: “pourquoi il y a plus tôt quelque chose que rien?” Schelling (“Warum ist nicht nichts, warum ist überhaupt etwas?”), Schopenhauer (“Lieber nichts als etwas”), and Heidegger (“Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr nichts?”) appropriate and individually accentuate it to suit their philosophical projects. Hannah Arendt turns the ontological question into a political one, inquiring, “Why is there someone rather than no one?” Framing Arendt’s version as a primarily ethical question, Jankélévitch combines metaphysics with ethics, Schelling with Arendt. For an overview of the history of this question, see Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? Wandel und Variationen einer Frage, eds. Rico Hauswald, Jens Lemanski, and Daniel Schubbe (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2013). 14. Plato, Phaedo, 67e. Cicero writes, “The Whole Life of a Philosopher is a Meditation on Death,” in The Tusculan Disputations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, book 1, chap. 30 (London, 1758), 49. Seneca offers the following advice: “Learning how to live takes a whole lifetime, and—you’ll perhaps be more surprised at this—it takes a whole lifetime to learn how to die.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, 7.3 (Internet Archive, 2014). Montaigne cites Cicero at the beginning of his chapter on “To Philosophize is to Learn to Die,” in Michel de Montaigne, Essays, vol. 1, trans. Charles Cotton (New York: Edwin Hill, 1910), 179. Plato. The Works of Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1936), chap. 23, 1020–1022. 15. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, ed. Seymour Feldman, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), Part IV, Prop. 67, 193. Cf. Jankélévitch, Penser? 50. 16. Schwab, “Avant-propos,” 9. 17. Plato, Theaetetus, chap. 31, 1731–1788, p. 1742. 18. Plato, The Sophist, chap. 18, 1507–1553, p. 1525–1528. 19. Plato, Phaedo, chap. 23, 1016–1053, p. 1046.

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20. Cf. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 406. 21. Cf. Ibid., 404–405, 454. 22. Ibid., 248. 23. Ibid., 369–370. Insofar as Jankélévitch stresses the incommunicability of death, he compares the silence imposed by death with the mystical silence concerning God. Like God, death, he asserts, is unsayable, and like God, death is beyond all categories, is of another order, is wholly other. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the notion of a creator God as beyond being is significantly different from the nothingness of death. Jankélévitch thus distinguishes between “silence indicible” and “silence ineffable.” Whereas God’s beyond being is ineffable, death is unspeakable because it is nothing; God fills the mystic with a godly silence, which, when broken, makes him stutter, as John of the Cross attests. With regard to God, there is so much to say (an immeasurable fullness), whereas the silence of death is empty and sterile (a deadly silence). See La Mort, 82–91. 24. Ibid., 256. See, for example, Epicurus, who maintains that death need not concern me, for where I am death is not, and where death is, I am no longer. It never touches me, not even tangentially. Jankélévitch engages with Epicurus’s remedy in several passages. See, for example, ibid., 270. 25. Ibid., 375–376. 26. Ibid., 322. 27. Ibid., 286. 28. Following Bergson, for whom the eye is not only the organ of sight but also an obstacle because of its limitations with respect to visual perspective, Jankélévitch conceives of the body as an organ-obstacle of the soul. It is the enabling condition of life and, most evidently in mortality, its inherent limitation. Cf. La Mort, 100. 29. Cf. ibid., 286, 355, 404. 30. Cf. ibid., 232, 282. 31. Ibid., 245–246. 32. Ibid., 260. 33. Ibid., 369. Cf. Jankélévitch, Penser? 44–45. The thrust of Jankélévitch’s argument, however, is unequivocally a critique of religions and their notions of an afterlife. Like Heidegger, he distinguishes between the anxiety of being faced with death and its derived, fallen form, fear, which, for him, manifests in the fear concerning one’s condition in the afterlife. 34. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 270. 35. Ibid., 163. 36. Ibid., 456. 37. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), §49, 247. 38. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 211. Cf. Penser? 54–56. 39. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1956), 698. 40. Ibid., 699. 41. See Cestari, “Each Death,” 38. 42. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 34.

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43. The proximity of Sartre to Epicurus is striking: “Since death escapes my project because it is unrealizable, I myself escape death in my very project. Since death is always beyond my subjectivity, there is no place for it in my subjectivity. [. . .] Therefore we can neither think of death nor wait for it nor arm ourselves against it; but also our projects as projects are independent of death.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 700. 44. Friedrich Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, Das Problem des Sokrates, I in Werke, vol. II (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 951. 45. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), lines 1388–1391. 46. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Mineola: Dover, 1966), 324–325. 47. See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 206–211. 48. Jankélévitch, Penser? 18. 49. Jankélévitch, Philosophie premiére, 51. 50. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “De l’ipséité,” Revue Internationale de philosophie 2, no. 5 (October 1939): 21–42. 51. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 469. 52. Ibid., 25. 53. Cestari, “Each Death,” 59. 54. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 29. Cf. Heidegger, SuZ, §9, 41–42; ibid., §47, 240. 55. In an interview from 1967, Jankélévitch says that several of his colleagues chastised him for writing a book about death in 1966 when other more pressing topics compelled philosophical attention. One of his colleagues, however, expressed understanding because, as he told Jankélévitch, everybody has lost somebody. Penser? 15. Jankélévitch highlights at the beginning of this interview his ethical concern with the other beloved’s death. Moreover, his experiences surrounding the Shoah spur his efforts to rehabilitate an ethics of particularity. In both La Mort and especially Le Pardon (Forgiveness), his concern is always also the other’s death. 56. Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 105, 43. 57. Jankélévitch is much more of a metaphysician than Heidegger is. Whereas the latter’s project is fundamental ontology, Jankélévitch probes the beyond being and the otherwise than being; while Heidegger’s project seeks to overcome the constraints of modern subjective philosophy, Jankélévitch basically presupposes a Cartesian subject, only to expose the limits of consciousness with respect to cognitive finitude. Most pertinently, in all of his works, Jankélévitch establishes an idiosyncratic link between metaphysics and ethics. This central concern is not one he shares with Heidegger. 58. Heidegger, SuZ, 245. 59. Heidegger writes that “the being of Dasein means being-ahead-of-oneselfalready-in (the world) as being-together-with (innerworldly beings encountered).” Ibid., §41, 192. Cf. ibid., §65. 60. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 239. 61. Ibid., 34.

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62. Heidegger, SuZ, §52, 258–259. 63. Cf. ibid., §52–53, 265–266. 64. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 34. 65. Levinas’s critiques of the I-You relationship takes particular shape in his critiques of Martin Buber’s philosophy, which is based on this relationship. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge,” in The Levinas Reader, 59–74. See also Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Levinas on the ‘Wholly Other,’” Levinas Studies 8, no. 1 (2013): 40–41. 66. Levinas, God, Death, and Time, 39; emphasis in the original. 67. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 29. 68. Ibid. 69. Even the third-person perspective can conceivably occasion such realization. “They,” Cestari observes, “can [. . .] become you.” Cestari, “Each Death,” 60; emphasis in the original. 70. Ibid., 59; emphasis in the original. 71. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 22. 72. Ibid., 462–463. 73. Ibid., 465. 74. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 203. Cf. Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Levinas,” 43. 75. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 455–456. 76. Ibid., 455. 77. Cf. Jankélévitch, Penser? 54. Jankélévitch claims that a certain “metaphysical ambition” belongs to the human vocation itself. La Mort, 452. The sole difference between philosophers and non-philosophers consists in the philosopher not having to wait for death in order to recognize the wonder of existence. Ibid., 456. 78. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 47, 55. See also Aaron Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 122–128; Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Levinas,” 36–37. 79. Jankélévitch, Penser? 39; La Mort, 463–465. 80. Jankélévitch, Penser? 32. 81. Søren Kierkegaard, Pap. IV A 164/JP 1030, cited in Niels Nymann Ericksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 11. 82. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 124–125. 83. Cf. Max Scheler, “Repentance and Rebirth,” in Person and Self-Value: Three Essays, trans. M. S. Frings (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 95. 84. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 450. 85. Jankélévitch, Penser? 24. 86. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 188–189. 87. Jankélévitch, Penser? 40. 88. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 454. Cf. Penser? 40. 89. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 449. 90. George Pattison, Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (London: Ashgate, 2013), 54. 91. Jankélévitch, La Mort, 313.

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92. Ibid., 94. 93. Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, in Oeuvres, vol. II, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 795.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cestari, Matteo. “‘Each Death is Unique’: Beyond Epistemic Transfiguration in Thanatology.” In Death and Desire in Contemporary Japan: Representing, Practicing, Performing, edited by Massimo Raveri and Andrea De Antoni, C’Foscari Japanese Studies 6. Italia: Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2017, 35–78. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Tusculan disputations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. London, 1758. Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning, edited by Pacale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. “Die Sorge lebt zwischen Heute und Morgen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 19, 2005, Nr. 243, p. L26, accessed on July 23, 2018. Ericksen, Niels Nymann. Kierkegaard, Pap. IV A 164/JP 1030, cited in Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. Hauswald, Rico, Jens Lemanski, and Daniel Schubbe, eds. Warum ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? Wandel und Variationen einer Frage. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 2013. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993, 17th Edition. Howells, Christina. Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. “De l’ipséité.” Revue Internationale de philosophie 2, no. 5 (October 1939): 21–42. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. v. 2. La Méconnaissance. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. La Mort. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1977. ———. “Le Pardon.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch: Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab. Paris: Flammarion, 1998, 991–1149. ———. Penser la mort? Paris: Éditions Liana Levi, 1994. ———. Philosophie première: Introduction à une philosophie du presque. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. Kelley, Andrew. “Jankélévitch and Levinas on the ‘Wholly Other.’” Levinas Studies 8, no. 1 (2013): 23–43. Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. “Martin Buber and the Theory of Knowledge.” In The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand, 59–74. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Looney, Aaron. Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015.

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Montaigne, Michel de. Essays, vol. 1. Translated by Charles Cotton. New York: Edwin Hill, 1910. Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Werke in Drei Bänden. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997. Pascal, Blaise. Thoughts. Translated by William Finlayson Trotter, Mary Louise Booth, and Orlando Williams Wight. New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910. Pattison, George. Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay. London: Ashgate, 2013. Plato. The Works of Plato. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1936. _____. Sämtliche Werke, 3 vols., Berlin Edition, edited by Erich Loewenthal. Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1982. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Pocket Books, 1956. Scheler, Max. “Repentance and Rebirth.” In Person and Self-Value: Three Essays, translated by M. S. Frings. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987, 87–124. ———. “Reue und Wiedergeburt.” In Vom Ewigen im Menschen. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1954, 28–59. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Mineola: Dover, 1966. Schwab, Franςoise. “Avant-propos.” In Penser la mort? Paris: Éditions Liana Levi, 1994, 9–13. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. On the Shortness of Life. 7.3 Internet Archive, 2014. Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics, edited by Seymour Feldman, translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992. Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Valéry, Paul. Mauvaises pensées et autres, in Oeuvres, vol. II, edited by Jean Hytier. Paris: Gallimard, 2000.

Chapter 6

Vladimir Jankélévitch’s “Diseases of Temporality” and Their Impact on Reconciliatory Processes Francesco Ferrari1

Aiming at the “creation of normal and, if possible, good relationships after grave violent incidents,”2 reconciliatory processes are constitutively temporal processes. A philosophical exploration of time is therefore required in their understanding, and a possibility in this direction is offered by the writings of Vladimir Jankélévitch. As a scholar of Henri Bergson, Jankélévitch inherited his conception of durée, formulating an original moral philosophy, which is presented in this paper as a phenomenology of reconciliatory processes according to their temporal connotation. To reach its goal, the essay focuses on a still little-known aspect of Jankélévitch’s thought: the role played in reconciliatory processes by those moral feelings which he calls “diseases of temporality” (malheurs de la temporalité)3. In the first section of this paper I present how time, according to Jankélévitch, has two fundamental and conflicting dimensions. First, considered as the flow of constant becoming and production of future, ratifying naturelaws, time is irreversible. Second, morally recognized as the indestructible being of what-has-been in its having-taken-place, time is set as irrevocable. Whereby reversing time is impossible, and regaining a past moment in the purity of its pastness is unattainable too, it is in resistance against irreversibility that a moral option is offered. It takes place through the recognition of a past moment as “irrevocable.” The consequences of this recognition for reconciliatory processes are discussed throughout this paper. Wrongdoings, once they are acknowledged in their indestructible irrevocability, are set as irrevocable for the interval time to come. They took place, nonetheless, in the ineffable extension of the instant. The dialectic between interval and instant, echoing the one between irreversibility and irrevocability, is explored in the second section of this essay, 95

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through a focus on the closely related antithesis between instant and interval virtues. Virtues like courage and fidelity are examined here. The former is understood by Jankélévitch as the instant virtue par excellence, which enables any new human undertaking; the latter as the paradigmatic interval virtue, which is required in any continuation. The hermeneutical faculty of memory becomes of paramount concern, since it makes possible and jeopardizes, at the same time, a faithful bond toward the irrevocable. According to Jankélévitch, memory operates a ceaseless work of reconciliation that might be defined as the complex process of overcoming-and-integration of suffered offenses in a higher synthesis. This definition of reconciliation introduces the third section of this chapter, which undertakes an articulated analysis of the fundamental time-related moral feelings—resentment, nostalgia, regret, and remorse—that arise in the dialectic between the irreversible and the irrevocable and represent, as such, the main obstacles toward the work of overcoming-and-integration proper of reconciliation. Jankélévitch coins for them the expression “diseases of temporality,” aptly focusing on their painful, sometimes even traumatic, essence. Through their phenomenological examination, it becomes evident that the past does not merely pass, but rather remains as “lived time,” and structures and burdens the consciousness of victims and victimizers. It therefore becomes salient how and why the diseases of temporality represent tenacious counterforces, which often lead to enduring stares of irreconcilability. The fourth and final section of the paper sets the thesis that the diseases of temporality cannot be successfully healed with the equivalence logic of justice to restore a status quo ante. Therefore, a new beginning, which stems out of the overabundance logic of love, is needed, beyond any tit-for-tat measures, which inhabit justice in its punitive retributive paradigm as well as in its commutative-reparative one. The gift-giving relationship of forgiveness, from which the international reception of Jankélévitch’s writings has recently begun,4 is crucial in this regard, and gains evidence in the moral confrontation between love and justice. Amid this struggle, fundamental in reconciliatory processes, the final polarity of this paper announces itself: namely, the one between the hyperbolical order of grace and the linear order of law. Its consequences are drawn throughout this section and summarized in the final remarks of the essay. THE DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM BETWEEN THE IRREVERSIBLE AND THE IRREVOCABLE Since 1929, following Bergson’s Creative Evolution,5 Jankélévitch affirms that the primary fact of our spiritual and moral life is that time is irreversible6.

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Irreversibility is the temporality of time itself, which we can visualize through the forward-oriented arrow of time.7 As the word itself suggests, irreversibility implies a vers, that is, a sense, a direction. This sense is the becoming (de-venir), which, according to Jankélévitch, is a permanent alteration and a ceaseless progression toward the future (a-venir). In his perspective, the future is the advent (avènement) of the wholly-other,8 whose event (é-vénement) comes at every instant, and, looking toward it, it is object of intentionality by human agents as futurition. Insofar as it is the flow of forward-oriented time, the “becoming (de-venir) does not come back (re-venir)”9. Irreversibility implies the impossibility of reversing time: “time is literally irreversible, that is to say, that it is absolutely impossible to reverse it.”10 There is no coming back in time, but we remember past moments through the faculty of memory in our consciousness. Thus, irreversible time opens itself up to its durée-dimension, receiving the name of “lived-time.”11 Far from merely being a physical quantity, lived time includes time-related moral feelings that are particularly relevant for reconciliatory processes, namely: resentment, nostalgia, regret, and remorse. They all express a resistance against irreversibility, which configures itself as fidelity toward past times (resentment) and spaces (nostalgia), as well as through the wish to have acted otherwise (regret), or even to annihilate one’s own deeds (remorse). Jankélévitch names them “diseases of temporality,” considering the profound suffering, sometimes even a traumatic one, that arises in the dialectic between time as irreversible and time as irrevocable, from which they stem. As we will see, in the third section of this paper, the diseases of temporality originate in the resistance against irreversibility, which takes place through the moral recognition of a past moment as “irrevocable.” All the diseases of temporality are forms of hypermnesia12: an excess of memory, which obstructed Jankélévitch’s own openness to the novelty of the future, too.13 Whereas irreversible time runs inexorably and insensitively, as an inflexible nature-law, the work of memory prevents it from disappearing, keeping it in the entanglement of the durée. Nevertheless, the act of remembering is also oriented by the sense of irreversibility, so that looking back always implies looking and going forward. According to this hermeneutical process, the past event cannot be regained in its original purity, that is, in its pastness. In Jankélévitch’s words: “every lived experience is the moment of a futurition, including memory (sou-venir), that seems to reverse its direction, including remorse, that seems to immobilize it, including nostalgia, that seems to slow it down. [. . .] The experience of the past, which is, after all, a present experience, is itself part of the futurition. [. . .] Everything is future, even the past.”14 Past does not cease to be, but rather accompanies us, and, in order to open ways toward a desirable future, it is required to come to terms with it in

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the present—in the most eminent way, through its recognition as irrevocable. Yet, no past moment is reachable in its pure pastness. Jankélévitch is aware that recalling memories in one’s consciousness, wishing to save them from oblivion, always implies drawing a new segment on the arrow of irreversible time that finally implies interpreting and even modifying remembrances from today’s perspective. Confronted with the nature-law of irreversibility, human beings, as free moral agents, might express their dissent toward it. The guiding principle of such resistance is the irrevocable. The irrevocable constitutes the recognition,15 through a moral initiative, of the indestructible ipseity of what-hasbeen in the single instant of its having-taken-place.16 The sentence “what has been, has been: and cannot not have been”17 aptly summarizes its acknowledgment. The irrevocable is also an event, and as such it is epoch-making and eternal. It bursts amid irreversible time, and breaks it up, so that nothing is like it was before. If the fact-of-having-once-been (fuisse) cannot be annihilated, the fact-of-having-once-done (fecisse) cannot be undone18: “we can neutralize the fact (factum), but we cannot annul the fact-of-having-done (fecisse) as if it was not-done (infectum).”19 With a fundamental thesis, Jankélévitch affirms that it is therefore possible to destroy someone or something in his/her present being, (that is, his/her quidditas), but the fact that someone or something was once in being (that is, his/her quodditas) is inexterminable. The argument positing that “death destroys the whole living being, but it cannot annihilate the fact-of-having-lived”20 has profound consequences in reconciliatory processes. In Jankélévitch’s writings, it becomes salient regarding the victims of Nazi Concentration camps. Although they were considered not to have the right to exist, no executioner, he counterargues, “will ever extinguish the having-been of those who, according to the delirious pretensions of the madmen determined to reverse temporality, should never have existed.”21 Attacking human beings in their “hominity,”22 that is, in their human essence, intending to erase their quodditas from world history is a crime against humanity. Given its atrocity, it is inexpiable, and its “legal forgetting”23 must be prevented. Moral irrevocability provides the foundation for legal imprescriptibility, turning from oblivion by temporal decay to perpetual responsibility toward the indelible fact-of-having-done. The possibility of the irrevocable emerges as the fundamental counterforce to the necessity of the irreversible: becoming, writes Jankélévitch, [k]eeps open the paths of futurition, renewal and endless progress. By the same way, it also indirectly affirms the fundamental indestructibility of the pastness, it consecrates the fact-of-having-been and the fact-of-having-taken-place in their irrevocable, inexterminable quodditas. Time is an open future as well as the secretion of an eternal, irrevocable having been, which it lays down behind.24

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Hence, irreversibility and irrevocability are complementary dimensions: whereas the former is the fleeting fluidity of becoming, the latter is not less tenacious and loyal. Acknowledged by human agency, the irrevocable illustrates that “the ethical vocation does not consist in ratifying the brutality of nature [. . .], but rather in denying it.”25 On the one hand, irrevocability exists only in the human world, and therefore seems weaker than irreversibility. On the other hand, it must be noticed that every irreversible moment, no matter how insignificant it appears, is potentially eligible as irrevocable, until a decision acknowledges it as such. The irreversible and the irrevocable finally stand in a dynamic equilibrium, which cannot be solved in any synthesis: [E]ach moment is at the same time irreversible, since it appears-disappears in the manner of a hapax, and irrevocable, since it leaves behind a having-takenplace, the trace of which can modify the whole course of existence. Let me say, more willingly: there is no last word. The irreversible and the irrevocable are always penultimate with respect to each other.26

Their mutual relationship can be illustrated through the following chiasmus: even if the irreversible is something ceaseless and continuous, it is lived as something fleeting and ephemeral; even if the irrevocable is something sporadic and intermittent, it is lived as something eternal and indestructible.27 Neither the irreversible nor the irrevocable has the final word. Their dialectic without synthesis echoes the fundamental antithesis between interval and instant, which is explored next. THE OSCILLATION BETWEEN INSTANTAND INTERVAL-VIRTUES The fact-of-having-done (fecisse), -given (dedisse), -been (fuisse), or -wanted (voluisse), recognized in its indestructible irrevocability, possesses nonetheless the temporal extension of the instant. Jankélévitch defines the instant as the urgency of what is absolutely new: it is something unprecedented and unpredictable. Interrupting the continuous stream of irreversibility, its unfolding is unique and unrepeatable (semelfactivité), and is, by its singularity and unexpectedness, an event: “the advent of the event is not a static point in space, but a fleeting instant in becoming. The event happens [. . .] and goes away; in other words, like everything that ‘occurs,’ it appears-disappears, and in the same instant.”28 As such, the event of the instant constitutes a coincidentally first and last time; it is a simultaneity between the opposites of not-yet and of not-anymore (primultimité), that expresses itself as a quasi-nihil: “it is the almost-nothing,

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where time and space vertiginously coincide.”29 Therefore, the instant owns the punctiform extension of an “almost-nothing” (presque-rien), combined with the ineffability of an “I-do-not-know-what” (je-ne-sais-quoi). Constantly on the verge of vanishing, it does not offer any articulated knowledge concerning its being (quidditas), but only the intuition that there is being (quodditas). In a dense passage from Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, Jankélévitch writes that “the nescio-quid of being does not answer the quid question with something (aliquid), but it makes us glimpse a I-Do-NotKnow-What: the fact in general that something exists. This I-Do-Not-KnowWhat, which is the fact-of-being, we call it the quod.”30 Beside the stratified interval of time as chronos, another experience of time is given: “the favorable instant of good movement [that] is a kind of occasion (kairos).”31 The quodditas of the instant-kairos and the quidditas of the interval-chronos represent two further fundamental expressions of the oscillation of temporality. We act and decide in the élan of the instant, with sudden and new deeds, as well as in the protracted durée of the interval, facing their consequences, persevering in the choices we made. Acting requires capabilities, and therefore virtues. Lead by the oscillation between instant and interval, Jankélévitch differentiates between “quodditative” instant-virtues and “quidditative” interval-virtues,32 so that “in the dichotomy between quod and quid we can read the one between humility and modesty, joy and contentment, courage and fidelity, forgiveness and excuse, love and justice, instant and interval.”33 Instant virtues—particularly, courage, forgiveness, and love—are characterized by selflessness, disinterestedness, and generosity. They overcome the selfishness proper of the philautie or self-love, showing that the good consists in its instantaneous accomplishment, without those reservations, which are peculiar to an excess of consciousness. Jankélévitch characterizes consciousness as the detachment from any “here and now” and a consequent lack of spontaneity, which is paradigmatically exemplified in introspection as the opposite of external-oriented action. Consciousness is therefore constantly on the point of being “bad conscience.”34 Furthermore, the good cannot be done once and for all, but requires an everlasting effort to be renewed in the irreversible time, whereas evil, on the contrary, owns indestructible irrevocability. No doctrine or system can replace the moral responsibility requested by the instant. Finally, since “a priori formulas do not exist, choices require far more demanding vigilance and seriousness.”35 The antithesis between instant and interval virtues is well exemplified through the polarity that binds courage and fidelity: “if courage is the virtue of the instant, fidelity is the virtue of the interval.”36 Courage is a necessary virtue in any beginning. With its quasi-nihil of consciousness, it expresses our own consent to the irreversible as our readiness to act, here and now.

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Arising, time and again, by the occasion of an unforeseen occurrence, “the object of courage is [. . .] the active urgency of the decision on the verge of acting.”37 In a complementary way, fidelity is a necessary virtue in any continuation. Residing in the faculty of memory, it makes possible our loyalty to the irrevocable in the durée; nonetheless, since “an irrevocable past deserves an immutable fidelity,”38 fidelity becomes a counterforce against indifference and forgetful frivolity, and finally expresses itself through its forms of obstinate resentment and unwavering gratitude. If courage empowers us to start something anew, fidelity binds us to our given word, our promises and oaths. Fidelity, nonetheless, cannot be reduced to a passive observance: keeping the élan of the irreversible in the durée of the interval requires the courage of “a new fidelity that is reborn in infidelity.”39 Courage and fidelity form a polarity, which cannot be solved, like the one between instant and interval: “fidelity is the virtue of continuous time, as well as courage is the virtue of the passage to the act. [. . .] To express the dual vocation of becoming, it will be necessary to unite the faithful immanence with the courageous transcendence.”40 The tension between granting forgiveness—which is an event initiated by a sudden decision,41 requiring, as such, the instant virtue of courage—and the effort to keep someone forgiven—which is made possible through the interval virtue of fidelity—can well exemplify the dialectic between instant courage and interval fidelity in reconciliatory processes. Notwithstanding its fleeting essence, the instant remains in the plot of interval durée, vivifying it. Human beings do not live in the amnesia of a mens momentanea or perpetual present, but are endowed with the faculty of memory. Keeping and recalling the not-anymore of the past, memory prepares to face the not-yet of the future (a-venir) with a reasonable pre-comprehension. The act of remembering (sou-venir) is articulated as a backward motion of preterition, which, apparently contrary to the sense of futurition, takes place in a given present moment, and is also forward oriented, according to the inflexible nature-law of irreversibility. In the middle of irreversible time, the substantial consciousness of the person attests itself in memory, as continuity of the durée: “memory is the durée itself as a continuation of change. It expresses that there is no duration, without a consciousness that is capable of prolonging its past in its present.”42 At the same time, since memory shapes (not merely stores) images of the past through an idealizing stylization, it is constantly exposed to the hermeneutical character, which is inherent in any retrospective glimpse: “memory is the exercise of a power, more than the growth of a having. It is more the ‘recreation’ or active realization of the past than its registration.”43 Given also the fact that the past is never regained in its pastness, memory is not only the organ but also an obstacle of the irrevocable.

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Its work of integration of traces from past experiences accompanies the constant transformation of the person: [T]he past rarely disappears without leaving any trace; the work of time in fact consists of integrating or digesting the adventitious event. [. . .] The organism, indeed, appears as a totality that is incessantly deformed and transformed, revised, retouched, and altered by the accidents of existence.44

The ceaseless work of integration, that shapes and reshapes our identity through the healing of memory, belongs to the fundamental prerequisites of reconciliatory processes,45 firstly in reconciliation with oneself. Whereas Jankélévitch’s vehement critique of any form of instrumental reconciliation is well-known,46 the subsumption he operates among memory, forgiveness, and reconciliation in the pages of Le Pardon has received scarce attention, and it is worthy of mention. Through an unmistakable echo of Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung, reconciliation is here defined as the overcoming-and-integration of past injuries, which is made possible through a forgiveness-without-forgetting: Just as the organism adapts to a strange body, so the offended person arrives at a modus vivendi with the offense. [. . .] Forgiveness would thus resemble a mediation that integrates the antithesis into a higher synthesis. Is not dialectic conciliation literally “reconciliation,” that is, pacification and cessation of all belligerence? [. . .] The reconciled or repentant consciousness carries, in the form of a scar, the trace of old moral traumatisms—forgiven offenses and redeemed misdeeds.47

Yet, certain “moral traumatisms” are hard to integrate and to reconcile, for the victim as well as for the victimizer: Jankélévitch names them “diseases of temporality,” and the next section is devoted to their phenomenological survey. THE DISEASES OF TEMPORALITY: RESENTMENT, NOSTALGIA, REGRET, AND REMORSE Together with the dynamic equilibrium between irreversibility and irrevocability and the oscillation between instant and interval, a further vibration of the lived time entertains lived future, lived present, and lived past. Lived future (a-venir) is an adventure, partly foreseen through our futurition, with projects, promises, and hopes, and also through preoccupations. Lived present requires the vigilance of seriousness, whereas anguish and ennui are always possible, as well as joy and contentment.48 Lived past, which is never re-attainable in its pastness by our preterition, appears finally as the temporal

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form of our powerlessness and becomes the main source of the diseases of temporality. With the expression “diseases of temporality,” Jankélévitch designates the moral feelings that accompany the dialectic between irreversibility and irrevocability inherent to the lived time.49 The diseases of temporality stem from the impossibility of reversing irreversible time, but also with the difficulties of getting rid of the burden represented by the irrevocable, and are, therefore, characterised by a significant amount of suffering. In his book L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, Jankélévitch recognizes that “the regime of irreversibility gives rise to all kinds of ‘pathic’ experiences and events in the human being. [. . .] The irreversible is primarily experienced as an incurable illness and as an irreparable disease.”50 In this regard, the role played by the irrevocable cannot be underestimated: “the becoming becomes without ever reverting, and to make matters worse, human decisions render irrevocable this irreversibility.”51 With a pathological lexicon, Jankélévitch describes the struggle between irreversible and irrevocable as the one between two illnesses, whose impossible cure is searched for in their mutual neutralization.52 Fluctuating between the wish of “making present a past too past, and making past a present too present,”53 the diseases of temporality are paramount in reconciliatory processes, expressing a past suffered as irreversible (through regret and nostalgia) and irrevocable (through resentment and remorse). As a “sentiment that is felt occasioned by a sentiment,”54 resentment feels time and again a previously suffered offense, expressing a persistent bitterness toward one’s own victimizer. Accompanied by loyalty and tenacity, constituting an ethical option, if not a virtue in itself, resentment is defined by Jankélévitch as a moral “protest against temporality,”55 which stems from “the irreparability of the situation prior to the crime, and from the moral impossibility of the new situation.”56 Notwithstanding the impossibility of reversing time and of reaching the past in its “pastness,” resentment intends to stop the forgetful course of irreversible becoming, recognizing an irrevocable character to the offense. Subsequently, it continues to feel it as a present wound, which can be neither healed nor overcome. Therefore, resentment is a primary source of irreconcilability, and its central organ is to be found in memory. Through it, struggling against the temporal decay of mnestic traces and any indifference toward the past, resentment becomes resistance toward the irreversible, in a duty to remember, which is accompanied by the traumatic impossibility of forgetting. Nonetheless, “the past is the realm of the impossible,”57 that is, of what exceeds our power-to-act. Applying it to the irreversibly bygone past damages our active openness toward the future. Painfully, the person of resentment lives “the impossibility not only of reversing the irreversible, but also to start doing”58 something anew. In Zur Genealogie der Moral, Nietzsche famously makes a correlation between the

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excess of remembrance, which takes place in a sterile rumination, a consequent powerlessness, and finally in the turning of the resenting consciousness against itself, as bad conscience: “the activity, rather than unloading itself in effective gestures, centrifugal and precisely adapted to the outside world, arrests itself [. . .], recedes and becomes emotion, that is to say, a re-sented thing.”59 Saturating an atmosphere with stagnant distrust, the reluctance of resentment to reconciliation constitutes, in the public sphere, a fertile soil for a politics of resentment, which undermines the peaceful coexistence between social groups: “where a sincere will for reconciliation is lacking—admonishes Jankélévitch—peace is necessarily precarious.”60 The disease of temporality of nostalgia implies the interaction of “return” (nostos) and “pain” (algos). Jankélévitch defines it as “a human melancholy made possible by consciousness, the consciousness of something else, consciousness of an elsewhere, that is awareness of a contrast between past and present, between present and future.”61 Paradigmatically exemplified by the Jewish consciousness of the diaspora,62 the disease of nostalgia develops itself as a sorrowful, haunting desire of return, which stems from the collision between the irreversibility of time and the reversibility of space. Consequently, its healing is often searched for by returning to one’s place of origin, restoring in space the status quo ante. A decisive paradox takes place in this regard: “the return to the familiar place or to the native land is possible, but it is not possible to revert the becoming.”63 Nonetheless, given a constant process of alteration operated by irreversible time, the one who returns, through the cancellation of distance in space, has become another person. What nostalgia really seeks is this impossible reversion of time: “the real remedy for nostalgia is not going back into space but reaching the past through time.”64 Narratives of refugees or exiles coming back to their Heimat, as we can learn, for instance, from Jean Améry’s life and works,65 witness that returning by reversing space is possible, but it is often a disappointing, alienating experience. An explanation of this is offered by the irrevocable character of time and space yearned for by nostalgia. Qualitatively different from any other place, it belongs to a “pathic geography.”66 Like resentment, “nostalgia is a reaction against the irreversible,”67 which configures itself as loyalty toward the irrevocable, aiming at the quodditas of the past in its unattainable pastness. Therefore, nostalgia also inhibits our willingness to reconcile: it desperately searches for a past that cannot return, casting away from any given present, and finally implies (since our power to act expresses itself only in our openness to the future) an overwhelming powerlessness. The diseases of temporality of remorse and regret finally reflect the dynamic equilibrium between irreversibility and irrevocability. If regret arises from the fact-of-not-having-done what could have been done, remorse arises from the fact-of-having-done. Hence, regret shows a having-done-too-little, a certain

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powerlessness, and descends from the vain effort to recover an irreversible absence, “the concavity that the irreversible digs behind us.”68 Remorse, on the contrary, stems from a having-done-too-much, through a misuse of the power to act, and descends from the vain effort to make an irrevocable presence absent, as “the convexity which is the deposit of the irrevocable.”69 Their related feelings are also different. Regret expresses a languor imbued by powerlessness, melancholy, nostalgia, sharing with the irreversible an impalpable, bittersweet, ghostly dimension, in which the charm of the past vibrates. From the other side, remorse bites the conscience with the imperative of the irrevocable, through guilty feelings, shame, and finally desperation, which is a prerequisite for any genuine repentance: “regret is morally indifferent, ethically neutral, to the extent that one can regret anything. [. . .] Remorse, on the contrary, in its characteristic form, is the moral suffering that the guilty person feels remembering his fault.”70 Regret is linked to the nostalgia of the irreversible and then to an aesthetic tone; through it, the unhappy consciousness becomes lyrically fecund. Remorse is linked to the resentment of the irrevocable and then to ethics; through it, bad conscience develops avoiding attitudes, identifying one’s fault with the whole person. Regret and remorse confirm the two fundamental laws of irreversibility and irrevocability: first, it is not possible to reverse irreversible time, that is, to relive past experiences, hence the illusion of regret; second, it is not possible to delete the irrevocable moment, undoing the fact-of-having-done, hence the desperation of remorse. Their interconnectedness finally reflects that one between the irreversible and the irrevocable: “the irrevocable gives rise to remorse. To be delivered from it, one would be tempted to go along blindly with the irreversible. But the irreversible in turn gives rise to the regret that, to find the past again, would be tempted to hang on to the irrevocable.”71 The moral feelings of the diseases of temporality show that the irreversible cannot be reversed, the irrevocable cannot be annihilated, and both remain unreconciled if faced with restoring a status quo ante. Reconciliatory processes concern a new beginning, that the consciousness stuck in the diseases of temporality can barely perceive. LOVE AND JUSTICE: THE ORDER OF LAW AND THE WHOLLY-OTHER ORDER OF GRACE The event of the irrevocable in the form of wrongdoing breaks the lives of the victim and the victimizer into a “before” and “after.”72 This inaugurates a change that might lead, in the latter, to a “con-version,” which Jankélévitch means as the inversion from that malevolent will, which committed the wrongdoing, to the intention of doing better in the future. This radical

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transformation is accompanied by a “returning to oneself” that, without contradicting the irreversible and the irrevocable, represents a journey, which goes from the despair of remorse to the work of repentance: [W]e can do something else, do normatively or qualitatively better, do something else that falls to us as a duty-to-do, or erase the fact and undo the thing done—this is the task of repentance—but we cannot make it that the thing done has not been done—and this is the despair of remorse.73

Unconditional forgiveness challenges this process of conversion. Starting from the victim, regardless of the moral conduct of the victimizer, it does not wait for his/her metanoia, neither for an apology or a request for forgiveness. As such, it opens up the possibility of a new beginning, whose importance is crucial in the struggle toward reconciliation. Opposed to unconditional forgiveness is the emphasis on atonement, which lies at the core of the punitive retributive paradigm of justice, that is, instead, focused on the victimizer. The irreparability of the crimes against humanity—which imply the irreversible destruction of the victim in his-her being—makes evident, nonetheless, some aporias of justice. While Jankélévitch vehemently asserts the irrevocable and imprescriptible character of those crimes in Pardonner?, he is also conscious that no punishment can expiate them, and no legal prosecution can offer, therefore, an adequate countermeasure: “killing the murderer is not resurrecting the victim, but it is making two victims instead of one. [. . .] The punishment is the fictitious reparation of the irreparable.”74 His remarks are not less severe toward the commutative-reparative paradigm of justice, whose focus addresses the victim through practices such as indemnities and Wiedergutmachung.75 Along its way, a “reparative and levelling justice, whose sole purpose is to level out, to annul, to neutralize”76 deploys itself, aiming at “the restoration of the status quo. It repairs things, that is, justice undoes what has been done and remakes what has been unmade. It returns, refunds and reimburses,”77 expressing an equivalence logic, which “guarantees, in exchanges, balance between action and reaction, and reciprocity of transactions.”78 Justice would be “enough” if the irrevocable would not admonish us that although “restorative justice undoes the thing done (res facta), the fact-of-havingdone (fecisse) is indestructible.”79 No punishment, no reparation, no compensation can return the unique, unrepeatable, unquantifiable ipseity of an individuality: “no consolation will give back to the victim of the irreversible an identical object to the lost one, it will not return this thing itself, ipsa, nor will it render to the victim, after a mourning, the ipseity of the loved one.”80 Justice alone cannot heal the diseases of temporality: equivalence logic inhabits it, orienting it toward the ideal of sameness. Notwithstanding

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its variety of condemnations and compensations, justice always aims at the restoration of the status quo ante. On the other side, the remorse of the guilty party and the resentment toward him/her, even after the sentence has been served, attest to the inexterminable character of the fecisse, that is, a surplus of the inexpiable. The injured ipseity of the victim bears an inestimable, “uncompensable residue,”81 which expresses the singularity of every human being in his/her wholly-otherness.82 In its punctiform quodditas, such a surplus, such a residue, epiphanically opens to a wholly-other-order, unveiling the singularity of every ipseity: “quod is truly the wholly-other-order, as Pascal says of charity, or rather it is the passage to this wholly-other, and the need for this passage, and the pressing obligation to cross its threshold.”83 Any ipseity is therefore a radical otherness that cannot be reconducted to mere differences of degree: “the first manifestation of metaphysical seriousness is the acceptance of the whollyother-order and the refusal to reduce the absolute difference of nature, the fundamental heterogeneity of this order and of the other to differences of degree.”84 It therefore requires a hyperbolic logic that exceeds that of equivalence and is capable of welcoming the wholly-otherness of the other, dismissing any reifying reduction to the sameness, dismantling any scalar proportion: “the passage to the wholly-other can only be a hyperbolic mutation.”85 In reconciliatory processes, hyperbolic logic expresses itself through the overabundance of the virtue of forgiveness, that, returning good for evil, breaks the tit-for-tat equivalence logic of justice. Opening the new beginning, which is required for the healing of the diseases of temporality, “forgiveness can be the founder of a future. [. . .] Forgiveness reveals itself capable of instituting a new order. Forgiveness, like inspired intuition, does the work of several generations in one instant.”86 According to Jankélévitch,87 forgiveness possesses the initial, sudden, and spontaneous character of the instantaneous event, which is antithetical to any form of forgetful temporal decay. It is a donation by grace, beyond any reason or intellectual excuse. It requires a personal relationship with the wrongdoer, therefore it cannot be reduced to the self-healing liquidation of any “forgive and forget” or be granted by institutionalized third parties.88 As the word itself suggests, for-giveness constitutes the instantaneous, revolutionary novelty of a gift, a donation out of charitable love, that takes place beyond any expectation of reciprocity and facing also the most dreadful evil. As aptly condensed by Aaron Looney: “the order of justice entails giving what is due; the order of forgiveness entails giving not what is due, which is not just to give or to give justly, but to give abundantly and superlatively.”89 Forgiveness therefore challenges the reciprocity of justice with the hyperbolic generosity of love: “doing good to everyone, friends and enemies, is not justice, but it is charity. In the Gospel, these are the paradoxes of love, the miracle of generosity, and the folly of forgiveness.”90 The

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scandal of forgiveness represents a constitutive excess, given the assumption that “charity is not a motivated sentiment [. . .], hyperbole and hybris are its legality.”91 Along this way, forgiveness shows “the fundamental moral alternative: the incompossibility of justice and charity. The former, that gives to each his due; the latter, loving with love, graciously gives, forgives.”92 The alternative between justice and love is the conflict of values par excellence: any ideal of reciprocity, which characterizes justice, is radically challenged by the “hyperbolical ethics that arises out of the duty of love.”93 Whereas justice cannot transcend sameness, love is, according to Jankélévitch, the only movement that approaches the other in its metaphysical otherness, and that is, at the same time, capable of addressing its ipseity as a Thou à la Buber94: “only through love are we related to the ipseity not as a cognitive object, but rather as a ‘you.’”95 As the sole virtue that makes a genuine encounter possible, “only love is able to go to the Other in so far as the Other is absolutely dissimilar from me. Only love makes this miracle of penetrating and understanding the stranger, of making the distant one near, and of making present the absent. Justice does not go to the Other, but precisely to the Equal, which is our abstract and arithmetic Similar, that is to say, to the Same.”96 Love is featured by Jankélévitch in its charitable dimension, as agape. With selflessness and disinterestedness, as the opposite of any egoism, “the vocation of love is the good movement for the other without any return on oneself.”97 Through “self-forgetfulness, abandonment of all glorious complacency and perfect innocence,”98 with the initial, efferent spontaneity of a gift, love constitutes an act of infinite generosity: “love is loving through the seed of generosity that it contains.”99 Aiming at the good of the other, love is “a benevolent inspiration that has no value, it is the value itself, or rather the source of values.”100 It is therefore the apex of moral life, “the truth and the life of all the other virtues.”101 The moral superiority of love as benevolent intention for the sake of the other as wholly-other becomes clearly visible also ex negativo. In a dense synthesis, Jankélévitch recognizes that “cowardice, hypocrisy, vanity, ingratitude, envy, pettiness are all due to selfishness, that is to say, lack of love.”102 It is the love which inhabits forgiveness that, in the odyssey of reconciliatory processes, has the power to heal the diseases of temporality and “inaugurates the new order of clemency and equity, which is initiation to grace.”103 The dualism between equalizing justice and hyperbolic forgiveness is a direct expression of the antithesis between the order of law and the whollyother-order of grace. Since “the order of the I-Do-Not-Know-What is the order of grace,”104 the latter requires “a conscience in a state of grace”105 that is receptive toward the ineffable dimension of the quod, the incomparable singularity of the ipse, and the incommensurable transcendence of the Other.

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Nevertheless, it is in the event of gift-giving that the order of grace expresses itself paradigmatically: “charis is the efference of a sincere and innocent heart that gives what it has without back-thoughts.”106 Love (caritas) and forgiveness are generous virtues, the metaphysical principle of which is to be found, thereby, in the order of grace (charis): “the aptly-named charity designates the very order of Grace.”107 The semantic shift leading from the Greek charis to the Latin caritas attests this profound connection too.108 Gratuitousness and gratitude are also intertwined with grace. Gratitude is addressed from the recipient to the donor as a bond of irrevocable fidelity. It is not inspired by the gift as such (donum), but rather by the nonrefundable irrevocable fact-of-having-given (dedisse),109 that took place in a selfless and spontaneous (therefore, gratuitous) way, and, as such, it is also not readily available. The superabundance of grace, irreducible to any logic of equivalence, finally asserts itself when it comes to exceed and to suspend any force of law as pardon.110 The state of exception of pardon witnesses the urgency to open the order of law to its alterity, constituted by the order of grace. Jankélévitch subscribes therefore111 to Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “love is the fulfilling of the law.112 Without effacing the irrevocable, nor reversing the irreversible, reconciliation requires and accomplishes the wholly-other-order of charis, which announces itself through charitable love as forgiveness. CONCLUSION This paper developed a phenomenology of reconciliatory processes according to their temporal connotation, based on the writings of Vladimir Jankélévitch in their entirety. Following an apophatic approach, which focuses on the obstacles that are to be encountered along the way toward reconciliation, the issue of the diseases of temporality, that is, time-related moral feelings, which obstruct reconciliatory processes, has been addressed at its core. To reach its goal, this chapter has reconstructed several polarities that shape the theoretical philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch, primarily the one between irreversibility and irrevocability. Nonetheless, it had a practical aim: to investigate how and why, in philosophical terms, is reconciliation possible. Applications of its outcomes might be of interest for several disciplines, foremostly theology, law, psychology, and political sciences. The time has come, now, for three final remarks: • Reconciliatory processes fail if they are backward-oriented toward the reconstruction of the sameness of an injured ipseity, which is not available anymore, given the irrevocability of the suffered offense and the irreversibility of bygone time.

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• On the contrary, reconciliatory processes mean and allow a new beginning, a forward-oriented one, that can be successful only in so far as it does not seek sameness, but rather otherness. • As such, reconciliation addresses the wholly-otherness of the Other (victim and victimizer as well) with that love, which directly stems from a whollyother-order, namely an order of grace, that integrates and overcomes, with its overabundance, any attempt of the equivalence logic that inhabits the “human, all too human” order of law. NOTES 1. This chapter is dedicated to Annalisa. This research was supported by funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the project “Hearts of FleshNot Stone” (DFG LE1260/3). Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 2. Martin Leiner, “From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation,” in Alternative Approaches in Conflict Resolution, eds. Martin Leiner and Christine Schliesser (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 176. 3. While Jankélévitch’s most detailed articulation of the diseases of temporality can be found in his book L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, their understanding requires a broader survey that analyses his works in their entirety. It is undertaken here in dialogue with a large series of writings that are exclusively available in their French edition. For the notion “diseases of temporality” (malheurs de la temporalité), cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 284. 4. Cf. Arnold Davidson, “Introductory Remarks,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 545–548; Andrew Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), vii–xxvii; Alan Udoff (ed.), Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness (Lanham: Lexington, 2013); Aaron Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch. The Time of Forgiveness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Peter Banki, The Forgiveness to Come. The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 83–102. 5. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan & Co., 1922), 6. 6. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Une Vie en toutes lettres (Paris: L. Levi, 1995), 172. 7. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 14. 8. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 117. 9. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise conscience, in Id., Philosophie Morale (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 86. 10. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 15. 11. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: PUF, 1959), 51. 12. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise conscience, 175. 13. Wiard Raveling, Ist Versöhnung möglich? Meine Begegnung mit Vladimir Jankélévitch (Oldenburg: Isensee, 2014), 17.

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14. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 34. 15. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien II (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 117–180. 16. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 71. 17. Ibid., 72. 18. Whereas Bergson conveys to Jankélévitch the notion of irreversible time, it is Schelling that deeply influences Jankélévitch in the definition of the irrevocable. Referring to Schelling’s definition of human beings as masters of their acts concerning their doing but not their undoing, he writes, already in 1933: “the act to be performed depends entirely on me, but once the act is done, it is irrevocable.” Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), 194. This position will be emphasized in his complementary thesis on the bad conscience: “the pathos of the irrevocable, which generates the desperation of the irreparable, takes its origin from the impossibility of undoing.” Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise conscience, 90. 19. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien III (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 28. 20. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 458. 21. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 202. 22. Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” trans. Ann Hobart, Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 555. 23. Ibid., 553. 24. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 71–72. 25. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 151. 26. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 329. 27. Ibid., 279. 28. Ibid., 227. 29. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première. Introduction à une philosophie du Presque (Paris: PUF, 2011), 73. 30. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien I (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 26. 31. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 38. 32. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus (Paris: Bordas, 1949), 796. 33. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 231. 34. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 146. 35. Enrica Lisciani Petrini, Charis. Saggio su Jankélévitch (Milano: Mimesis, 2012), 18. 36. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 27. 37. Ibid., 107. 38. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 220. 39. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 17. 40. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.1, 141. Significantly, Jankélévitch here relates courage to the “transcendence” of the sudden irruption of the good instant (kairos), whereby fidelity, virtue of the interval, is associated with the “immanence” of time as interval (chronos).

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41. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 5. 42. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 47. 43. Ibid., 7. 44. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 26. 45. Martin Leiner, “Thinking Differently about Identity and Harmony. The Potential of Asian Thinking for Reconciliation,” in Asia-Pacific between Conflict and Reconciliation, eds. Phillip Tolliday, Maria Palme, and Dong-Choon Kim (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016), 185–186. 46. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 32; 53. Cf. Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” passim. 47. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 26–27. 48. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux (Paris: Flammarion, 2017), 7–8. 49. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 284. 50. Ibid., 154. 51. Ibid., 318. 52. Ibid., 282. 53. Ibid., 261. 54. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 33. 55. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 42. 56. Ibid., 23. 57. Ibid., 181. 58. Ibid., 184. 59. Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise conscience, 52. 60. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 154. 61. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 346. 62. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Sources (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 56. 63. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 192. 64. Ibid., 368. 65. Cf. Francesco Ferrari, “Der ewige Fremde. Jean Améry e la ricerca della Heimat dopo Auschwitz,” in Auschwitz dopo Auschwitz. Poetica e politica di fronte alla Shoah, eds. Micaela Latini and Erasmo S. Storace (Milano: Meltemi, 2017), 49–65. 66. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 341. 67. Ibid., 368. 68. Ibid., 266. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 272–273. 71. Ibid., 283. 72. Jankélévitch himself applies his conception of the irrevocable event to the discourse on trauma and traumatic temporality, cf. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 333–334. 73. Ibid., 182. 74. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 22–23. 75. A specific reference to German post-WWII policies of reparation-making is meant here with the term “Wiedergutmachung.” Jankélévitch will uncompromisingly refuse any attempt in this direction, exemplarily in 1965, during the debates in France

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regarding statutory limitations for Nazi war crimes. Cf. Jankélévitch, “Should We Pardon Them?” 552. 76. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 20. 77. Ibid., 15. 78. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 244. 79. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 22. 80. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 195. 81. Ibid., 349. 82. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 80–98. 83. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 266. 84. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 2. 85. Ibid., 54 86. Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, 155. 87. Ibid., 5. 88. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission represents the paradigmatic example of the implementation of forgiveness in the juridical-political sphere. Critical remarks, aiming to differentiate forgiveness from reconciliation, are formulated by Jacques Derrida: “one could never, in the ordinary sense of the words, found a politics or law on forgiveness. [. . .] As soon as a third party intervenes, one can again speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of forgiveness in the strict sense.” Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), 39; 42. 89. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch, 176; cf. Lisciani Petrini, Charis, 81–117. 90. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 66. 91. Ibid., 140–141. 92. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Alternative (Paris: Alcan, 1938), 14. 93. Banki, The Forgiveness to Come, 84. 94. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 301. 95. Andrew Kelley, “Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, ed. Alan Udoff (Lanham: Lexington, 2013), 37. 96. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 84. 97. Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible, 247. 98. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 8. 99. Ibid., 331. 100. Ibid., 223. 101. Ibid., 7. 102. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus III (Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 68. 103. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 168. 104. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 192. 105. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien I, 128. 106. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 163. 107. Ibid., 245. 108. Cf. Alessandra Cislaghi, L’invenzione della grazia. Sulle tracce di un’idea splendida (Milano: Mimesis, 2018), 98–99.

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109. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus I, 115. 110. What in English is called “pardon” must not be confused with “forgiveness.” The same word, “pardon”, in fact means “forgiveness” in French. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that what in English is called “pardon” is expressed in French with the oxymoronic expression “right of grace” (droit de grâce), that is also attested in the German Begnadigungsrecht. 111. Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus II.2, 166. 112. Romans XIII:10, ESV, Bible Gateway. Accessed December 16, 2018. https​ ://ww​w.bib​legat​eway.​com/p​assag​e/?se​arch=​Roman​s%201​3:9-1​1&ver​sion=​ESV.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Banki, Peter. The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. London: Macmillan & Co, 1922. Cislaghi, Alessandra. L’invenzione della grazia. Sulle tracce di un’idea splendida. Milano: Mimesis, 2018. Davidson, Arnold. “Introductory Remarks.” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 545–548. Derrida, Jacques. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 2001. Ferrari, Francesco. “Der ewige Fremde. Jean Améry e la ricerca della Heimat dopo Auschwitz.” In Auschwitz dopo Auschwitz. Poetica e politica di fronte alla Shoah, edited by Micaela Latini and Erasmo S. Storace, 49–65. Milano: Meltemi, 2017. The Holy Bible. English Standard Version. Bible Gateway. Accessed December 16, 2018. https​://ww​w.bib​legat​eway.​com/p​assag​e/?se​arch=​Roman​s%201​3:9-1​1&ver​ sion=​ESV. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’Alternative. Paris: Alcan, 1938. ———. L’Aventure, l’ennui, le sérieux. Paris: Flammarion, 2017. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Henri Bergson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. ———. L’Irréversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien I. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien II. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien III. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. “La Mauvaise conscience”. In Vladimir Jankélévitch: Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab, 31–202. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. ———. La Mort. Paris: Flammarion, 1977. ———. L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. ———. “Le Pardon.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch: Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab, 991–1149. Paris: Flammarion, 1998.

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———. Philosophie première. Introduction à une philosophie du presque. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. ———. “Should We Pardon Them?” Translated by Ann Hobart. Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 552–572. ———. Sources. Paris: Seuil, 1984. ———. Traité des vertus. Paris: Bordas, 1949. ———. Traité des vertus I: Le Sérieux de l’intention. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 2. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Traité des vertus III: L’Innocence et la méchanceté. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Une Vie en toutes lettres: correspondance. Paris: Lia Levi, 1995. Kelley, Andrew. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, vii–xxvii. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. “Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness, edited by Alan Udoff, 27–46. Lanham: Lexington, 2013. Leiner, Martin. “Thinking Differently about Identity and Harmony. The Potential of Asian Thinking for Reconciliation.” In Asia-Pacific between Conflict and Reconciliation, edited by Phillip Tolliday, Maria Palme, and Dong-Choon Kim, 183–204. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. ———. “From Conflict Resolution to Reconciliation.” In Alternative Approaches in Conflict Resolution, edited by Martin Leiner and Christine Schliesser, 175–186. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Lisciani Petrini, Enrica. Charis. Saggio su Jankélévitch. Milano: Mimesis, 2012. Looney, Aaron. Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Raveling, Wiard. Ist Versöhnung möglich? Meine Begegnung mit Vladimir Jankélévitch. Oldenburg: Isensee, 2014. Udoff, Alan (ed). Vladimir Jankélévitch and the Question of Forgiveness. Lanham: Lexington, 2013.

Chapter 7

Jankélévitch’s Metaphysics of Humility Andrew Kelley

When one reflects on Vladimir Jankélévitch’s moral philosophy, one thinks especially about his thought-provoking analyses of forgiveness, of the bad conscience, and of love. But, as I will attempt to show here, humility is also an important theme in Jankélévitch’s thought, a theme that should receive more attention than we presently give to it. And just as there is an intimate link in Jankélévitch’s work between morality and metaphysics, there is also a very important relationship between humility itself and a metaphysical consciousness. Moreover, his concept of humility runs counter to many of the traditional philosophical understandings of humility; not only is it an important account in its own right, but it will shed a light on his ethical theory and philosophy as a whole. In his monumental Traité des vertus (Treatise on the Virtues), Vladimir Jankélévitch devotes an entire section of the book to the subject of humility,1 a subject that has more often been left for theologians to address than for philosophers. In that chapter, which is really a “metaphysics of humility,” he demonstrates not only how humility is a virtue in itself, but also how it serves as a ground (fondement) of the virtues in general. But just as importantly, humility can be regarded as a ground of metaphysics. For Jankélévitch, metaphysics is not a system, but rather a special type of consciousness (conscience) and humility plays a central role in this metaphysical consciousness. In order to show this close link between humility and metaphysics, I will discuss several central themes in Jankélévitch’s thought: the notion of ground, the organ-obstacle, the other, and mystery.

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JANKÉLÉVITCH’S READING OF SCHELLING’S NOTION OF “GRUND” At the beginning of the chapter on humility in the revised edition of the Traité des vertus, Jankélévitch discusses humility very specifically in terms of “the Schellingian sense of ‘Ground’ (‘Grund’), which is the primordial passivity that is anterior to the enterprising initiative of the arché.”2 Because Jankélévitch describes humility in this manner, it will be useful for my project to look at Jankélévitch’s discussion of the concept of the Schellingian Grund—or fondement, as he often renders the word in French—in his main doctoral thesis, which was subsequently published in 1933 under the title of L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (The Odyssey of the Conscience in Schelling’s Late Philosophy).3 The notion of duration is at the very center of Jankélévitch’s thought; it is one that he also sees in the philosophies of Schelling, Simmel, and Bergson, all of whom greatly influenced him. Given this attention to duration and temporality, it is not surprising that Jankélévitch emphasizes that there is a wholly different “logic” at work in Schelling’s late philosophy. According to Jankélévitch’s interpretation, for Schelling “the universe is not a system, but [rather] a history.”4 As such, Schelling attempts to write a “biography of being.”5 On account of the stress that Schelling places on the living and lived order of life, Schelling’s logic needs to be “especially attentive to the emergence of the real,” which is a response to “any logic of exposition that renders duration useless.”6 Schelling does not attempt to explain a concept deductively, starting from a higher and more fundamental concept, a “concept of concepts,”7 a practice for which Schelling criticizes Jacobi.8 Rather, Schelling focuses upon the “real generation of beings” and not on “the ideal order of [a] constructed logic.”9 Jankélévitch emphasizes, on the other hand, that for Schelling, a principle should, in fact, begin from what is lowest, something that the German word, Grund—or ground—makes quite obvious. Moreover, Jankélévitch claims that the primary principle—Grund—is also “first in the order of time.”10 As such, it—the ground—is not only a logical principle, but it “also designates a physical ‘base,’ a founding [fondation] or foundation [fondement].”11 On Jankélévitch’s reading of Schelling, the past is not destroyed or wholly abolished with the progression of duration.12 The past subsists in duration, which means that the past remains “invisible” instead of being non-existent.13 But the fact that, for Schelling, the past serves as a “ground” (fondement) for the present remains an even more important idea.14 There may be the temptation to interpret Schelling’s term Grund as “cause.” But for Jankélévitch, this is incorrect because a cause is often understood as being “transcendent to” its effect, that is, after it unleashes its effect it is no longer in relation to the

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effect. In contrast, a ground always remains “there,” although perhaps in a different form, within the very thing for which it serves as a ground.15 For Jankélévitch, a Schellingian “ground” is both a basis for and a negation of that for which it serves as a ground. Moreover, it continues to be “present” after the fact, so to speak, in that for which it serves as ground. Jankélévitch provides several examples of a Grund: that movement can only begin by—and after—rest, that a line commences with a point, that movement commences with rest, and that death is the source of life.16 What becomes evident is that this idea of a ground as a negation, or as a contrary, lies at the heart of Jankélévitch’s interpretation of Schelling’s Grund.17 Jankélévitch explains that “a line begins with a point, [which itself] is the negation of a line” (but is still contained in the line).18 Likewise, movement cannot be said to begin unless there was a prior state of rest out of which it came; yet, rest in and of itself, is the negation of movement.19 Ironically, yet also dear to Jankélévitch’s heart, is the example of death being the “ground” of life. For him, if there is no determinant time span in which a being is said to live, then there is no “life.” In other words, an eternal being could not be said to “live” and would not experience the flow of time. Thus, ironically, for Jankélévitch, the very thing that allows there to be life—death—is the negation of life. In other words, death is implicit in life, it is part of the essence of what it is to be alive. Yet, at the same time, it is that which negates, or takes away, life. Moreover, life only gains value because of the precarity of life, which is entailed by death. In several passages of the text, he describes a ground as a “seed” (germe) that, as such, is simultaneously “more and less” than what it becomes in the duration that flows.20 Citing the influence of Böhme on Schelling, Jankélévitch remarks that for Schelling the Grund is the very nature of something before it exists, whereas the essence—Wesen—of the thing is the very existence of the thing itself.21 Thus, concerning Schelling’s conception of the ground, Jankélévitch writes that it is “always more reduced and more concentrated than the adult organism.”22 The adult is different from the seed just as the possible is different from the real, and, additionally, the adult expresses this difference “in a wholly different language, in the explicit language of existence; it deploys, in the order of effective things, that which only existed in a state of compression.”23 The ground, so to speak, “is” or has the possibility of becoming something that exists and that possesses positive qualities, just as white noise can be filtered so that it becomes a distinct musical note with a specific timbre. This is how Jankélévitch can describe Schelling’s Grund as apeiron or as “the undecided matter of judgment.”24 For Jankélévitch, the Schellingian Grund is amphibolic and it represents “the greatest tension of forces, and, thus, a maximum of instability”: just like Böhme’s notion of the Ungrund, Schelling’s Grund is “a Nothing that is Everything.”25

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What is in the ground, qua seed, becomes something new, but in such a way that what is now the new being was, in one way or another, prefigured in the ground in a germinal or embryonic manner. For example, a piece of marble can become a sculpture. The characteristics of the sculpture are already somewhat prefigured in the very nature of the stone itself, in opposition to how the sculptured piece would have appeared had it been made of wood or clay. The “ground” qua “undecided matter” is what allows there to be something that is formed and it will have some influence over what form the finished being will have. So, it is possible that certain forms can be executed in marble than could not have been sculpted in wood or clay. The finished sculpture represents the culmination of the raw piece of marble because now it possesses a new form. And now, as well, the marble has the form of, say, Julius Caesar instead of Augustus Caesar. So, both the raw marble and a different possible form—that of Augustus—are now excluded by the sculpture being of Julius Caesar. But in order to become one of these possibilities, all of the other possibilities have to be excluded, that is, sacrificed. So, what begins by being a Grund sacrifices itself and terminates itself. However, in doing this, that which is the ground now becomes “matter [or] an instrument [organe],” insofar as it is transformed into its contrary.26 A ground unleashes development, and, in this respect, it is not only a “ground” (fondement) but also a “founding” (fondation).27 As such, the Schellingian Grund inaugurates or recommences becoming (le devenir) with each new moment of duration.28 Moreover, in duration, or time, there is always development and this requires exclusion, conquest, and suppression.29 Each moment is “sacrificed” in order to permit the development of the moments to come.30 Hence, each previous moment plays the role of Grund for each subsequent moment.31 The essence of becoming is the sacrifice of the Grund that is renewed at every minute.32 Yet, conquest and suppression require resistance.33 It makes little sense to speak of a conquest, or of going beyond, if nothing is conquered or if nothing is overcome. The Grund is a resistance insofar as it is that which is overcome. In fact, the ground is precisely what is sacrificed in becoming and in the act of overcoming or going beyond. Consequently, Jankélévitch will call Schelling’s Grund a “double principle,” because “on the one hand the entire future of the organism is tacitly preformed therein . . . [but] on the other hand, the Grund is the contrary of development because development stands in need of this very resistance.”34 On the one hand, the Grund initiates development and becoming, that is, the series of sacrifices.35 Because of this, Jankélévitch interprets the Grund as a principle of “radical novelty,” which is “positive and fecund,” but also as “a veritable and positive creation.”36 Yet, on the other hand, the Grund is that which is sacrificed and in being sacrificed, it offers itself up as a resistance to the conquest.37

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In this regard, the Grund is an example of Jankélévitch’s notion of the “organ-obstacle,” which claims to have “found” this notion in Bergson’s thought, stating, in fact, that “[t]here is no idea more profound and fertile in Bergson’s philosophy.”38 The overall idea of an “organ-obstacle” concerns something that serves, on the one hand, as a necessary instrument or means, but that, on the other hand, simultaneously negates and acts as an impediment to the very thing that it enables. However, the impediment itself, as it impedes, creates the instrument. A good example of this, but one that Jankélévitch does not, himself, cite, is an airplane wing. If there is too much resistance by the air, the wing cannot produce lift. But if there is no resistance at all, then the wing cannot produce lift. In other words, the very thing that hinders the flight of the wing is what allows the wing to fly. We can also consider an example of the organ-obstacle that Jankélévitch does cite; it is that of evil and forgiveness. Some person might be so wicked and her act so evil that it might make it (near) impossible for there to be any forgiveness of the person and her action. But if there were no evil, then there could be no good and nothing resembling forgiveness. So, wickedness is ironically an impediment to, but also what makes possible, forgiveness.39 Humility qua Grund, for Jankélévitch’s, is a prime example of an organ-obstacle (organe-obstacle). HUMILITY In the second edition of Jankélévitch’s Traité des vertus (from 1968 to 1972), the chapter in which humility is addressed—“L’Humilité et la Modestie”— has not changed much from the original version of the book that appeared in 1949. In that long chapter we see Jankélévitch claim that modesty is an empirical virtue—that is, one tied to an interval of time—and that it is also a virtue correlated with humility, which is its metaempirical “brother.”40 For Jankélévitch, modesty serves, in a manner, to correct and limit egoism.41 But this virtue arises out of knowledge and rationality; as such it is intimately linked to the virtue of justice.42 In other words, when one is modest, one sees that one’s role, one’s place, and one’s value are a function of where one fits into the system that is ordered by justice and rationality. Because of this, one does not ask for or take more than one has the right to do so, in accordance with justice and reason. On Jankélévitch’s view, the essence of modesty is disinterestedness (désintéressement) and detachment; the self—that is, the “I”—now becomes an abstract concept, an abstraction even for oneself.43 When a person is modest she looks at herself “as one among many others.”44 It needs to be emphasized that Jankélévitch is not deriding modesty; it is a virtue that is quite important for justice and in everyday life. Yet, whereas modesty is an “empirical” virtue, one of the interval, humility, on the other

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hand, is a metaempirical virtue, which means one of the instant and of openness. This distinction between the interval and the instant is extremely important for Jankélévitch. As a Bergsonian of sorts, it is not surprising that Jankélévitch begins his philosophical analyses from, or within, consciousness (conscience). Moreover, the very “structure” or framework of consciousness, and that of which consciousness is conscious, is the passing of time. Consciousness involves the very flow of time. But, for Jankélévitch, in order for there to be consciousness of duration, time, and change, there needs to be something atemporal or nontemporal in comparison to which change can be noted. The normal flow and change of our everyday lives—what he calls the “interval”—is punctuated by atemporal or nontemporal points, which is what he calls “instants.” Instants do not take time; they are not very short “intervals” of duration. Rather, they are the very point of conversion or change, or the decision or beginning that institutes a new interval. The lives that we lead are largely in the empirical, everyday realm of the interval. But the intervals of our lives are punctuated by important instants, ones of conversion, love, heroism, courage, forgiveness, and humility, when everything changes or takes on a new meaning. Thus, for Jankélévitch, there are virtues tied to both the interval—for example, modesty or justice—and those that arise as “instants,” such as forgiveness, courage, or humility. The virtues of the interval are tied to rationality and moderation, whereas the virtues of the instant are, by definition, “extreme” and, as such, cannot be regulated by intellect, rationality, or justice. Because they are literally like mathematical points, they do not endure; otherwise they would be virtues of the interval. Instead, they must be re-created again and again. As such, they alter, revise, or give new meaning to the intervals of our lives. Modesty and humility both serve as a “check” on a person’s sense of importance or value. The modest person, in being modest, in acknowledging her role and her place in the order of justice and reason; but she can still remain prideful (orgueilleux(euse)).45 Thus, while modesty is opposed to vanity—a person’s irrational or unjust sense of what she is owed—humility, to the contrary, is opposed to pride tout court.46 As concerns humility, there is no issue of what the proper, rational, or just, amount of humility should be because justice and reason have nothing to say when it comes to humility, given that, as Jankélévitch tells us, “a moderate humility is not humility at all”;47 humility is an all or nothing matter. As with other metaempirical virtues such as love, heroism, and sacrifice, there can never be a question of moderation or proportion; there can never be “too much love,” or “too much heroism.”48 Unlike with humility, modesty does not really require any sacrifice; the modest person must simply recognize her place or role in the system.49 This is why Jankélévitch describes humility in terms of “prostration” and, what is more, a prostration that has no relation to justice or reason.50 He claims that

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“the great things in life are of the order of quality [as opposed to quantity] and can only be revoked or given in one fell swoop[d’un seul coup].”51 Hence, quite the opposite from modesty, which can allow for degrees, humility must come to pass in one go (d’un seul coup) and right away (séance tenante).52 We have already seen that Jankélévitch conceives of humility as a Grund. More particularly, it is a ground in relation to charity.53 And this pair, this relation between humility and charity, is quite important for Jankélévitch. Humility, he writes, is a “waiting” (attente), but it is not yet an accomplishment.54 More specifically, humility “sets the stage for [dispose à] grace, but it, itself, is not this grace, because that grace is charity.”55 Accordingly, when Jankélévitch describes the Schellingian Grund, he claims that a “continual sacrifice permits becoming to progress, just as a particular sacrifice of the initial Grund unleashes Creation.”56 Humility is a sacrifice that paves the way for charity and creation. Before charity can occur, it is necessary that humility be there, qua a necessary condition, as a “prelude” to this love or this charity.57 The accomplishment of virtue “requires” love or charity, but Jankélévitch will emphasize that what theologians say of humility is that it “is the ground of the virtues.”58 In order for there to be other virtues—courage, loyalty, and even the virtues of the interval such as modesty and justice—it is necessary that there is first a limit on one’s self-love (amour-de-soi). In this respect, humility is, at bottom, a ground of the virtues. But it still remains necessary to show in what way humility can be this ground of virtue. Jankélévitch begins the second edition of the Traité des vertus by providing an expanded discussion of consciousness (conscience). On his account, a person’s everyday type of awareness is an example of what he terms “semi-consciousness,” that is, a consciousness that is conscious of itself, but in the manner of a subject reflecting upon its object. Moreover, because the semiconsciousness is conscious of temporal things, it, in reality, represents a balancing act between the past and the future. However, as a semiconsciousness, the consciousness is never complete. That is, because it has the structure of a subject observing an object, there is always a gap (décalage) between the subject and object, especially when the “object” is itself. Because of this gap, the semiconsciousness “is, indeed, essentially a latecomer [retardataire]”59 to that of which it is conscious. As such, instead of looking forward and being open to the future, the consciousness can remain bogged down in the past to the extent that it looks at itself, as in a mirror. In actuality, what often restricts and holds the person back—in the end, that which is “bad,”—is a good intention itself, ipsa, one that has deteriorated from inside by the satisfied consciousness that one has of it.”60 In other words, the subject remains focused on its past accomplishment— almost a preening—instead of looking toward what is to come. In this regard, Jankélévitch makes reference to Bergson’s well-known concepts of an “open

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morality” and a “closed morality” from The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, writing that “the humbled consciousness is, in Bergson’s sense, an open consciousness.”61 A so-called closed morality is one that reinforces the established mores and customs of society and acts as a bulwark against possible attempts to “violate” the mores and customs of the society.62 Jankélévitch claims that closed morality is “founded on an entirely mercantile idea of equilibrium and reciprocity.”63 However, this closed morality is occasionally “broken” and the customs and mores of society are challenged. And this “opening up,” itself, requires for Bergson, as it also does for Jankélévitch, a hyperbolic act. This “open” morality does not provide a set rule or have a set form; instead, it is a transgression. For Bergson, on Jankélévitch’s reading, this transgression is that of “charity,” a first movement, and an “élan of the heart.”64 As examples of such a Bergsonian élan of open morality, Jankélévitch cites Plato, Diotima, Plotinus, and St. John of the Cross.65 However, Jankélévitch reminds his reader that just as quickly as the circle of closed morality is opened up, it closes again, standing in needed of being opened again.66 Modesty, contrariwise, only requires a person to place herself into her rightful position—without demanding any more or any less—and she receives exactly what she is owed. Due to the fact that modesty and justice are closely linked, the relationship between just people and modest people is that of reciprocity.67 The just person cannot demand more for herself than she can demand in regard to anyone else. In contrast, as concerns humility, there is an absolutely fundamental disparity between the humble person and her neighbor; this “inferiority” is radical.68 In order to describe humility, Jankélévitch uses expressions such as “prostration,” “radical inferiority,” “hyperbolic sacrifice [immolation],” “supernatural and gratuitous sacrifice,” and “fall”; and it should be noted that he never uses such expressions when describing the concept of modesty.69 All of the aforementioned locutions relate to a movement away from oneself—qua reducing an emphasis on oneself—and toward something other, or someone other, than oneself. Contrary to the situation with modesty, which is only a just or reasoned measure of oneself, the sacrifice implied by humility is, on the other hand, a “nihilization” of the self in which the humble person literally becomes “nothing[ness] [le néant].”70 The humble person is a “méontic nullity,” that is, “diminished to the extreme.”71 However, a potential difficulty arises here. If the subject no longer exists after a sacrifice, then, quite literally, the subject can no longer sacrifice itself in the future.72 Something of the subject must continue to exist if there are to be more sacrifices in the future. Thus, in the act of sacrificing itself, the subject—the I—cannot sacrifice itself completely; afterward, something must remain in some fashion. Yet, the continued existence of the I, the self, the ego is also important for another reason. Somewhat ironically, the I, the ego,

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or more precisely, egoism must exist as an obstacle to humility. Of course, the more that someone is egoistic and prideful, the more difficult it becomes for the person to sacrifice her egoism in humility. But if there is no ego—and no egoism or pride—then there is nothing that can be sacrificed, and, thus, no humility. So, Jankélévitch asks: “Is the ego an obstacle to sacrifice? Or rather, is the ego the matter, the raison d’être, and the vital sustenance of sacrifice? One must respond that: it is both together.”73 Egoism, and really the I itself, is an organ-obstacle (which is also the case for humility, as will be seen). Jankélévitch worries that if virtue arises completely naturally, flowing from someone “like the circulation of blood in the arteries, [then] there is no virtue,” due to the fact that there had been no choice or decision to become virtuous.74 So, he claims that it is “egoism that makes altruism altruistic,” since “it is altruism that needs egoist instinct so that it can be overcome.”75 As is the case with egoism, so too, humility, qua ground, is an organ-obstacle as well. Earlier, we saw that Jankélévitch describes Schelling’s Grund as a “tension,” a term that he also uses to describe humility, writing that humility constitutes “a tension, an unstable relation, and a provisional transitivity.”76 If the humble person abolishes herself completely, then there no longer remains any agent who can act. So, the humble person must actually reduce herself to an almost nothing (presque-rien), and in such a way, there can actually remain “something” that can continue on into the future.77 But, as opposed to modesty, with humility one cannot remain in one’s humility.78 To the contrary, for Jankélévitch, humility is a transformation, or decision, or conversion that comes to pass quickly, like lightning, as opposed to a state that endures for a certain period of time.79 It is for this reason that Jankélévitch claims—as is the case with every intention or choice—that humility itself is “unknowable after the fact.”80 When one is reduced to an almost nothing, when one’s self-love has, so to speak, disappeared, one has a consciousness that is open to others and to the world, which, as Jankélévitch calls it, is a consciousness “rapt with wonder [émerveillée].”81 On account of this openness, humility welcomes novelty; everything—each moment, each event—becomes a “marvelous chance.”82 In certain passages, Jankélévitch explicitly refers to the link that exists between the Greek notion of thaumas—astonishment—and humility.83 He writes that the grand soul, the magnanimous person, such as Aristotle’s virtuous person, Spinoza’s sage, or Kant’s moral agent, “does not become astonished.”84 Rather, it is the person who is reduced to almost nothing that has within herself the capability to become astonished as well as that of renewal.85 Just as importantly, it is in humility that one can have an “intuition” of, or a “glimpse” of the “absolutely other” or that which is of a “wholly other order,” notions that are dear to Jankélévitch, and that he claims to have initially found in the works of Blaise Pascal and also Rudolf Otto.86 Jankélévitch expresses this

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notion succinctly when he asserts that “the temple of humility is the “sanctuary” in which everything betokens the Absolutely Other.87 However, in the “glimpse” or “intuition” spurred on by humility, one does not find oneself in front of an alterity, contemplating it like an object of thought; rather in humility, the humble person is able to “be absorbed with the other,”88 in the sense of being as focused on the other, as one can possibly be. In fact, this topic of the relation to the other, a major theme in Jankélévitch’s metaphysics, has a moral tint to it insofar as he sees the other person—the Thou (Tu)—as “the most other of others.”89 So, not only does humility provide an openness to the world, but just as importantly, if not more importantly, humility preserves the alterity of the other person. In being humble, one does not attempt to reduce the other to one’s own concepts or needs. In so doing, the other is allowed to remain in their alterity. Not surprisingly, this reflects another important aspect of Jankélévitch’s thought: the Thou in front of me is, simultaneously, “close and yet always also far away.”90 Spatially, the other can be quite near to the humble person. But, at the same time, qua alterity, the other person is very far away from the humble one. So, we see Jankélévitch refer to the proximate alterity of the other person as “the true organ-obstacle.”91 This theme of openness to the other represents an important aspect of humility for Jankélévitch. But Jankélévitch takes pains to distinguish humility from humiliation. The latter supposedly comes from the outside and is imposed upon the subject unwillingly. In humility, the humble person humbles herself willingly, that is, by herself.92 When it is a question of modesty, and, thus, of justice and reason, one regards both others as well as oneself from a third-person perspective.93 Even friendship, according to Jankélévitch, concerns people who are modest,94 because in friendship people “desire as a partner someone who is always the same, and not another person who is always other.95 On the other hand, the infinite impoverishment that is involved with humility puts us into relation with others.96 But here, the other person is not just any old bystander, nor the multitude in general, nor the abstract, ambiguous, third person of modesty and justice. Rather, in reducing oneself to almost nothing in humility, one also reduces one’s egoism and self-love to almost nothing.97 As a result, humility makes it such that the humble person is “perfectly receptive to the concrete person, to this Other par excellence, that is the Thou [Toi].”98 Again, what is important is that the person in front of whom the humble one stands is neither the abstract agent of justice, nor the person of Kantian dignity, nor Levinas’s Other (autrui). Instead, the person in front of whom the humble person stands is a concrete and living human being, a “Thou,” to use a term from Martin Buber that Jankélévitch frequently employs.99 Whereas in modesty, the I can still make legitimate claims about what it merits or about that of which it has need; in humility, the focus of the I is no longer on itself but rather on the other, and as such it becomes “thou-saying [tutoyant] and alterocentric.”100 Qua open to, and astonished

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by, the other, there exists in the humble person an “infinite gratitude” of the I toward its thou, a relation that is not at all that of economics and justice, but rather one that remains “beyond every commutative exchange of services.”101 Although Jankélévitch understands that economic concerns and justice—in the sense of everyone getting their fair share—do have their place in the grand scheme of ethics and society, he is at pains to avoid a “transactional” notion of the foundation of ethics, and, thus, of humility and also of love. If ethics, at its core, is merely some kind of deal or a line on a balance sheet, then we are right back to a “closed system” in Bergson’s terminology. And if everything has its monetary price then mere utility becomes the basis of all values. On such a model, humility could not be a virtue and would serve no purpose; there would only be modesty. For, in humility, the I literally has no selfishness or even a sense of its own dignity. In fact, the moral person, for Jankélévitch, claims no rights for herself or nothing due to herself. We now understand why it is that Jankélévitch asserts in many of his writings that the moral person “has no rights, but rather only duties.”102 Jankélévitch does not reserve his metaphysical terminology—“wonder,” the “wholly other,” the “organ-obstacle,” the “mystery,” and so on—only for the other person, he also uses these terms when he discusses the I’s relationship to the world. The nihilization of the self, effectuated in humility, represents not only an opening toward, and an affirmation of, the other person but also an opening onto the world around oneself.103 This is not the same as the awe that one might experience in front of a marvelous entity (merveille) in this world, such as a towering mountain, a great work of art, or a massive storm. Rather, it is the wonderment (émerveillement), the “‘wholly other’ Thauma, that is no longer [just] a marvel [merveille] , but [rather] a mystery.”104 But this wonderment is nothing other than the “consciousness of the mystery.”105 In juxtaposition to a “secret,” which is something that is merely hidden, but that can, when all is said and done, actually be revealed, and known empirically, a “mystery,” according to Jankélévitch, is something that, by its very nature, can never be understood by reason; its very nature is to be wholly other. The organ-obstacle is the vehicle of this mystery and is, thus, that before which one has wonderment.106 It is precisely at this juncture that humility and modesty again show their differences. For Jankélévitch, modesty, qua linked to rationality and reason, only sees that which is the same in the other person and the world. That is, it necessarily reduces any aspect of alterity to some common measure—say, reason or common linguistic concepts—and only recognizes what is the “same” in the other.107 Humility, on the other hand, in allowing the other to exist as it is, recognizes “all that is irreducible and impenetrable in the mystery.”108 However, for Jankélévitch, what is a mystery, what is metaphysical, is not something outside of this universe. It is not, for example, found in a Platonic world of forms nor does it represent an ideal manner of being that

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is somehow hidden behind the empirical world and that we would attempt to find by rejecting or going underneath the empirical world. In fact, if this were the case, then what is metaphysical would merely be a “secret” in Jankélévitch’s terminology and not a “mystery.” What is more, attempts to conceive of that which is other, or mysterious, as belonging to another world, or reducing this so-called other world to a second version of reality, that is simply a mirror image of the empirical world around us but now on a supposedly higher order, do not capture the essence of metaphysics on his view.109 For Jankélévitch all of this falls prey to a so-called myth of the beyond.110 It is simply on account of pride that we attempt to reduce the metaempirical to the empirical.111 Instead, metaphysics should be concerned with what is, on the one hand, entirely ordinary and this-worldly—because there is only one world—yet which, on the other hand, is quite extraordinary. So, for Jankélévitch, what is mysterious is the mere or pure “fact that” (something is) and this is revealed to us in humility.112 Humility brings about the recognition— that is, the revelation—of that which is absolutely other about the empirical world.113 Yet, this absolutely other that we encounter in the quotidian or empirical world is not some type of special, or “holy,” object of this world. Rather, what is mysterious is something that is extraordinary and ordinary at the same time: “astonishment at [the very fact of] something’s existence.”114 It must be stressed that it is not existence qua concept or even in terms of Being qua Being that constitutes the mystery. What is mysterious, for Jankélévitch, is something’s “quoddity,” “its ipseity.” This is not to be confused with what something is, its attributes, its “quiddity.” Rather, something’s or someone’s “quoddity” is nothing other than “the fact that” something before me exists (instead of nothing [néant]).115 Something is mysterious by the fact that one posits or recognizes “its very presence and by the fact that it exists.”116 For example, a scientist can tell us what an oak tree is. But what is mysterious, wondrous, and metaphysical is the fact that the oak tree is here in front of me. The very fact of its existence is metaphysical. The same holds for one’s “thou” or one’s “beloved.” As such, the beloved, or the thou, is no longer “one human among many.” But the “thou” or the “beloved” is experienced as unique in the world precisely because of the fact that he or she is. In a word, what is “metaphysical” is to experience wonder at that which, in a way, is most mundane. Metaphysics involves a way of being toward others and the world such that we experience both in a different or new manner, one in which we do not reduce what is other to preformed, pre-given concepts or ideas. And this is exactly what Jankélévitch sees as the challenge (gageure) of metaphysics, “to make problematic what poses the least of problems.”117 However, this wonder at existence does not last because it changes over into contemplation. As soon as one finds oneself in front of an object, contemplating it, one no longer encounters the object or the other person as it is

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in itself. So, there is a need for a “humble submission to the pure fact such as it is given . . . that is to say, of the fact of being there,” which remains “opaque to intelligence.”118 Hence, humility must arise again so that it can diminish the I—egoism—and, as such, permit the pure fact of alterity to radiate. Humility requires a continual diminution of the semiconscious I in order to allow for a true consciousness of the quoddity. Consequently, Jankélévitch calls humility “the experiential [expérimentale] philosophy of the mystery,” which just is “mysticism.”119 And this mysticism is nothing other than “the reality of the mystery.”120 So, for Jankélévitch, there is a “fraternity” between mysticism and empirical experience,121 given that both relate to the everyday world around and people in that world. For Jankélévitch, humility creates a “void for great beginnings.”122 But humility is a preparation and not a completion. It alone cannot suffice and it requires a complement. Thus, he writes that “humility destroys, while charity creates.”123 This is where love, or charity, plays a role. In his last book, Le paradoxe de la morale (The Paradox of Morality), Jankélévitch writes of love qua (true) gratuitousness, that is, in terms of an absence of a cause.124 As Jankélévitch repeats in so many of his texts, love, true love, does not have a “reason” for loving. Love is precisely this movement toward, or a “living for,” the other.125 One does not love because of this or that quality; one loves merely because one loves.126 Love does not love because of some preexistent value that it searches out in the other.127 But rather, the other and the qualities of the other become valuable because of the love of the lover: “love founds the value itself . . . love is foundational.”128 It is love, or generosity or charity that creates value, that makes people and things valuable. And in so doing, love “creates.” Love, and not qualities such as humor, wit, or style, is what makes the beloved special (also by making these qualities in the beloved special). Because love, for Jankélévitch, is a virtue of the instant, as is humility, it must be continually restarted; one cannot love and remain in that love. Humility implies a never-ending nihilization, one that allows for continual recommencement; and this continual recommencement allows for an opening in which charity, or love, carries out a continual creation.129 It is because of the back and forth between nihilization and creation that our philosopher will say of humility that it “obeys the vocation of futurition, which is to become and to be renewed.”130 CONCLUSION We have seen how Jankélévitch analyzes humility using a concept from Schelling: the ground. Such a ground is both an organ and an obstacle. Humility reduces the I to almost nothing. Instead, for Jankélévitch, humility

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involves a sacrifice of one’s focus on oneself, even of one’s own value, worth, or dignity. It occurs as “the sudden mutation that, in one flash of lightning, makes coincide the sudden motion that unleashes the first-last movement.”131 As this comes to pass, “the subject and object become confused in one same Almost-Nothing, the pure flame of the flash of intuition.”132 As in a Bergsonian intuition, in which a knower becomes tangentially close to that which it knows, or intuits, so for Jankélévitch, humility, in reducing a person to almost nothing, opens the person up—in Bergson’s notion of “open”—both to other people around her as well as to the world that surrounds her. In humility, the ego does not attempt to see and understand the world through preconceived ideas and categories. Thus, it is a traditional metaphysical gesture because it represents, if only for an “instant,” an attempt to allow the world to appear as “given,” and insofar as it is given. And in this, it resembles Bergsonian intuition. But humility also permits the other to shine forth as a “thou” instead of a mere object of cognition. So, it is also an ethical gesture in which “the moral movement is accomplished in the glow of the instant.”133 It is not possible to remain in the instant, which disappears as soon as it appears. For this reason, our ethical actions—but also our outlook on the world itself—must always be restarted insofar as the instant of sacrifice does not continue, so the privileged access to the “thou” and the world appears and disappears in a flash. Hence, Jankélévitch emphasizes that “this is why ethical works, which are always undone, are always to be redone.”134 In the end, humility is the ground of this conscience insofar as it must be remade at every moment, and because that which, each time, begins a new, open conscience of the other and the world is humility. NOTES 1. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1 (Book One) of Volume 2 of the Traité des vertus (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), 285–402. All translations from Jankélévitch are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2. Ibid., 287–88. 3. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Du fondement (« Grund »),” in L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1933), 29–45. 4. Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience, 3: “l’univers n’est pas un système; mais une histoire.” Jankélévitch may be referring to: F. W. J. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1800), 413–41. Trans. Peter Heath and Michael Vater, System of Transcendental Idealism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981), 119–212. 5. Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience, 34: “biographie de l’être.” 6. Ibid., 35: “[. . .] attentive surtout à l’émergence du reel [. . .] toute logique de l’exposition qui rend la durée inutile.”

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7. Ibid., 33: “concept des concepts.” 8. Ibid., 32, 33, 34. 9. Ibid., 32–33, 33: “génération réelle des êtres [. . .] ordre idéal de la logique constituée.” 10. Ibid., 32: “dans l’ordre du temps.” 11. Ibid., 36: “désigne encore la ‘base’ physique, le fond ou fondement.” 12. Ibid., 30, 43. 13. Ibid., 30. 14. Ibid., 31, 43. 15. Ibid., 40, 43. 16. Ibid., 41, 42. 17. Ibid., 38. 18. Ibid., 41: “La ligne commence par le point, qui est la negation de la ligne [. . .].” 19. Ibid.: “Ainsi le movement commence avec la negation du movement: le repos est le ‘Grund’ du movement.” 20. Ibid., 32, 39. 21. Ibid., 31. 22. Ibid., 33: “toujours plus réduit, plus concentré que l’organisme adulte.” 23. Ibid., 40: “dans un tout autre langage, dans le langage explicite de l’existence; il déploie dans l’ordre des choses effectives ce qui n’existait qu’à l’état de compression [. . .].” 24. Ibid., 38: “la matière indécise du jugement.” 25. Ibid., 40, 41: “la plus grande tension des forces, et par suite le maximum d’instabilité [. . .] un Rien qui est Tout.” 26. Ibid., 32. 27. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 287–88. 28. Jankélévitch, L’Odyssée de la conscience, 40, 43. 29. Ibid., 39, 42. 30. Ibid., 43. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 31. 33. Ibid., 38. 34. Ibid., 40. “[d’] un côté, tout le futur de l’organisme y est préformé tacitement [. . .] [d’] autre part, le Grund est le contraire du développement car de cette résistance elle-même le développement a besoin.” 35. Ibid., 43. 36. Ibid., 7, 38, 39: “une création véritable et positive.” 37. Ibid., 41. 38. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 167: “Il n’est guere dans le bergsonisme d’idée plus profonde et féconde.” Trans. Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils Schott (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 138. He cites Bergson, (1) Évolution creatrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), 61–65. Trans. Arthur Mitchell, Creative Evolution (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998), 60–63; and (2) Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale de

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la religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), 52, 118, and 335. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudsley Brereton, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 54, 114, 314. 39. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Le Pardon,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch. Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 1113–16. Trans. Andrew Kelley, Forgiveness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 125–28. 40. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus (Paris: Bordas, 1949), 796, Annexe I. This appendix was removed from the second edition (1968–72) of the Traité des vertus. 41. Jankélévitch, Les vertus et l’amour 1, 322. 42. Ibid., 321, 324, 338, 348. 43. Ibid., 324, 327. 44. Ibid., 324. 45. Ibid., 348. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 319: “une humilité modérée n’est pas une humilité du tout.” 48. Ibid., 296. 49. Ibid., 330. 50. Ibid., 285, 359. 51. Ibid., 355: “les grandes choses importantes de la vie sont de l’ordre de la qualité et ne peuvent être révoquées ou accordées d’un seul coup.” 52. Ibid., 298, 396, 397. 53. Ibid., 401. 54. Ibid., 287. 55. Ibid.: “dispose à la grâce, mais elle n’est pas elle-même cette grâce car c’est la charité.” 56. L’Odyssée de la conscience, 31: “sacrifice continuel permet au devenir de progresser, comme le sacrifice particulier du Grund initial déclenche la Creation.” 57. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 287, 364. 58. Ibid., 287, 373: “est le fondement des vertus.” 59. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, Volume One of the Traité des vertus (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), 24: “est, en effet, essentiellement retardataire.” 60. Ibid., 32–33. 61. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 319–20: “[l]a conscience humble est au sens de Bergson, une conscience ouverte.” See Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 188–92 [“Le Clos et l’Ouvert”]/(English), 156–59 [“The Open and the Closed”]. See also Henri Bergson, Les deux sources, 34–35; The Two Sources of, 38–39. 62. Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, (F)rench 188/(E)nglish 156. 63. Ibid., (F) 191/(E) 158: “fondée sur une idée toute mercantile de l’équilibre et de la réciprocité.” 64. Ibid., (F) 191/(E) 159: “La charité [. . .] est un bon movement [. . .] un premier movement, un élan du cœur.” 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., (F) 191/(E) 158. 67. Ibid., 360.

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68. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 360. 69. Ibid., 319–20, 359, 330, 331, 347. 70. Ibid., 318, 384; Le Sérieux de l’intention, 22. 71. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 363: “nullité méontique [. . .] amenuisée à l’extrême.” 72. Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, 22. 73. Ibid., 40: “L’ego est-il un obstacle au sacrifice? ou bien l’ego est-il la matière et la raison d’être et l’aliment vital du sacrifice. Il faut répondre: les deux ensemble.” 74. Ibid., 20, 27: “comme la circulation du sang dans les artères, il n’y a plus de vertu [. . .].” 75. Ibid., 24, 29: “égoïsme qui rend altruiste l’altruisme”; “c’est l’altruisme qui a besoin de l’instinct égoïste, pour le surmonter.” 76. Ibid., 67–68: “une tension, un rapport instable et provisoire transitivité.” 77. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 363. 78. Ibid., 365. 79. Ibid., 395–96. 80. Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, 41: “méconnaissable après coup.” 81. Jankélévitch, Le Vertus et l’amour 1, 391. 82. Ibid., 391, 397: “une chance merveilleuse.” 83. Ibid., 374, 391. 84. Ibid., 374. 85. Ibid., 391. 86. Ibid., 356–57. 87. Ibid., 358: “le temple de l’humilité est le ‘sanctuaire’ où tout annonce l’Absolument autre.” See also Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Levinas on the ‘Wholly Other,’” Levinas Studies, Volume 8, edited by Jeff Bloechl (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 23–43. 88. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 390: “peut s’absorbe[r] en l’autre.” 89. Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, 21: “proche et toujours aussi lointaine.” 90. Ibid., 21: “le veritable organe-obstacle.” 91. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 390: “le plus ‘autre’ des ‘autres.’” 92. Ibid., 380. 93. Ibid., 324, 324–25. 94. Ibid., 367. 95. Ibid.: “veut pour partenaire une personne, toujours la même, et non pas un autre toujours autre.” 96. Ibid., 312. 97. Ibid., 363, 305. 98. Ibid., 363: “parfaitement réceptif à une personne concrète, à cet Autre par excellence qu’est le Toi.” 99. Ibid., 312. See Martin Buber, Ich und Du in Das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg, Germany: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1984), 5–136. Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, I and Thou (New York: Scribner Classics, 2000). 100. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 324: “tutoyant et altérocentrique.”

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101. Ibid., 360: “au delà de toute échange commutative de services.” 102. Ibid., 398. See also Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Tout le monde a des droits, sauf moi,” (Chapter V.6) in Les Vertus et l’amour, Volume 2, of the Traité des vertus (Paris, Flammarion, 1970), 67–75; and Vladimir Jankélévitch, “Tout le monde a des droits, sauf moi,” Chapter IV.3 in Le Paradoxe de la morale, 161–63. 103. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 391. 104. Ibid., 252: “un ‘tout autre’ Thauma qui n’est plus merveille, mais mystère.” 105. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Philosophie première (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953/86), 253: “conscience du mystère.” 106. Ibid., 243. 107. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 390. 108. Ibid., 390: “tout l’irréductible et tout l’impénétrable du mystère.” 109. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 1–29. 110. Ibid., 357. 111. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour, 357. 112. Ibid., 389. 113. Ibid. 114. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 253. 115. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “De l’ipséité,” in Premières et dernières pages, ed. Françoise Schwab (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994), 196, emphasis in the original. 116. Ibid., 177: “sa présence même et par le fait qu’il existe.” 117. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 253: “problématiser ce quit fait le moindre problème.” 118. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 388: “humble soumission au fait pur tel qu’il est donné, [. . .] c’est à dire du fait d’être là [. . .] opaque à l’intelligence.” 119. Ibid., 389: “la philosophie expérimentale du mystère.” 120. Jankélévitch, “De l’ipséité,” 177: “la réalité du mystère.” 121. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 388. 122. Ibid., 401: “[. . .] vide pour les grands commencements [. . .].” 123. Ibid., 335–36. 124. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Paradoxe de la morale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985), 47. 125. Ibid., 49, 119: “vivre pour l’autre”; “vivre pour autrui.” 126. Ibid., 48: “Pourquoi cet amour de l’un à l’autre [. . .]. Parce que c’est elle, parce que c’est moi. Parce que, parce que.” 127. Ibid.: “La première personne s’élance vers l’autre [. . .]. [L]oin de se laisser aimanter par une valeur antecedent [. . .].” 128. Ibid., 48. “fonde lui-même cette valeur [. . .]. [L]’amour lui-même est fondateur.” 129. Jankélévitch, Les Vertus et l’amour 1, 316, 366, 367; and also Philosophie première, 243. 130. Jankélévitch, Le Vertus et l’amour 1, 398: “obéit à la vocation de la futurition, qui est de devenir et de se renouveler.” 131. Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, 40: “est la mutation subite qui fait coïncider dans un même éclair, la soudaine motion qui déclenche le premier-dernier movement.”

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132. Jankélévitch, Philosophie première, 105: “l’objet et le sujet sont confondus dans un même presque-rien, la pure flamme de l’éclair de l’intuition.” 133. Jankélévitch, Le Sérieux de l’intention, 30: “le mouvement moral s’accomplit dans la leur fugitive de l’instant.” 134. Ibid., 41: “[c]’est pourquoi les œuvres éthiques, sans cesse défaites, sont sans cesse à refaire.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergson, Henri. Les Deux Sources de la morale de la religion. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. ———. Évolution creatrice. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Translated by Arthur Mitchell, Creative Evolution. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998. Buber, Martin. Ich und Du in Das dialogische Prinzip. Heidelberg, Germany: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1984, 5–136. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, I and Thou. New York: Scribner Classics, 2000. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. Henri Bergson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. ———. Henri Bergson. Translated by Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils Schott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. ———. “De l’ipséité.” In Premières et dernières pages, edited by Françoise Schwab, 177–98. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1994. ———. L’Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1933. ———. Le Paradoxe de la morale. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981. ———. “Le Pardon.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch: Philosophie morale, edited by Françoise Schwab, 991–1149. Paris: Flammarion, 1998. ———. Traité des vertus I: Le Sérieux de l’intention. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 1. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Traité des vertus II: Les Vertus et l´amour: vol. 2. Paris: Flammarion, 1986. ———. Philosophie première. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953/86. ———. Traité des vertus. Paris: Bordas, 1949. ———. Une Vie en toutes lettres: Lettres à Louis Beauduc (1923–1980), edited by Françoise Schwab. Paris: Liana Levi, 1995. Schelling, F. W. J. System des transzendentalen Idealismus. Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1800. Translated by Peter Heath and Michael Vater, System of Transcendental Idealism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1981.

Chapter 8

The Work of Remorse Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Conception of the Ethical Subject and François Ozon’s Frantz1 Magdalena Zolkos

REMORSE AND NACHTRÄGLICHKEIT In Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy of bad conscience, can remorse be described as a kind of work undertaken by the penitent subject?2 Following the logic of Jankélévitch’s apophatic method,3 it is perhaps easier to say what such work of remorse is not: it is not an attempt at nullification or undoing of the crime nor an active pursuit of repentance. Rather than engaging in an active doing, or an undertaking, Jankélévitchean remorse is the enduring of moral pain that derives from the irreversibility of the harmful acts. Invoking a metaphor of a subject who is rendered immobile—prevented from action, growth or development, or “stuck”—due to the guilty conscience, Jankélévitch says that remorse “is the dragging of one’s feet and stagnation [piétinement et stagnation].”4 It is “the despair of a will that feels itself monstrously exceeded by its works.”5 Put in terms from Spinoza’s theory of affect, the remorseful subject is being characterized through reference to her passivity, or the power to be affected (potentia patiendi), rather than her power of activity (potentia agendi).6 To ask about “the work of remorse” in Jankélévitch’s philosophy of bad conscience appears then to be a counterintuitive, or even misguided, endeavor in that “work” seems to imply a moral conception of the subject that achieves her own salvation and contradicts the central element in Jankélévitch’s ethical analysis, namely its “gift structure.”7 For Jankélévitch remorse does not bring about the other’s forgiveness or absolution; rather, it signifies ethical receptivity8 to what Andrew Kelley calls “events of grace.”9 Jankélévitchean forgiveness is always “‘unmerited,’ [. . .] ‘not required’ or ‘non-necessitated.’”10 137

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I argue in this essay that approaching bad conscience in terms of the “work of remorse” is not incompatible with Jankélévitch’s conception of the ethical subject, but that it requires reconceptualizing work, away from its modern definition of a deliberate and outcome-oriented productive activity and in the direction toward the subject’s laborious endurance of moral pain, whereby she comes undone by the loss or harm that she brought about. There is an important parallel here between Jankélévitch’s writing on remorse and Max Scheler’s philosophy of repentance.11 For Jankélévitch, at the heart of remorse lies a deeply transformative act, akin to a religious conversion. Similarly, for Scheler true repentance demands not merely an “adjustment of outlook” or “good resolve,” but “a veritable transformation of outlook [einen wirklichen Gesinnungswandel].”12 My first interpretative move consists of proposing a conjoined reading of Jankélévitch’s notion of remorse and the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit (variously translated as “deferred action,” “belated action,” and “afterwardsness”).13 Nachträglichkeit describes “an action of the past upon the present,”14 particular to traumatic experiences, whereby the subject initially fails to absorb and make sense of the event, and revisits it only belatedly (nachträglich). In the theory of psychoanalysis it is this belated revisiting of the event that “invests it with significance and [. . .] efficacy or pathogenic force.”15 The subject is “caught out by a time signature that consistently exposes [her] too early to traumatic markers that can only be comprehended too late.”16 Notwithstanding its reliance on a unidirectional conception of time implied in Jankélévitch’s reflections on the irreversible (l’irréversible) and the irrevocable (l’irrévocable),17 the idea of remorse in The Bad Conscience shares interesting traits with the traumatic temporality of Nachträglichkeit. Both remorse and Nachträglichkeit testify to the ways in which the past retains a relentless hold on the subject in the present.18 Temporal belatedness is central to remorse in that the source of the subject’s moral pain lies in the irrevocability of the harm. Arguing that remorse is not a moral directive that can provide guidance for how to live, Jankélévitch writes: “[m]oral conscience always arrives late, and [. . .] it never tells us what it is necessary to do {{but rather what should have been done}}.”19 He reinforces that point later in the book by stating that “remorse [. . .] does not tell us what it is necessary to do, [. . .] it tells us too late what would have been better not to do.”20 Remorse “remains quiet at the moment which, in order to act, we would wait for its oracles; and it, a derisory and posthumous reproach, is only uttered when the irreparable is accomplished.”21 It is bound to the temporality of the “could-have-doneotherwise [l’avoir-pu-faire-autrement].”22 Reading together Nachträglichkeit and remorse helps to adjust the lens of my inquiry because it presents the subject’s laborious penitence not as a productive, efficacious or intentional activity, but as a process in which the

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subject remains “stuck” in relation to her irreversible past deed, and where she undergoes a profound transformation by the loss or harm that she had caused. In Studies on Hysteria, Freud clarifies that at stake in the dynamic of Nachträglichkeit is not simply a narrow economic theory of abreaction, or affective discharge.23 Rather, it is work of recollection (Erinnerungsarbeit), or mnemonic reproduction (Reproduktionsarbeit), which, as George Pollock points out, is a precursory concept for Freud’s later, and better known, idea of the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit).24 Freud writes, in his case description of Fräulein Anna O., Shortly after [the death of the loved one], there would begin in [the patient] a work of reproduction [Reproduktionsarbeit], which once more brought up before her eyes the scenes of illness and death. Every day [the patient] would go through each impression once more, would weep over it and console herself—at her leisure, one might say.25

Important in that passage is that in the work of recollection the subject negotiates her own self in the face of a loss that she has suffered; in other words, the loss resonates with the experience of her own finality. It thus marks a radical breakdown of the subject/object distinction. Fräulein Anna O.’s Reproduktionsarbeit is not a (re-)productive process of coming to terms with the loss of a love object, but an unproductive and dispossessive moment. Jankélévitch’s philosophy of remorse similarly relies on a momentary collapse of the subject/object distinction. Differentiating between repentance and remorse, Jankélévitch argues that the former is associated with actions and the latter—with persons. He argues here against an atomistic conception of moral life, consisting of “[disjoined] defects and misdeeds.”26 In contrast, the philosophy of remorse presupposes “intensive continuity” in moral life in that it “directly calls into question the person, who is the overflowing source of all actions,” and “is interested in a particular action inasmuch as this action serves to define me,” and inasmuch as the misdeed “expresses a general perversion of the I [. . .].”27 Remorse, similarly to forgiveness, indicates the “exchange of roles between agent and patient [. . .], the inversion of the active and of the passive,” as in remorse the offender, “the master of the action to be done becomes the servant of the action already done,” a “colonized colonizer.”28 In The Bad Conscience, the work of remorse is thus not a repentant action or salvific achievement,29 but the unmaking of the subject through compunctious affective experience. For Jankélévitch, remorse is “fecund” only because it is also, in the first place, gratuitous and “impotent.”30 One can talk about the work of remorse, and about the laboring remorseful subject, only to the extent that one also talks about the inoperativity, futility, even idleness of remorse.

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In addition to the juxtaposition of Nachträglichkeit and remorse, it is important to highlight the etymology of remorse. The earlier definition of the word “work” is closely connected to that of “pain.” The Latin verb laborare, meaning “to work, endeavor, exert oneself,” also means “to suffer, or be afflicted” (that is even more pronounced in the case of its synonym, “travail,” which is derived from the Latin verb tripaliare, meaning “to trouble, torture, torment”). Raymond Williams points out that the modern use of the term “labor” dissociates it from the premodern associations with pain, which in turn coincided with the emergence of the modern capitalist understanding of labor as a productive activity.31 Jankélévitch invokes a feeling of biting and gnawing on the soul to express the moral pain of remorse. This also has an etymological basis: the Latin root of remorse is (re)mordere, “to repetitively vex or disturb,” literally “to bite,” derived from the Proto-Indo-European root mer-, meaning “death.” Remorse, then, seems to be reserved for those who are subject to death—for mortals—as gods know no remorse. For Jankélévitch, remorse reveals something important about the human condition and its relation to time and moral life. In what follows, I situate my reading of Jankélévitch’s philosophy of remorse alongside François Ozon’s film Frantz.32 Frantz focuses on the moral dilemma of guilt and atonement with the view of the aftermath of World War I. The film draws on Maurice Rostand’s drama, L’Homme que j’ai tué, and its adaptation by Ernst Lubitsch, Broken Lullaby (1932).33 I use Ozon’s film partly as an illustration of Jankélévitch’s notion of remorse and partly as a way to inquire into the implications of conceptualizing the remorseful subject in terms of their passivity, that is, as an undergoing a certain kind of labor, and in terms of the breaking down of the subject/object distinction. The film’s main character, Adrien (Pierre Niney) is a soldier of the French army who has just returned home after World War I with a terrible secret. He suffers remorse for (what he sees as) an irreparable crime of killing a German soldier, Frantz. An embodiment of a truly Jankélévitchean subject, Adrien is an existential expression of “an inconsolable sadness” and “pure pain.”34 Due to his crime, he is no longer able to function in the world. He is suspended between, on the one hand, despair due to the irrevocability of his deed and the hopeless hope for forgiveness. “I know forgiveness is impossible,” Adrien writes in a letter to Anna (Frantz’s fiancée).35 Later in the film Adrien’s fiancée, Fanny, expresses directly the aporetic desire for forgiveness and undoing, which has underpinned Adrien’s actions: “He wanted to be forgiven. Replace the man he’d killed. But such things are impossible. We can never replace a loved one, can we?”36 Adrien travels to Quedlinburg in Germany to visit Frantz’s grave, to confess his crime to Frantz’s parents and his fiancée, Anna (Paula Beer), and to plead for their forgiveness. Anna has in common with Adrien that she also

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cannot “go on living” after Frantz’s death (in the words of Kreutz, a man who pursues her affection). She appears “stuck” in the time of mourning and in the continuous remembrance of the past; she has lost the will to continue her studies, to experience any kind of enjoyment, or to participate in the communal life of the town. Confronted with the grief of Frantz’s family, Adrien commits a seemingly irrational and highly reprehensible act: instead of making his confession, he pretends to be Frantz’s secret university friend from before the war. I suggest that Adrien illustrates, in deliberately exaggerated ways, what Jankélévitch understands by moral intention and moral authenticity, which figure as central to remorse in The Bad Conscience. JeanChristophe Goddard’s description of Jankélévitch’s remorseful subject aptly captures Adrien’s ethical transformation—in the “innermost reality of moral experience [. . .] aware of my futility, of the insincerity of my sincerity that I have voluntary insisted on, in clearly and painfully acknowledging the impurity of my purity, I once again furtively attain moral purity.”37 If the work of remorse is indeed an unproductive reparative ethical engagement with the world, it is through the act of grace of the other, which the subject is always at risk of misunderstanding, confusing or plainly not wanting. REMORSE AND (IN)FIDELITY TO ONESELF In The Bad Conscience, Jankélévitch makes a distinction between remorse and two other responses to past misdeeds, which are “either to escape [the past] completely or belong to it unreservedly.”38 In contrast, remorse traces a middle pathway between “the forgetting that is immoral and the reparation that is impossible.”39 Interesting here is the contrast that Jankélévitch sets up between remorse on the one hand and the subject’s overidentification with the harmful deed on the other. The remorseful subject not only rejects the more obvious temptation of excuse or self-absolution but also, recognizing themselves as “a man of duration,” refuses to identify with the crime and to hold oneself “entirely in his minute-of-sin, lie, or betrayal.”40 This is because, Jankélévitch argues further, just as “there is no definitive saintliness, the misdeed is always unfinished [toujours inachevée]; it does not condemn us to an irremediable demerit, no more than the practice of the virtues confers upon us solid and absolutely eternal rights [des droits solides et absolument éternels].”41 In contrast to the idea of the subject based on “an imperturbable coherence” and “[f]idelity to oneself [la fidélité à soi],” Jankélévitch outlines a conception of an internally splintered and fragmented subject.42 This subject declares herself irreducible to her misdeed, or in excess of it, and thus in an important respect unfaithful to oneself. From that “power to contradict oneself” comes

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the remorseful subject’s ability to “renew oneself.”43 Or, rather, Jankélévitch proposes that she enacts a different kind of fidelity, which is not based on a coherent, unified and stable conception of the self, but which builds on the idea of a plurivocal self. At hand is not a “grammatical fidelity,” which is an expression of the formal relations of truthfulness, but a “pneumatic fidelity,” which articulates the ethical relation of truthfulness.44 The “pneumatic fidelity” of the subject manifests in the act of conversion, which, as Andrew Kelley argues, shows that Jankélévitchean remorse implies “a radical or complete change of the person,” rather than mere renunciation of one’s deeds.45 Jankélévitch argues: If grammatical fidelity remains attached to the letter, even if it should be sincerity in suffering, then pneumatic fidelity prefers, be it at the price of retraction, to perpetuate the constituting spirit that posited the first act of thetic fidelity. The former becomes disloyal by dint of loyalty; the latter does not fear being disloyal out of love of fidelity. [. . .] At the root of “true conversions” one recognizes the disquietude of a mind [l’inquiétude d’un esprit] that has maintained the power of contradicting itself [le pouvoir de se démentir] and, consequently, of renewing itself [se renouveler].46

Remorse is underpinned by the sense of moral disquietude of a subject who is capable of retaining, within the same psychic and ethical space, two irreconcilable contents and who assumes plurivocality: [M]an, an amphibious and common creature, is neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad, and that everything accuses him and excuses him, not only alternately, but simultaneously; the aggravating circumstances refer to the attenuating circumstances [. . .]; and the Against to the For; but the For, itself, makes the Against reappear, and this infinitely, without one being able to pass a judgment that is unambiguous, univocal, and nondialectical, either on radical wickedness or on the fundamental goodness of the unattainable ipseity that is so well made for both disappointing and justifying all unilateral predications [un jugement inambigu, univoque et adialectique soit sur la radicale méchanceté, soit sur la bonté fonciére de cette ipséité inattingible si bien faite pour ensemble décevoir et justifier toutes les predications unilatérales].47

Adrien illustrates the ethical dimension of remorse, which emerges at the crossroads of his two (seemingly oppositional) responses to the killing of Frantz: the despair due to the impossibility of erasing the past and the “hopeless hope” for a reparative engagement with the world that he had shattered. Adrien’s remorse is viewed by those at home as an oddity and a pathology. What he sees as an inexcusable crime is justified, and even praised, by the key social institutions of postwar France, the military, the state and the

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church, and his plan to visit Frantz’s parents in Germany is considered a sign of mental instability by his family. Adrien insists on his own culpability in spite of being officially interpellated into the position of a hero and a victim. His stubborn remorse is regarded with suspicion because it undermines the legitimacy of the war and the ideology of militant nationalism. While Adrien exemplifies the moral interiority of Jankélévitch’s remorseful subject—at the same time wholly consumed by the weight of his misdeed and yet nonidentical to it—he can also be interpreted as its exaggerated, perhaps ironic enactment. This is because what occurs in the decisive moment of the film, when Adrien is about to make a confession to Frantz’s parents, the Hoffmeisters, and his fiancée, Anna, is that he instead adopts a false identity of Frantz’s prewar university friend. If, as Jankélévitch argues, remorse originates in an event of conversion, this moment in the film is perhaps best described as anti-conversion—it reveals not the change of the offender, but (what at first appears as) a dark moral residue of his psyche.48 The confabulated story of Frantz and Adrien’s friendship involves shared passion for art and music, comradery and intimacy, suggestive even of a secret fantasized homoerotic bond. Adrien’s (false) memories include a scene of Frantz being tutored by Adrien in violin-playing—the bodies of the men express aesthetic pleasure, concentration, mutual understanding, and affection. Here the libidinal topography of the narrative seems inscribed onto the displaced logic of the crypto-homoerotic desire underpinning the relationship of the three protagonists, where Anna is looking at Adrien, who is looking at Frantz (or, more precisely, at Frantz’s grave). Adrien’s impersonation of Frantz’s friend appears at first to be an act of reprehensible pusillanimity and a failure of remorse. However, another way of interpreting that scene is in relation to how Jankélévitch approaches remorse through the human experience of time and the moral life. Here Adrien’s deception can be interpreted as an ironic enactment of the offender’s non-identity with the misdeed. As the two narrative lines merge in the film, Adrien indeed becomes someone more than Frantz’s killer—he also becomes a phantasmatic friend, a confidante, a guide in the world of music and pleasure, and a lover. Also, it is through impersonating Frantz’s friend that Adrien defies the nationalistic excuse and glorification of his crime, and is consequently able to present the deed for what it truly is—an act of fratricide. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Adrien’s failure to follow through the moral intention to confess his misdeed and his false impersonation of Frantz’s friend, exemplifies what Freud has described in the case of the Rat Man as the psychic defence mechanism of undoing.49 In “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” Freud names this mechanism Ungeschehenmachen, meaning a retroactive annulment (literally “to make un-happen”).50 Ungeschehenmachen is an enactment of a ritualized procedure that renders past action “null and

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void.”51 For Freud at stake in the reparative procedure that his subject obsessively undertakes is the undoing as a staging of a counter-act or a counterevent: “compulsive acts [occurring] in successive stages, of which the second one neutralizes the first.” As such, it underwrites the subject’s ambiguity toward the love-object as, also, a hate-object. Paul Lorentz (the “Rat Man”) engaged in the process of the undoing of “love deeds” in relation to his fiancée, supplementing them instead with acts of aggression, which Freud interpreted as expressive of a “battle between love and hate [against] one and the same person.”52 Something similar, I think, transpires with Ozon’s Adrien. In Frantz there is a kind of reversal of the Rat Man case: Adrien, expected as a soldier of the opposite army to hate Frantz, comes to love him—fraternally and perhaps also erotically—and displays the kind of ethical fidelity to Frantz that Jankélévitch in The Bad Conscience described as “pneumatic” (literally, of spirit). Answering Anna’s question “You must have suffered a lot,” Adrien replies: “My only wound is Frantz.” Later in the film, Adrien’s mother admonishes Anna with the words “You mustn’t torment [my son],” and Anna responds: “I am not the one tormenting your son, Madame. It’s Frantz.”53 Adrien’s fabricated identity puts in motion a dynamic of an impossible undoing of his crime, whereby he does succeed at providing a kind of restitution to the Hoffmeisters, and to Anna, by becoming (substitutive) Frantz. The three of them spend evenings listening to Adrien’s fictitious stories of Frantz and their prewar life in Paris. Magda Hoffmeister says: “Tonight it felt as if Frantz himself was present.”54 Adrien becomes for them a substitutive son. This process requires not only that Adrien receives Frantz’s beloved violin (an offer he declines), but also that Anna’s libidinal investment is transferred from Frantz to Adrien. Anna sheds her black dress and puts on a trendy Parisian outfit (a politically suspicious gesture in postwar Quedlinburg), adopting a mirthful manner, which suggests that her mourning for Frantz, and with it what she has described as feelings of emotional deadness, have ended. In Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby, the union between Adrien (Paul) and Anna (Elsa) is facilitated and encouraged by Frantz’s (Walter’s) parents, and it produces a closing reparative scene, whereby the filial substitution is complete, which in turn enables restitution.55 However, Ozon’s film radically departs from the original script of Broken Lullaby. Unlike Rostand and Lubitch, Ozon knows that what emerged in the aftermath of World War I was not postnationalist Europe, but the rise of fascist movements that led to another war and the horrors of the Holocaust. In Frantz, the reconciliatory scene in the Hoffmeisters’s salon is highly ambiguous, partly because Anna, now in love with Adrien, continues to mourn Frantz, and partly because Adrien eventually rejects the “substitution”; he faints and shortly after escapes Quedlinburg and returns to France. In Frantz, the reparative scene implodes—it becomes what speech act theorists call an unsuccessful or failed illocution.

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“THE BETTER BEING WE COULD HAVE BEEN”: REMORSE AND CULPABILITY Ozon’s depiction of the work of remorse in the relationship between Anna and Adrien—framed by aporetic restitutive desire and by the hyperbolic demands of remorse—resonates closely with Jankélévitch’s idea that in remorse the subject gestures away (but never quite departs) from “an abominable past that should never have existed.”56 The experience of remorse means not being able “to [revoke] the destinal quoddity of the having-done,” that is “to undo {{the fact of having done, not to be able to make it that one has not made it}} [. . .].”57 The desire to undo the undoable (the impossible Ungeschehenmachen at the core of remorse) concerns the subject’s aporetic longing for the reversibility of the past deed, which Jankélévitch elaborates through the conceptual prism of Max Scheler’s das Andersgekonnthaben (“something [that] could be otherwise”).58 The perspective of das Andersgekonnthaben implies the collapse of the subject/object distinction. This is because the remorseful subject’s acknowledgement that “we could have willed and acted otherwise” leads to a more profound moment of recognition of “the better being we could have been [das Andersgekonnthaben].”59 Jankélévitch also argues that it is impossible for the subject to dissociate herself from the past deed; the “bad action,” he writes, “[is] just as adhesive as voluptuous pleasure.”60 That the irrevocability of the past misdeed signifies a profound crisis of the subject, or in Jankélévitch’s words, “[that remorse] calls into question the I inside the me,” is illustrated by Adrien, who appears as not only a suffering subject, but also a deeply confused one—in regard to his motivations (we remain unsure whether he seeks the Hoffmeisters’s forgiveness or condemnation), in regard to his national and familial fealty, his feelings for Anna, and his sexuality.61 The breakdown of the subject/object distinction in remorse thus maps onto Scheler’s notion of das Andersgekonnthaben, but Jankélévitch also supplements it with an emphasis on the recuperative capability of the affects that accompany remorse. Remorse condenses within a specific deed or action the subject’s more general predilection to evil-doing. Remorse thus “obliges the evil [within us] to reveal itself clearly, to declare its presence; it makes the wickedness that hides itself within our hearts come back to the surface, with a type of catalysis.”62 Remorse acts as a kind of “vesicatory” agent: it helps to “gather together” what is “impure and vile in our nature [. . .] around a precise action instead of circulating within us in a diffuse state”; remorse is “concentration” as it “circumscribes at the same time that it exalts; with a type of ‘crisis,’ it precipitates the insidious poison that is hidden in our soul [le poison insidieux qui est cache dans notre âme].”63

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In the face of the irrevocability of the past, any reparative possibility must entail not undoing or renunciation of the past, but the untangling of the temporal relation specific to remorse; by “making it so that my past, rather than remaining face-to-face with my present, is allowed to be absorbed and digested by it.”64 It is significant that Jankélévitch ascribes to repair a promissory structure (he writes of the “hope [for] regeneration [espérance de régénération]” and “the promise of reparation [une promesse de réparation],” and subsequently locates it in the domain of things that are yet to come.65 That is why, I suggest, Jankélévitch shies away from writing about repair in any definite way in relation to remorse. This is because remorse provides no assurance or guarantee of reparative outcome. The work of remorse does not bring about or accomplish repair (and, even less so, forgiveness), but only sketches out its horizon of possibility, and is a mark of the subject’s openness, or receptivity, to it. This promissory status of repair is highly conspicuous in Frantz: the restitutive scene in the Hoffmeisters’s salon is brought to a halt with Adrien’s body staging an unconscious protest against his deception of Frantz’s relatives. As Anna sets off to France in search for the disappeared Adrien, she comes close to, but never quite accomplishes, that reparative possibility—in the aesthetic experience of a painting, and perhaps also in her newly forged commitment to life unencumbered by patriarchal obligations, as I will explain. I have suggested that central to the work of remorse is the idea of the “biting” [(re)mordere] of moral pain; “remorse is pain, pure pain, pain [. . .] in flesh and bones.”66 It is in the pain that Jankélévitch locates the work of remorse, rather than in any moral codifications or in repentance rituals. Without embracing the position of “[a]sceticism and the cult of redemptive suffering,” which regards pain as a meritorious end in itself, Jankélévitch nevertheless assigns to the pain of remorse a transformative and reparative, perhaps even emancipatory, effect.67 The pain of remorse has a dual meaning in The Bad Conscience: it is at the same time an affective reaction to the irremediability of the past misdeed and an indication of a reparative process underway; it is “a symptom of [. . .] healing.”68 Jankélévitch draws on contemporary biological metaphors whereby two aspects of pain, exoteric and esoteric (negative and positive), enter into a dialectical relation with one another as concurrent indications of bodily ailment and recuperation. For example, he writes that “everything that is positive in certain inflammations of the organism consists, in reality, in an ensemble of defenses against microbial aggression; phagocystosis is [. . .] the esoteric side of infection, the positive of the negative, the being of nonbeing.”69 Jankélévitch describes the remorseful subject as both marked by a certain incapacity to live a “normal” life after the misdeed, and as undergoing a recuperative process in an attempt at “reestablishing, somehow, its equilibrium.”70 The pain, which expresses

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the tangled relation of past and present characteristic of traumatic events, is not solely an expression of the subject’s self-destructive drives or of internally directed aggression, but it is also a sign of the subject’s attachment to life and of her adaptive and recuperative capacities: the pain of remorse is “simultaneously fall and progress, sickness and cure.”71 Jankélévitch argues that we need to recognize an element of “fecundity” and “vitality” in the moral pain of remorse, but that this element becomes conspicuous only in a forward-looking perspective; it “reveals its medicinal nature as soon as one looks towards the future [. . .].”72 The pain of remorse “represents the effort of an organism at {{transforming}} itself {{or at reestablishing itself in its form}} with respect to the past,” and when “envisaged [. . .] with the optics of the future [l’optique du future], it appears as a prelude, and no longer as an effect; it manifests the resistance of an organism that defends itself [. . .] and that does not want to become again matter.”73 As I have suggested above, however, it is important to view the “optics of the future” of remorse not as a guarantee of repair or recuperation, but as something much more uncertain, unforeseeable and intangible. Drawing upon Kierkegaard, Jankélévitch argues that worse than the perpetration of a misdeed is the subject’s refusal to feel remorse. The “most profound and incurable sin,” he writes, is to “no longer [. . .] know how to suffer” and to have “lost the capacity of tears.”74 In a kind of counter-Nietzschean gesture, Jankélévitch sketches a philosophical scene where remorse appears as a virtue enabling the subject’s self-inspection.75 This is contrasted with the impenitent subject, who is overcome by a “desire [for] impunity.”76 I have previously suggested that Jankélévitch’s remorseful subject is passive in the sense of enduring the pain of remorse, rather than undertaking it as a deliberate moral or political project. Jankélévitch emphasizes here that the ethics of remorse consists of the gesture of giving in to moral pain in the act of recognition that “the initial grace, the grace of regretting emanates uniquely from the bad action.”77 Because it is “the sin itself that engenders remorse for the sin, which becomes, despite its nothingness, miraculously fertile,” the subject does not seek to erase or blot out the misdeed, but accepts its transformation.78 Adrien’s dwelling at the site of remorse, without seeking pardon or absolution, contrasts with the figures of German and French patriots in the film, who are deeply invested in self-perceptions of being the inculpable victim of the war. They illustrate the dynamics of Jankélévitchean “remorselessness”: having “lost the capacity of tears,” they appear incapable of Adrien’s selfinspection and self-renunciation, and they embody a constellation of anxieties and defenses characteristic of the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position.79 That contrast serves as a device to posit the non-identity of remorse and culpability in the film. On the one hand, Adrien experiences the pain of remorse in response to an act that, depending on interpretations, he might not be

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culpable for; on the other hand, the impenitent and war-mongering German and French men continue their self-idealizations, projections and splitting. Ozon represents them as symmetrical and identical in their blind patriotic devotion: just as the Germans gather to sing “Des Deutchen Vaterland,” the French come together to sing “La Marseillaise.” This position is exemplified in the first part of the movie by Dr. Hoffmeister, who refuses to treat Adrien because he is French: (“[e]very Frenchman is my son’s murderer,” Dr. Hoffmeister says).80 In Frantz it is the remorse-less German and French subjects who are truly culpable for the death of their youth. In an ironic reversal of the Freudian reading of Oedipus, they resemble the Greek god Saturn who devours his own sons. As Hanya Yanagihara suggests, the myth of Saturn reveals an unbearable truth, poignantly illustrated by the case of warfare that, in spite of the professed paternal devotion to the offspring, “we might not want to be succeeded by our children, that we might destroy them to save ourselves [. . .].”81 Later in the film Dr. Hoffmeister confronts his German contemporaries, who ostracize him for hosting a Frenchman, thus insisting on their responsibility and culpability: Who sent them to the Front? Who furnished ammunition and the bayonets? We did. Their fathers. On this side, as on the other side. We are responsible. When we killed their sons by the thousands, we celebrated our victory by drinking beer. And when they killed our sons, they celebrated by drinking wine. We are fathers who drink to the death of our children.82

When visiting Adrien in provincial France, Anna attends a party given by Adrien’s mother. In contrast to the solemn comportment of the youth (Anna, Adrien and Fanny), whose lives seem to bear an indelible imprint of war and the destruction it brought, the attending French aristocrats adopt a frivolous demeanor and approach Anna’s war experience with detached curiosity. Their undue levity is poignantly summarized by Adrien: the fathers/mothers of the soldiers are the ones who “danced” to celebrate France’s victory in the war, but “on dead bodies” of their children.83 Perhaps most conspicuously revealing of this saturnal logic underpinning the actions of the older generations of the French and the Germans alike, is the scene, occurring twice in the film, when the parents listen to the music performed by the youth—the sons and daughters are consumed by their fathers and mothers not only as soldiers at the military front but also as providers of aesthetic pleasure, guarantors of communal safety, and loci of national identity. In Frantz, remorse and culpability are thus differential categories. It is the inability or unwillingness to experience the pain of remorse in the face of the war and loss that indicates greater crimes than Adrien’s misdeed. The refusal of remorse is a sign of

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complicity, of improper jollity in the face of hopelessness and destruction, and of dehumanizing cruelty. CONCLUSIONS: ON JUSTICE AND JOY Adopting Scheler’s distinction between Tatreue (“repentance of conduct”) and Seinsreue (“repentance of being,” or what Jankélévitch calls “ontic repenting”), Jankélévitch emphasizes the hyperbolic dimension of remorse. This means that remorse makes infinite and impossible demands on the penitent subject—there is no end to remorse in the sense that the misdeed will not ever be fully rectified, or undone. For Jankélévitch, the work of remorse lies beyond the economy of social exchanges and beyond the logic of compensation, or what Catherine Malabou calls in a different context “the reign of the calculus.”84 Rather, remorse belongs to the domain of the incalculable. Jankélévitch writes that the justice of remorse “is neither repressive, nor corrective [. . .],” it is not the “closed, symmetrical, and leveling justice that replies ‘tit for tat’ to the bad action.”85 Instead, the justice of remorse is asymmetrical and non-corrective. Even more so, elsewhere Jankélévitch remarks that remorse demands something different than what justice can provide or is oriented towards; “remorse is the contrary of justice, remorse is utterly unjust [le remords est le contraire de la justice, le remords est souverainement injuste]”).86 Hisham Matar, the author of Return where he tells the story of his dissident father’s disappearance by the Gaddafi regime, illustrates this point well, when he says the following about the loss suffered by his family members at the hands of the Libyan regime: [What is] difficult to describe about the consequences of political oppression? It is easy to count the bruises, how many people died, how many days [they spent in] prison. These things you can measure. But the more complicated damage is the damage [of the] imagination, on the scale and breadth and depth of your heart, on your patience, on your curiosity.87

The final “Jankélévitchean trope” in Frantz that I want to point to is that of joy that emerges from, or is activated by, remorse. At the site of the unmaking of the penitent subject, Jankélévitch offers a conception of joy that accompanies the transformation of the pain of remorse into a type of “attentive morality.”88 Its figure is a minor Roman goddess of gaiety, Laetitia, whom Jankélévitch contrasts with Gaudium—joy or satisfaction derived from the fulfillment of duty, or repayment of a debt: “[g]audium enjoys its accomplished duty like the pensioner [enjoys] his pension and the proprietor of produce [enjoys] his

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harvest, but Laetitia succeeds a despair that knew nothing of her.”89 Laetitia is “the surprising modulation of despair into hope.”90 Where Broken Lullaby ends—with a reconciliatory scene of Paul accepting his role of a substitutive Walter-son and Walter-lover—Frantz, in a way, begins. Prompted by a sudden lack of correspondence from Adrien and fearing that some harm might have befallen him, Anna sets off on a journey to France, where, as a German, she is met with suspicion, and where she encounters omnipresent traces of the war in the form of ruins, destitution, and the mutilated bodies of the veterans. While she searches for Adrien and visits places of significance for Frantz, the journey enables her to experience a Paris different from its romanticized version in Frantz’s prewar stories (“Everything is different from what Frantz told us,” she writes in a letter to the Hoffmeisters, “I suppose the war changed many things”).91 The journey that is both a search for Adrien and an encounter with the material and immaterial remnants of the war and its horrors, is also a process of emergence of something akin to joy—Anna’s overcoming of emotional insensateness; of the death-like inclination to cease feeling (“When I came back from Germany,” Adrien confesses, “I wanted to die.” “So did I,” Anna responds, “I did not want to feel anything anymore. No more sadness”).92 Anna’s rapprochement with Adrien suggests that such joy involves allowing for remorse to be acknowledged and granted visibility by others—Fanny thanks Anna for welcoming Adrien and listening to his story during his visit in Germany—but also that of the subject’s receptivity to the other’s forgiveness. Anna visits the Louvre museum to see Frantz’s beloved painting, Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé. The painting is a key visual object in Frantz. It represents a young man lying, presumably dead, but perhaps merely asleep, on a bed. It is suggestive of Adrien’s fate and it also resonates with Anna’s psychic life, including her suicide attempt. In Broken Lullaby, Lubitch (faithfully following Rostand’s script in this regard) includes a different painting, Gustave Courbet’s Portrait de jeune homme, and Ozon spoke at length about his decision to exchange Courbet’s painting for a darker and more ambiguous representation. The final scene of Anna viewing Le Suicidé in the Louvre suggests the consolidation of an affect akin to Jankélévitch’s Laetitia, as Anna transcends not only patriarchal expectations, but also that of her role in Adrien’s personal drama of sadness and regret. There is a joyful affect accompanying her aesthetic experience of viewing the painting, which is, partly, a commemorative gesture of love towards both Frantz and Adrien, but, importantly, is not reducible to what the painting has meant for both men. It is also a mark of Anna’s new life in Paris, and of her emerging sense of ownership of her emotions and desires. Frantz obliges Anna in his farewell letter to promise him that, should anything happen to him, she would continue “loving life [and be happy].”93

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Similarly, bidding her farewell, Adrien says to Anna “be happy.” Anna’s refusal to play music in a French salon for the aristocratic audience is interpreted by Adrien as a remnant of a wound (“I wasn’t able to play for the Hoffmeisters either, remember? We were thinking of Frantz,” he says to Anna), but she rejects that interpretation and insists she is motivated not by the trauma of the past but by love and desire for life (“I wasn’t thinking of Frantz. I was thinking of you, Adrien,” she says).94 Ultimately, Anna refuses to be brought down by the patriarchal expectation that she should commit to the institution of marriage (as a widow, substitutive daughter, or a remarried wife), or to partake in Adrien’s remorse. She declines the invitation to Adrien and Fanny’s wedding, but she does not return to Germany. She stays in Paris and is “happy in the city that Frantz loved so much” (as she writes to the Hoffmeisters).95 It is undisputable that the happiness, or joy, available to her is inseparable from her position as an unassimilable stranger, and even a potential enemy, as a German woman in France. That liminal condition of a simultaneous insider and outsider underwrites her reflection on Manet’s painting: “It makes me want to live,” are her final words in the film.96 NOTES 1. My thanks to Marguerite La Caze, Angelee Joy Contini, Diane Perpich, Paul Atkinson, and Andrew Kelley for their comments and questions that have helped me develop and revise this chapter. 2. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience (Paris: Flammarion, 1966 [1933, 1952]); The Bad Conscience, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3. Aaron T. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 44–76. 4. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 133; La Mauvaise Conscience, 165. 5. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 155. 6. See for example, Andreea Smaranda Aldea, “Spinoza’s Imagination: Rethinking Passivity,” Idealistic Studies 45, no. 1 (2015): 21–39. 7. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 275. 8. For a philosophical account of receptivity, see Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure. Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); “Receptivity, Possibility, and Democratic Politics,” Ethics and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2011): 255–72. 9. Andrew Kelley, “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself,” Sophia 52 (2013): 182. 10. Jankélévitch quoted in ibid. 11. Cf. Looney, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness, 109–18. 12. Max Scheler, “Repenting and Rebirth,” in On the Eternal in Man, ed. Max Scheler (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010 [1960]), 46; “Reue Und

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Wiedergeburt,” in Vom Ewigen Im Menschen, ed. Max Scheler (Leipzig: Verlag Der Neuer Geist, 1921), 25. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1950 [1895]); Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drives (London: Ica Editions, 1993); Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999). 14. Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973), 112. 15. Ibid. 16. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2013), 92. 17. Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie (London: Flammarion, 2011 [1974]). 18. See for example Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (London: Routledge, 2012). 19. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 40, emphasis in the original. 20. Ibid., 133, emphasis in the original. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 134; Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 165. 23. Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and Sigmund Freud, “Studies on Hysteria,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1995). 24. George H. Pollock, “Mourning and Adaptation,” in Essential Papers on Object Loss, ed. Rita V. Frankiel (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 147. 25. Breuer and Freud, “Studies on Hysteria.” 26. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 93. 27. Ibid., 94, emphasis mine. 28. Ibid., 102. 29. Cf. Ibid., 119–33. 30. Ibid., 118–19 & 15. 31. Raymond Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 176–79 & 334–37. The semantic proximity of the physical exertion of the laboring body and the body in pain is conspicuous in regard to the use of such terms as “labor” and “travail” to describe childbirth. This is, however, a less useful example for understanding the moral imaginary of Jankélévitch’s remorseful subject, who is rather modeled on male archetypal figures of regret, such as Orestes and Raskolnikov. 32. François Ozon, “Frantz” (2016). 33. Maurice Rostand, L’Homme que j’ai tué (Paris: Nagel, 1950 [1930]). Ernst Lubitsch, “Broken Lullaby” (1932). There are numerous parallels between Frantz and Broken Lullaby, in spite of Ozon’s insistence that Frantz is not a remake, and that he had become aware of Lubitsch’s film only after making Frantz. See for example, Eric Kohn, “How François Ozon Made the Best Remake of the Year by Accident,” IndieWire, March 20, 2017.

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34. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 109 & 46. 35. Ozon, “Frantz.” 36. Ibid. 37. Jean-Christophe Goddard, “Vladimir Jankélévitch,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 38. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 109. 39. Ibid., 110. 40. Ibid., 111. 41. Ibid.; Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 143. 42. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 112 & 13; La Mauvaise Conscience, 144. 43. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 113. 44. Ibid., 112 & 13. 45. Andrew Kelley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in The Bad Conscience, Vladimir Jankélévitch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), xvii. 46. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 113; La Mauvaise Conscience, 145. 47. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 153; La Mauvaise Conscience, 182. 48. It must be noted that Adrien’s deception of the Hoffmeisters is based on compassion, not on avoidance of responsibility. It is the Hoffmeisters who assume that Adrien is Frantz’s friend. 49. Sigmund Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955 [1909]). 50. Sigmund Freud, “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959 [1926]). 51. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 477. 52. Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” 192. 53. Ozon, “Frantz.” 54. Ibid. 55. Lubitsch, “Broken Lullaby.” 56. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 42. 57. Ibid., 107, emphasis mine. 58. Ibid., 108 (n.227). 59. Scheler, “Repenting and Rebirth,” 47; “Reue Und Wiedergeburt,” 26. 60. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 107. 61. Ibid., 106. In Rostand’s L’Homme que j’ai tué there is no ambiguity in the protagonist’s motivations—he seeks the parents’ forgiveness, which also marks complete expiation of guilt. In Frantz, Adrian’s guilt remains, even after he had been forgiven by Anna. 62. Ibid., 116. 63. Ibid.; Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 144. The word “vesicatory” means an agent that causes blistering; in the quoted passage Jankélévitch wants his readers to think about the “vesicatory of remorse,” as its way of concentrating and manifesting shameful desires and inclinations in specific acts. In other words, bad

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conscience causes the subject’s moral “blisters,” and thus allows the aching, shame, and compunction to prop unto concrete events or undertakings. 64. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 114. 65. Ibid., 113 and 14; Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 145. Jacques Derrida makes a useful distinction between “future” and “to come” [l’avenir], where the latter is both unguaranteed and unforeseeable. He writes: “In general, I try and distinguish between what one calls the Future and ‘l’avenir’ [the ‘to come’]. The future is that which—tomorrow, later, next century—will be. There is a future which is predicable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes, whose arrival is totally unexpected. For me, that is the real future. That which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So is there is a real future, beyond the other known future, it is l’avenir in that it is the coming of the Other when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.” Derrida in Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 53. 66. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 46–47. 67. Ibid., 117. 68. Ibid., 114. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 115. 71. Ibid., 116. 72. Ibid., 115. 73. Ibid., 114; Jankélévitch, La Mauvaise Conscience, 146. 74. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 115, emphasis mine. 75. Ibid., 117. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 118. 78. Ibid. 79. Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (1946). 80. Ozon, “Frantz.” 81. Hanya Yanagihara, “Closing Address,” The Sydney Writers Festival (2016). 82. Ozon, “Frantz.” 83. Ibid. 84. Cf. Magdalena Zolkos, “‘Where Counting No Longer Makes Sense’. Loss and Incalculability in Philosophic and Artistic Responses to Historical Injustice,” in Transitional Justice Beyond Blueprints: Ethnographies and Case-Studies, ed. Claire Garbett and Sari Wastell (London: Routledge, 2019). 85. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 94 & 98. 86. Ibid., 94; La Mauvaise Conscience, 127. 87. Hischam Matar, “A Murderer in the Family,” in The Sydney Writers Festival (2017). 88. Jankélévitch, The Bad Conscience, 169. 89. Ibid., 170. 90. Ibid.

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91. Ozon, “Frantz.” 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aldea, Andreea Smaranda. “Spinoza’s Imagination: Rethinking Passivity.” Idealistic Studies 45, no. 1 (2015): 21–39. Bevernage, Berber. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. London: Routledge, 2012. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1995, 1–335. Dick, Kirby, and Amy Ziering Kofman. Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1959 [1926], 77–178. ———. “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955 [1909], 153–319. ———. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, edited by James Strachey, 347–445. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1950 [1895], 283–387. Goddard, Jean-Christophe. “Vladimir Jankélévitch.” In The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century Thought, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, 551–553. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. The Bad Conscience. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. L’Irréversible et la nostalgie. London: Flammarion, 2011 [1974]. ———. La Mauvaise Conscience. Paris: Flammarion, 1966 [1933, 1952]. Kelley, Andrew. “Jankélévitch and Gusdorf on Forgiveness of Oneself.” Sophia 52 (2013): 159–84. ———. “Translator’s Introduction.” In The Bad Conscience, edited by Vladimir Jankélévitch, vii–xxii. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Klein, Melanie. “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (1946): 99–110.

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Kohn, Eric. “How François Ozon Made the Best Remake of the Year by Accident.” IndieWire, March 20, 2017. Kompridis, Nikolas. Critique and Disclosure. Critical Theory between Past and Future. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. ———. “Receptivity, Possibility, and Democratic Politics.” Ethics and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2011): 255–72. Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. London: Routledge, 1999. ———. Seduction, Translation and the Drives. London: Ica Editions, 1993. Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973. Looney, Aaron T. Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Lubitsch, Ernst. “Broken Lullaby.” 1932. USA, Paramount Pictures. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2013. Matar, Hischam. “A Murderer in the Family.” The Sydney Writers Festival, 2017. Ozon, François. “Frantz.” 2016. France, Mars Films. Pollock, George H. “Mourning and Adaptation.” In Essential Papers on Object Loss, edited by Rita V. Frankiel, 142–80. New York: New York University Press, 1994. Rostand, Maurice. L’Homme que j’ai tué. Paris: Nagel, 1950 [1930]. Scheler, Max. “Repenting and Rebirth.” Translated by Graham McAleer. In On the Eternal in Man, edited by Max Scheler, 35–65. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010 [1960]. ———. “Reue Und Wiedergeburt.” In Vom Ewigen Im Menschen, edited by Max Scheler, 5–58. Leipzig: Verlag Der Neuer Geist, 1921. Williams, Raymond. Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Yanagihara, Hanya. “Closing Address.” The Sydney Writers Festival, 2016. Zolkos, Magdalena. “‘Where Counting No Longer Makes Sense’. Loss and Incalculability in Philosophic and Artistic Responses to Historical Injustice.” In Transitional Justice Beyond Blueprints: Ethnographies and Case-Studies, edited by Claire Garbett and Sari Wastell. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

Chapter 9

The Philosophy of the Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi and the Possibility of a Nonreligious Spirituality Clovis Salgado Gontijo

Vladimir Jankélévitch alludes, in different moments of his book Fauré et l’inexprimable (1974), to the spirituality which characterizes the poetics of Gabriel Fauré. This element is not exclusive to Fauré’s religious music, but pervades all his work, recognizable by a sort of immateriality which evokes “a desire for inexistent things,”1 as the French composer himself remarks in a reference to “the divine phrase of the viola in the Andante of his second String Quartet.”2 Curiously, Jankélévitch attributes the presence of a spirituality in an author described as “that mystic who wrote the Requiem and was not a believer.”3 Considering that the musical production of a nonreligious composer may emanate a spiritual atmosphere, we could now ask if the philosophical work of an agnostic thinker, such as Jankélévitch declared himself to be, may carry some sort of spirituality, even if nondogmatic or nonreligious. In order to examine that hypothesis, I will undertake the following theoretical itinerary. Firstly, I will check certain affinities between Jankélévitchian thought and Christian mysticism, which, although may not be sufficient to present the former as a nonreligious expression of mysticism, may include an important feature of a nonreligious spirituality, namely the recognition of an unsurpassable mystery. The second section of the chapter will consider my central hypothesis through three understandings of spirituality that could be applied to Jankélévitchian non-religious philosophy, and even to his interpretation of biblical events: spirituality as a poetics; spirituality as immateriality; and spirituality as charm. After that itinerary, it will be possible to present a definition of spirituality compatible with the philosopher’s perspective. Since the definition of a nonreligious spirituality could not differ from the traditional definitions of spirituality to the point of making the latter unrecognizable, it will be necessary to formulate a final question, which will contribute to a 157

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better comprehension not only of a key concept of Jankélévitchian thought (charm), but also of a fundamental theme of Christian spirituality (grace). A NONRELIGIOUS MYSTICISM? I will start this exposition employing a negative approach, which is repeatedly found in Jankélévitchian thought. It is frequent, in the lexicon related to the spiritual life, to use the words mysticism and spirituality indiscriminately. As cited by the title and the introduction of this chapter, I will try to verify the possibility of a nonreligious spirituality, not of a non-religious mysticism, in the “philosophy of the je-ne-sais-quoi.” Although describing Fauré as a mystic in Fauré et l’inexprimable, the French philosopher affirms, in the essay “Le Nocturne” (1942), that “there is only mysticism when there is the possibility of a religious life or the communion with the absolute.”4 That observation evidently leads to the impossibility of a “non-religious mysticism,” at least within the philosopher’s conception presented in the essay of 1942.5 As a reader of the Christian mystics, Jankélévitch is here in accordance with some authorized definitions of mysticism, such as the one found in Evelyn Underhill’s classical treatise on the theme, where it appears as “the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else.”6 As the British specialist comments later on, it is also “the name of that organic process which involves the perfect consummation of the Love of God: the achievement here and now of the immortal heritage of man,” or, in other words, “the art of establishing his [the human being’s] conscious relation with the Absolute.”7 Therefore, mysticism deals with an itinerary, which concerns the deepening of the aforementioned relation and culminates in the union with the ultimate Reality, somehow foreseen by the mystic at the beginning of the road. If not religious as restrictively pertaining to a specific creed, mysticism is religious in the very sense of the Augustinian etymology of the verb religare (re + ligare = “to bind fast”), of (re)establishing a connection—and even a fusion—between the individual and the Absolute. Despite the application of some of the characteristics and terminology of mystical experience to immanent ones, Jankélévitchian philosophy could not be properly conceived as a kind of mysticism, since it is not supported by a unified or a permanent focus of transcendence. As we can observe, for instance, in Quelque part dans l’inachevé (1978), the author defends the possibility of a tangential access to the ipseity of particular realities, but not to the origin, to the center, or to the totality of the subject and of the surrounding phenomena. Interestingly, art reception, and not mystical union, is, in that context, the privileged way that enables, through stylization, a deeper contact with the reality converted to an artistic motif.8

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If, for these reasons, Jankélévitchian philosophy distinguishes itself from mysticism in its usual understanding, both still share a fundamental element, which will also be present in the comprehension of spirituality. As a disciple of Henri Bergson, Jankélévitch sustains, throughout his work, what Underhill considers “the first great message of Vitalistic philosophy”: “Cease to identify your intellect and your self: a primary lesson which none who purpose the study of mysticism may neglect.”9 And since verbal language is built over the categories and the logic imposed by intellect, humans’ repertoire, which includes spiritual and aesthetic experiences, also spills over “the fringe of speech.”10 As Jankélévitch himself puts it, in his reflections on the art specially recovered by ineffability, “music buoys up the heavy weight of logos, loosens the devastating hegemony of the word, and prevents the human genus from becoming overidentified with the spoken alone.”11 The recognition of a zone of unknowing which coincides with a zone of not-saying—at least with a zone that could not reproduce a certain standardized structure of speech— may be understood as the recognition of the mystery which permeates human experience. In this sense, the contemporary philosopher retains something of the mystic, which, like the word mysticism, keeps a close relation with mystery, both etymological and experiential.12 The prominence given by Jankélévitch to mystery and also to ineffability— a constitutive mark, according to William James, of mystical experience13— can be easily confirmed by some of the titles of the philosopher’s main works: Debussy et le Mystère (1949); La Musique et l’ineffable (1961); Fauré et l’inexprimable; Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien (1957), Quelque part dans l’inachevé; and even the early essay “Le Nocturne,” which alludes not only to the Romantic musical genre but also to one of the most acclaimed images of unknowing in Christian mystical tradition. Concerning specifically the theme of mystery, it will be illuminating to quote some selected passages of the beautiful first paragraph of Debussy et le mystère, where the affinity between Jankélévitch’s perspective and Christian mysticism may be once more detected and the delineation of some sort of implicit spirituality suggested. There is mystery, and there is secret. [. . .] The distinctive mark of secret is not, therefore, the incognoscibility, but the refusal of diffusion, principle of closed societies and of esoteric selfishness. [. . .] From secret to mystery there is such a long distance as from the grammatical to the pneumatic symbol: the former is a verbal or spiritualist mystery, the latter an essential mystery; the former ceremonial, signal of recognition or Egyptian enigma, the latter mystery no more of the letter, but of the spirit. And whereas secret isolates, being the secret of one in relation to the other [. . .], mystery—secret per se, that is, universally, eternally and naturally mysterious, unknowable for everybody, and not anymore a taboo or an object of interdiction—is a principal of fraternal sympathy and common

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humility. Unfortunately, [. . .], men treat mysteries as secrets: for example, they would like that immortality was a secret, when death is a mystery; they believe there are recipes to win the affection, when charm is an undeserved gift and an inexplicable grace. [. . .] Complex arrangement, new combination of known elements, secret is, like a hieroglyph, essentially decipherable; but mystery, a simple thing, cannot be revealed. Mystery is a metaempirical secret. The sharp enigma that exercises our sagacity and stirs our curiosity, the exciting and heuristic enigma does not wish to be respected, but, on the contrary, to be desecrated. Mystery makes us kneel. Mystery is not anymore, like secret, a “thing,” res, but a climate of our destiny, and, literally, a sacrament.14

This long passage presents a relevant distinction between the secret (enigma) and mystery, which curiously displays an intimate parallel with the differentiation examined by Underhill between magic and mysticism. Magic appears exactly as the belief that nature would guard, such as closed societies, a secret which could be deciphered by the human mind. Therefore, it responds, as the simplistic conversion of mysteries into secrets, to human “indiscrete itching for knowledge,”15 as ironically observed by Jankélévitch, which makes us undertake “a serious attempt to solve the riddle of the world.”16 Nevertheless, in spite of the acclaimed seriousness, magic makes false analogies, establishing a continuity “between the visible and the invisible, between the finite and the infinite,”17 which implies a mere difference of degree between the sensory and the supersensory. Magic is consequently founded on an ultra-optimistic and even arrogant conception of human knowledge, as supposedly capable of being enlarged to an extent that it could embrace unimaginable realms. That conception is obviously in direct opposition to the recognition of the limits of our understanding, so frequent in mystical writings, as the famous verses of Saint John of the Cross, “y quedéme no sabiendo, / toda ciencia trascendiendo,”18 masterly epitomizes. The focus on knowing, characteristic of magic and the secret, which includes the interested desire of actively taking possession of an external object, contrasts with the “movement of the heart,” characteristic of mysticism, “seeking to transcend the limitations of the individual standpoint and to surrender itself to ultimate Reality; for no personal gain, to satisfy no transcendental curiosity, to obtain no other-worldly joys, but purely from an instinct of love.”19 Therefore, the comprehension of mystery presented in Debussy et le mystère, as well as in other texts of the philosopher, corresponds in many aspects to a certain comprehension of mysticism. First, it generates an attitude of openness and even of reverence, before a reality that cannot be surpassed, unveiled or intentionally seized, whereas the secret generates a movement of appropriation and desecration (of something that, as a matter of fact, was never sacred in its condition of being a mere riddle). Mystery, in its kinship with charm, is thus connected to gratuity, one of the major themes of Jankélévitchian thought.

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Second, our degree of access to mystery is not variable as it occurs with secret or magic, where some initiates, provided with a privileged knowing, are able to seep into its mechanism. As in Pauline spirituality, mystery conserves and exhales its mystery to every human being, assembling us in a same community that tends to be touched, puzzled or questioned by its presence. That universality, as Jankélévitch observes, is not restricted to “the unfathomable love of God,”20 included in La Musique et l’ineffable, but also comprehends “the inexhaustible mystery of love,”21 music, poetry, time, forgiveness, and even the sterile mystery of death, already cited in Debussy et le mystère. In that way, mystery applies to the two opposite modalities of the inexpressible, equally formulated in La Musique et l’ineffable and La Mort: on the one hand, the fecundity of the ineffable (ineffable), “infinitely speakable”; on the other, the aridity of the strictly unsayable (indicible), situated outside of possible experience (death) or beneath intelligibility (the problem of evil, violence, and even the inconsistency of spells). A third point of similarity between Jankélévitchian mystery and Christian mysticism is the already mentioned recognition of and respect for the unknowing. Unlike magic or “an intellectualism which reduces the organic to the mechanical,”22 the philosopher does not face the je-ne-sais-quoi implicit in the unsayable and in the ineffable as an “object” susceptible of decoding and dissection. Mystery does not apply to a model of knowledge in which the obscure zone of unknowing could be progressively brought into light. In other words, the je-ne-sais-quoi, as the mystery of God savored by the mystics in their contingent condition, is not a “I-know-not-what-yet,” but a permanent “I-know-not-what.” The insurmountable permanence of mystery implies of course some deficiency of human understanding or at least a discrepancy between the nature of certain themes and the limited structure of our knowledge and language. If the medieval mystic yearns to descend “through desire and through love into that abyss of the Godhead, which no intelligence can reach in the created light”,23 Jankélévitch observes that “no intelligence is sharp enough, airy enough to graze with its tangency the intangible presque-rien,”24 an expression that refers to the evanescent je-nesais-quoi. Perhaps due to the refined delicacy of its “object,” or to its extreme simplicity (“mystery, a simple thing”), as it occurs in Plotinus, or to its deep singularity which cannot be transposed into universal concepts, or finally to its inexhaustible multiplicity which does not fit in a logic constituted by disjunctions, our intelligence is not always capable of formulating a precise and conclusive reasoning. Of course, this does not mean that after detecting the insufficiency of the intellect, the philosopher should resort to ineffability as his only stratagem or simply remain in silence. In the first case, Jankélévitch himself states that just after pursuing a thorough and careful analysis, “we find the right of invoking

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a je-ne-sais-quoi,”25 when noticing that something else remains. That statement has relevant implications in the spiritual domain, since it prevents the hasty attribution of a mystical connotation to certain experiences. In the second case, as the mystic who prefers stressing the ineffable character of his or her delight to keeping an absolute silence which could correspond to the void of experience, Jankélévitch needs to consider and verbalize the inexpressible. Otherwise, he would have to renounce his occupation, since (his) philosophy is mainly oriented to “objects” of a “nocturnal,” “blurred, evasive and fleeing” nature, “objects that are not really objects.”26 Therefore, it becomes necessary to reformulate and defy speech, employing, besides negative constructions, oxymora and suggestions, philosophical concepts that, according to Béatrice Berlowitz, are actually “crystal tools.”27 This explains the admiration of the philosopher not only for the “French delicacy of taste of a Montesquieu” but also for the “Spanish mysticism and preciosity”28 of John of the Cross and Baltasar Gracián. Taking into account the aforementioned distinctions between a transcendent (religious) and an immanent worldview, Jankélévitch’s affinity with Christian mysticism is thus a deliberate sharing of certain fundamental premises, of a methodology and of an accurate sensibility, which, as we will see next, may resound in the philosopher’s own “spirituality.” A NONRELIGIOUS SPIRITUALITY Spirituality as a Poetics I will start this topic with a particular definition of spirituality, which, besides being included in its more conventional sense, can also be applied to Jankélévitchian thought. The Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson, in I Problemi dell’Estetica, defines spirituality as a set composed by the worldview, the values, the references, the beliefs, and the taste of an artist or of a historical time. That spirituality, in the creative process, is translated into a poetics, that is, into an implicit or explicit program of art.29 It is worth noting in this context that Enrica Lisciani-Petrini classifies Jankélévitchian aesthetics— and that classification could be perhaps extended to all his philosophy—as a “poetics,”30 inhabited by privileged motifs, procedures, and affects, such as the imponderable, the unattainable, the immaterial, the crepuscular, the nocturnal, the fluidity, the spark, veiled suggestions, irony, lyricism, and nostalgia. That peculiarity, in the field of musical aesthetics, incurs the risk of improperly extracting from a privileged poetics the principles of art.31 Nevertheless, the singular arrangement of themes and experiences is quite positive and necessary in the artistic realm, since the arts, as a whole, may include a large variety of poetics and thus enrich its possibilities.

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Something analogous occurs in spirituality, understood in its ordinary sense, as the apprehension of a deeper—often transcendent—level of existence. Similarly to the particular shade of blue found in the paintings of Vermeer,32 spirituality, “as the efflorescence, the spontaneous and personal expression of spiritual life,”33 is for each of us “incomparable and thus practically inexpressible.”34 The multiplicity of spiritual experiences may be a response to the divine multiplicity, as the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité affirms, in a passage that displays the resemblance between mystical and Jankélévitchian concepts of ineffability: “as the droplets of dew spark multicolored in the sun, the variety of styles in the relation towards God refracts the richness of God’s gift.”35 It is interesting to observe that such is the cohesion of Jankélévitch’s thought that the same poetics which underlies his aesthetic, ethical, anthropological and ontological approach echoes in his spiritual conception (or, at least, in the way he would like God to be conceived). A singular—in this case, religious—spirituality springs from the singular philosophy of the je-nesais-quoi. Epiphanies involving the presque-rien and the “disappearing-apparition,” such as the brief recognition of the resurrected Christ by the disciples of Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35),36 are preferred to the image of a God Incarnate who, proclaiming himself as “the light of the world” (John 8:12), conflicts with the equivocity, irrepresentability, and ingenuity valued by Jankélévitch. The manifestation of God to Prophet Elijah (1 Kings 19: 12–13) is also appreciated in a philosophy whose ineffability is associated less with the sublime than with subtlety. Severe to Job, gentle to Saint John of the Cross (Llama de amor viva, 16), the touch of God reveals different hues in each spiritual experience. Closer to the Carmelite poet, for the musician-philosopher, “God, according to Scripture, does not come with the noise of wrathfulness but as imperceptibly as a breeze, or (not according to Scripture, but as I prefer to put it, to evoke Pelléas et Mélisande one more time): God arrives on tiptoe, furtively, pianissimo [. . .].”37 That original allusion to an indication of musical dynamics as well as the example of the soft breeze, which also contains a sonorous implication, suggests in Jankélévitchian poetical thought a kind of spirituality of listening, a listening that, as we will see, apprehends an atmosphere. The philosopher himself reveals, in La Musique et l’ineffable, his affinity with biblical perspective, where, in the opposite tendency of Greek ocularcentrism, “every so often [. . .] hearing trumps vision,” and “God at certain moments reveals himself to man in the form of the spoken Word.”38 As it occurs in Jankélévitch’s thought, sounds more properly evoke the register of faith, which is not ruled by well-delimited, visible and touchable realities. Nevertheless, if for the tradition of Fidex ex auditu (Romans 10:17), the auditory event is, above all, a verbal utterance of the divinity, registered and conveyed by the Scripture, for the French philosopher the sonorous epiphany shares the vagueness and the

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enchantment of unintelligible natural sounds (among which may be included the murmuring breeze) or of a musical piece (not necessarily provided with a text).39 That spirituality of listening differs, therefore, from a musical mysticism, such as the one found in the medieval English hermit Richard Rolle, delighted in his mystical raptures by celestial harmonies. According to Jankélévitch, it would not be necessary to concede to music a “transphysical reach” in order to discover its spiritual character: “physical sonority is already something mental, an immediately spiritual phenomenon.”40 That conception of music announces one important characteristic, somehow connected to the realm of sounds and auditory perception, as well as with a widespread understanding of spiritual life and events, namely, immateriality. Spirituality as Immateriality The previous conclusion is supported by the philosopher’s interpretation of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, used by Rimsky-Korsakov as the plot of one of his most acclaimed operas. Covered by a golden mist, Kitezh becomes invisible to the tartar invaders, who can still perceive two traces of its intangible presence. On the one hand, the reflection of the city over the lake at daybreak, on the other, the bells of its cathedral, which sound with amplified intensity in the dead of night. Differently from the visual trace, mere duplication of an inaccessible original image, the sonorous one is the very stimulus that propagates in the vanished city. Since Kitezh appears to be, at the end of the opera, the dwelling of the blessed, Jankélévitch suggests that physical sounds may equally inhabit sensorial and super-sensorial realms. Of course, that suggestion is metaphorical both in a thought that does not effectuate a division or opposition of ontological strata, and more specifically in a musical aesthetics that does not consider sensible music as an incarnation or expression of an intelligible musical idea. Nevertheless, it may point to a particular characteristic of sonorous events, relevant to my research, that is, their apparent immateriality. The Dictionnaire de Spiritualité explains that the word spirituality “was very early used to translate the Greek pneumatikos in the old versions of the Pauline Epistles.”41 It is, in this context, put in contrast with the level of flesh (sarkos) and corporeity.42 That comprehension is still found in Modernity, more precisely in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie, whose definition of spirituality includes the same distinction: “we employ the expression spirituality of the soul to designate that quality which is unknown and that essentially distinguishes it from matter.”43 Curiously, Jankélévitch describes Kitezh as a “pneumatic city,” justifying in that way the comprehension of its sonorities as a “spiritual phenomenon.” And although sound can be measured in its acoustical parameters, its usual

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definition as “transference of energy without transference of matter,” or even the way we receive it in our more immediate sense perception, bring it closer to the domain of pneumatikos. Sounds—and especially musical sounds— include the following features: they deal with an ethereal evanescence (once again we may recall the breeze passing by Elijah); they are not appreciated as a separated and tangible object; they are not kept in the soundboard of the instrument, waiting to be played;44 their area of action cannot be delimited in precise coordinates; their charm seems to exceed the compositional procedures that serve as its material basis.45 Therefore, the spirituality of listening implies that human experience, besides being irreducible to logos, is not restricted to the relation with solid, consistent, durable realities, which can be touched, circumscribed, stored, and located. Music makes us sensible to other “absent-presences,” where the attributes of ineffability and immateriality are also interwoven.46 Among those subtle presences, I may highlight the soul, which, simultaneously recovering and being recovered by the body, according to Plotinus, cannot be found in a fixed part of the organism, and God, who, “being at the same time everywhere and nowhere, is absolutely not ‘somewhere,’ as finite existences” nor in a specific temporal mark, since “he is still at the same time always and never.”47 Passing from the theoretical language to the poetical one, more open and “airy,” and thus more pneumatic, according to the Pauline opposition between gramma (letter, written and literal language, exterior law, prescription) and pneuma (vital principle, freedom and spontaneity of the spirit, inner life) developed by Jankélévitch,48 we could recall the verses of the Brazilian poet Cecília Meireles: “Não digas até onde és tu. / Não digas desde onde é Deus. / Não fales palavras vãs.”49 As the Gospel teaches in the episode of the Transfiguration, we cannot install the divinity or even ourselves in the tents50 of a past epiphany. A reality which could not be imprisoned in rigid limits nor frozen in a solid object manifests the immateriality of the atmospheric, intimately related to the Jankélévitchian concept of charm. Spirituality as Charm The distinction extracted from Debussy et le mystère, which served as the main theoretical basis for the first section of the current essay, should now be taken up. Jankélévitch affirms, at the end of the quoted paragraph, that “mystery is not anymore, like secret, a ‘thing,’ res, but a climate of our destiny, and literally, a sacrament.” Explicitly defining mystery as a “non-object,” the author connects it to the examined sphere of immateriality. That connection is confirmed in La Musique et l’ineffable, where a major example of an ineffable expression, music, appears as “a mystery and not some material secret, [. . .] a Charm and not a thing.”51

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It is interesting to observe how all these concepts—mystery, ineffability, immateriality, je-ne-sais-quoi, charm, grace—are associated in Jankélévitch’s thought, especially within the pole of the inexpressible fecundity, occupied by extreme positive realities, which exceed, due to their richness of meaning, the possibilities of discursive language. The association between the immaterial (atmospheric) and the inexpressible, for example, may be noticed when the philosopher states: “this something (quelque chose) that is the opposite of a thing (chose), we would willingly call it the je-ne-sais-quoi.”52 And, in its turn, charm is conceived as the “activated je-ne-sais-quoi.”53 I could risk saying that charm, “an undeserved gift and an inexplicable grace,” is the privileged manifestation of positive mystery in Jankélévitchian philosophy. As Lisciani-Petrini explains in Charis: Essai sur Jankélévitch, the French word charme is etymologically derived from carmen, a Latin noun which has “two main meanings: poetical composition (carmen) and incantatory rite (enchantment). Therefore, the term, in both cases, serves to indicate something that escapes from the laws of reason and provokes an irresistible attraction.”54 As an incantatory formula, which is literally nothing but nonsense, charm is inconsistent, insubstantial. Nevertheless, it is capable of performing “an operation, like the factura of the magicians: it is nothing, but it makes.”55 Interestingly, charm coincides in that way with the philosopher’s ontological (or meontological) conception, in which God, classically identified with being (or with the radically transcendent source of being), is described as a “sheer make-being without being, whose entire existence is a continued operation and nothing more than an operation.”56 If that origin of the word apparently departs from mysticism and spirituality, in its bond to the manipulations of magic, Jankélévitchian charm incorporates in its constitution a second influence, namely, the Plotinian grace (kharis), closer to Christian tradition, from which the philosopher probably elaborates his own comprehension of mystery.57 Contrary to an explanation of the aesthetic experience exclusively based on measurable and identifiable criteria, such as order, proportion, and symmetry, Plotinus recognizes an indispensable component, which should necessarily be present in order to make formal beauty effective. That component is grace, a spiritual element, in this case, of transcendent origin, which may be represented as a beam of light, a heat, an “‘emanation’ that comes from the Good” (Ennead VI, 7, 22, 8), fundament of Reality. If the beauty of proportion is based on the adjustment of parts, which occupy excluding positions in time or space, grace, simple and indivisible as its source, is a totalizing presence. In other words, grace is entirely disclosed in each “point” where it is found, filling it with movement, life, enchantment. Therefore, the two terms related to Jankélévitchian charm somehow intersect, since both operate a transformation. And that transformation, although less apprehensible than the reasons of

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formal beauty, is not less perceptible to the one who is under its effects. Curiously, in grace, as well as in most of the themes explored by the philosopher: music, time, nocturnal experience, love and charity, the intangibility is not an obstacle to sensorial recognition. Quite the contrary, as the Argentinian writer Santiago Kovadloff puts it, in an essay of Jankélévitchian inspiration: “music will be heard by the one to whom there is nothing more palpable than the intangible.”58 Due to its particular modus operandi and to its intangible, immaterial character, grace is experienced as an atmosphere, a keyword for the purpose of the present study. The totalizing presence, which, like God and the soul, is also an “absent-presence,” is a “circulation of grace on the surface of beauty.”59 Its diffuse action, not concentrated on a single location, works as an aura,60 as an irradiation.61 That Neoplatonic understanding of grace is maintained by Jankélévitch, whose charm, although migrating to immanence in its dependence on material circumstances,62 is a kind of climate, such as the one that permeates the words of a poem in its new musical setting.63 Even the classical opposition between an objective and a subjective aesthetics seems to be overcome when the component responsible for the effectiveness of beauty is not situated “in the subject or in the object; rather, it passes from one to the other like an influx.”64 Besides the nouns atmosphere, circulation, aura, irradiation, climate, influx, the lexicon of charm (and grace) should include some verbs capable of translating its action and our special relation to it. In that sense, charm exhales, bathes, imbibes, irradiates, involves, fills, whereas we are enveloped by and immersed in it. This brief phenomenological analysis of charm attests again to the exceptional cohesion of Jankélévitch’s thought. The special attention given to the atmospheric should be accompanied by the valorization of sensorial perceptions which are not founded in a concentrated, tangible or delimited focus nor in the distanced relation between subject and object. Therefore, the optical emphasis, typical of Western metaphysics, is replaced by auditory and olfactory metaphors and experiences, in the philosophy of charm (in consonance with poetical symbolism and musical impressionism). Coincidently, the poetics and the spirituality of listening to which I once more return share one of the attitudes included in the register of charm. If the secret invites us to actively unveil and capture the hidden through the “eyes of the soul,”65 mystery simply asks to be heard, to be selflessly embraced (accuielli) as grace, in its inherent gratuity. After this revision of some fundamental points in the philosophy of the je-ne-sais-quoi, especially in its conception of charm, I will sketch my own comprehension of spirituality, which could correspond to Jankélévitch’s perspective. Some Christian definitions of the term also relate it to the attitude of embracement, namely, “the embracement (accueil) of God’s infinity and

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absolute.”66 As it occurs in Jankélévitchian grace, the believer embraces a reality that is also an operation, “the salvific action of God in Christ by the Holy Spirit, in each of the Christians and in the community that is the Church, Temple of the Spirit [. . .]”67 According to another definition, “spirituality is always considered as an interior and personal attitude, submitted to the action of the Spirit and oriented towards ‘the following of Christ.’”68 It is interesting to note in these formulations the emphasis given to the Holy Spirit, implied in the word spirituality and in the expression “spiritual life,” “defined by the relation with God through his Spirit.”69 Due to the Spirit’s diffuse and pneumatic presence, the third person of the Trinity is symptomatically connected to the atmospheric dimension of grace, as the Book of Wisdom proclaims: “For the spirit of the Lord fills the world” (Wisdom 1:7). Therefore, recollecting the previous observations on charm and grace, I could propose a definition of spirituality not as the search for union with the ultimate Source of sense, but as the recognition/embracement of an effective and intangible atmosphere, of the order of gratuity, which involves us and in which we are immersed. My proposal, although more open to a nonreligious modality of spirituality, may be supported by some mystics’ reports, such as Mechtild of Magdeburg, who compares spiritual life to the fish, immersed in, supported and vitalized by the Ocean of divinity. That image, frequently cited by Evelyn Underhill, an author who emphasizes the role of the atmosphere throughout her work devoted to mysticism and spirituality, may illustrate the British researcher’s own definition of spiritual life, as “a life in which all that we do comes from the center, where we are anchored in God: a life soaked through and through by a sense of His reality and claim, and selfgiven to the great movement of His will.”70 The verb soak, which I highlight, could be added to the lexicon of grace and reinforce the kinship between the atmospheric and the spiritual, focused in that definition on the first person of Trinity. Returning to Jankélévitch, as it can be noticed in the first paragraph of Debussy et le mystère, mystery implies the recognition of an unsurpassable unknowingness, which, I should now add, is not always the complete obscurity of unsayable death, but could include a certain access to the unknown. Situated “between two lights,” as the nocturnal moments just before dawn in Saint John of the Cross,71 we do not “know how to say,” but we “know how to feel”72 the ineffable mystery, and we are even able to glimpse it. Otherwise, if absolutely hidden and not partly hidden (fere absconditus),73 mystery could not be conceived, in continuity with grace, as a perceptible and effective atmosphere. According to the French philosopher, mystery is exactly “the climate of our destiny,” a metaphor that alludes to the permanent perplexity of human beings who face their mortality and their partial knowledge of themselves.74 On the other hand, mystery can also appear as

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an evanescent and gratuitous event, which, like a spark, may enlighten for a brief moment the opacity of things that without charm “would not be but what they are.”75 If religious spirituality is described as “the savor (sapor) of divine realities,”76 the nonreligious spirituality traced in Jankélévitchian thought may be conceived as the savor of and the immersion in realities that are not properly a divinum Nescioquid,77 but are still something of an other in the empirical continuity of our existence and in the impossibility of receiving an exact denomination. Differing from mysticism, the recognition of that immersion does not progressively lead to the union with the source of mystery and enchantment, since the source seems to coincide with the spark and to dissolve with its dissolution. Therefore, if there is by any chance a mystic union, it can only be the union with the “indivisible ‘atom,’”78 described by the English spiritual guide The Cloud of Unknowing, which is experienced in the lapse of a fleeting instant. Demanding the presence of an atmosphere, that is, of an effective je-nesais-quoi, spirituality is thus directly connected to a specific modality of mystery: the ineffable one, whose fecundity radically contrasts with the absolute nothing of the unsayable. CONCLUSION: A FINAL QUESTION As I have observed in the first section of this essay, it is rather problematic to assert a nonreligious mysticism or to apply the word “mysticism” to Jankélévitchian philosophy. In addition to affirming a transcendent principle, mystical experiences and reports usually include the presence of a continuous and ascendant itinerary, which contrasts with the presque-rien praised by the philosopher. A similar problem may also affect the comprehension of some fundamental aspects of Jankélévitch’s work as traces of a nonreligious spirituality. Specifically considering spirituality as the radiance of charm, it is now important to ask if discontinuous moments of grace that are not oriented to the fulfillment of a certain (and “higher”) end could be sufficient to support a sort of spirituality. First of all, the improvement established as an objective in some definitions of spirituality probably contradicts the dimension of gratuity, so precious to the philosopher. If we conceive the spiritual path as a progressive ascension to plenitude, we will somehow reduce its unpredictability and, consequently, its radical mystery and singularity. Besides that, we will be also overestimating our limited point of view and impairing the gratuity of our action when establishing the desired goal or sequence of spiritual events. A second fundamental point is that the fleeting occasion, characteristic of the ineffable experiences especially valued by the philosopher, manifests

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itself as a presque-rien and not as a rien. An enormous distance separates the absolute “nothing” from the “almost nothing,” and perhaps that same distance is what prevents the philosophy of the je-ne-sais-quoi from constituting a nihilism, which would probably contest its interpretation in a spiritual key. A religious spirituality always involves some construction of sense or some increase in self-comprehension, supported by the belief of life’s insertion in a broader plan. Therefore, I believe that a nonreligious spirituality should also maintain that possibility, which of course cannot be justified anymore by a transcendent will. Otherwise, our existence would fall into the void of nonsense, from which no shade of security and serenity, frequent effects of spiritual life, could be extracted. And for Jankélévitch, in accordance with Bergson, we are still capable of detecting, even if only afterward, a sense of direction to the events, including the more evanescent ones, that weave our lives or a life that has attained its end. Therefore, the study of the possible spiritual resonances of Jankélévitchian thought leads us to a relevant conclusion: we are not able to foresee what is about to come, it simply falls to us to be open to and even to cooperate with the brief manifestations of grace, which in its customary ambiguity, do not always take us to where we supposed at a first moment, but which will serve to write our history, whose sense may be retrospectively read and composed. Besides the emphasis on gratuity, implied in a non-teleological conception, and the distance from an absolute nihilism, spirituality may also be maintained in the philosophy of charm due to the possible occurrence of a transformation performed by the ephemeral moments of grace. According to the philosopher, in Quelque part dans l’inachevé, “the tangency of the intuition with the intangible,” which could also be achieved by mystical experience, “has intangible sequences: it is an introduction that introduces nothing, a meeting without following day nor visible consequences; an introduction whose only message is not an enrichment, but a je-ne-sais-quoi that cannot be formulated, an intangible brush; and that brush without visible stigmata will have afterwards transformed our life.”79 Suggestively, an impalpable experience, such as receiving an embrace of forgiveness, reading a poignant novel, accomplishing a long pilgrimage, may leave in the subject a pneumatic trace, which cannot be reduced to measurable, progressive and material accumulation.80 The effectiveness of the je-ne-sais-quoi in its repercussions on the subject, as well as in the experienced reality and in the irradiation between both poles, confirms the partial conclusion at which I arrived in the last section: a (nonreligious) spirituality only makes sense in Jankélévitch’s work within the realm of ineffability. Finally, we may ask if the philosophy of the je-nesais-quoi presents itself as a privileged “place” for the study of a possible, if not nonreligious mysticism, then nonreligious spirituality. The rich legacy of

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Vladimir Jankélévitch suggests that as long as there is the recognition of an ineffable mystery which involves, inspires, fertilizes, and intimately affects us, there is a place for spirituality. NOTES 1. Vladimir Jankélévitch, De la musique au silence, v. I. Fauré et l’inexprimable (Paris: Plon, 1974), 300–301. All translations from Jankélévitch are my own, except for some passages of La Musique et l’ineffable extracted from Carolyn Abbate’s American translation. 2. Ibid., 301. 3. Ibid., 282. 4. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musique et les heures (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 248. 5. Frédéric Worms presents another definition of mysticism offered by Jankélévitch’s work. Mysticism is understood, in the first edition of the Traité des vertus as “the realism of mystery” (“Le mysticisme, c’est-à-dire le réalisme du mystère”). Frédéric Worms, “La Conversion de l’Expérience: Mystique et Philosophie, de Bergson au Moment de l’Existence,” ThéoRèmes (2010); Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus (Paris: Bordas, 1949), 788. Following that definition, a nonreligious mysticism could be accepted. Worms emphasizes how Jankélévitch changed the Bergsonian comprehension of mysticism, in a probable connection, I should add, with the acceptance of the term from Evelyn Underhill’s acclaimed treatise on mysticism. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (New York: Image Books, 1990), quoted in Henri Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932). Differently from Bergson (and Underhill), to whom the term implies an access to the “metaphysical foundation of experience,” Jankélévitch comprehends mysticism, in the quoted passage of the Traité des vertus, as the astonishment and the affirmation before “the single fact that it [the mystery] exists,” without the concern for the content or the basis of being. Worms, “La Conversion de l’expérience: Mystique et Philosophie, de Bergson au Moment de L’Existence”; Jankélévitch, Traité des Vertus, 788. That conception clearly equates mysticism with the sphere of mystery, allowing the permanence and the manifestation of an immanent mysticism in response to a mystery that is not rooted in transcendence. The comparison between the two definitions may suggest an evolution in the philosopher’s understanding of the term. Nevertheless, consulting the passage from the Traité des Vertus, we can notice that mysticism is only mentioned there en passant: the focus of the section is the “delimitation” of mystery, which follows the same arguments and perspective of the initial paragraph of Debussy et le Mystère (close in its publication to the Traité des vertus). Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le Mystère (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1949). It is important to clarify that I do not refer to that second definition in my chapter since I only had access to it after having written the first version of this essay for the symposium “Vladimir Jankélévitch in the 21st Century.” I aim to examine at a later date whether a nonreligious mysticism would differ more from the traditional conception of mysticism than a nonreligious spirituality from the traditional conception of spirituality.

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6. Underhill, Mysticism, 72. 7. Ibid., 81. 8. Cf. Béatrice Berlowitz and Vladimir Jankélévitch, Quelque part dans l’inachevé (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 21–22. 9. Underhill, Mysticism, 32. 10. Evelyn Underhill, Light of Christ (Oxford: Mowbray, 1981), 27–28, quoted in Marie Therese Crowley, Beyond the Fringe of Speech: The Spirituality of Evelyn Underhill and Art (Fitzroy, Victoria: Australian Catholic University, 2008), 111. 11. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 140. 12. According to the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, in a reference both to the tradition and the early experience of Christianity, “in the center of Christian mysticism, it lies thus, following the terminology of Saint Paul, mystery.” Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 1980 ed., s.v. “Mystique.” 13. William James points out four distinctive marks of mystical experience, namely: (1) ineffability; (2) noetic quality; (3) transiency; and (4) passivity. Cf. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Lexington: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010), 159. 14. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Debussy et le mystère (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1949), 9-11. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. Underhill, Mysticism, 151. 17. Ibid., 160. 18. “[A]nd stayed there unknowing, / rising beyond all science” (English translation: Willis Barnstone). Coplas del mismo [autor] sobre un éxtasis de harta contemplación. San Juan de la Cruz, Obras completas (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000), 57. 19. Underhill, Mysticism, 71. 20. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 72. 21. Ibid. 22. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. 1, La Manière et l’occasion (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 43–44. 23. John of Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, book 1, chapter XXVI (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1916), 48. 24. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. 1, 73. 25. Jankélévitch, De La Musique au silence, v. I, 284. 26. Berlowitz and Jankélévitch, Quelque part dans l’inachevé, 96. 27. Ibid., 51. 28. Jankélévitch, De La Musique au silence, v. I, 346. 29. Cf. Luigi Pareyson, Os problemas da estética (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1997), 15–16. 30. Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, “Lo ‘charme’ della musica,” in Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musica e L’Ineffabile (Napoli: Tempi Moderni, 1985), lvi. 31. Cf. Pareyson, Os Problemas da estética, 17. 32. Cf. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 90. 33. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 1990 ed., s.v. “Spiritualité,” 1164.

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34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 1171. 36. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. II, La Méconnaissance; Le Malentendu (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 167. 37. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 150. 38. Ibid. 39. Cf. ibid., 107. 40. Ibid., 76. 41. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 1989 ed., s.v. “Spiritualité,” 1142. 42. Biblical references: Gl 5,17; 1Co 2-3. In a more careful reading of the Pauline passages, which prevents a sort of spirituality that categorically denies the corporeal level, the opposition between the pneumatikos and the sarkikos only occurs in relation to “flesh” understood as that aspect of our creaturely existence which resists or opposes to the Spirit. 43. Dictionnaire de l’Académie, t. 15, Paris, 1765, 478, Apud, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 1990 ed., s.v. “Spiritualité,” 1149. 44. Cf. Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’ineffable (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 115. 45. Cf. ibid., 133–135. 46. The kinship between the immaterial and the positive genre of inexpressibility (the ineffable) in Jankélévitchian thought, as well as in Neoplatonic and Christian mystical sources, was the specific theme of my article: Clovis Salgado Gontijo, “A Imaterialidade do Inefável: Traços Imponderáveis da Percepção Auditiva e da Experiência Musical em Jankélévitch,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 74, no. 4 (2018): 983–1012. 47. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 88. 48. The opposition between gramma and pneuma is also present in the following passage of the first paragraph of Debussy et le mystère: “From secret to mystery there is such a long distance as from the grammatical to pneumatic symbol: [. . .] the former ceremonial, signal of recognition or Egyptian enigma, the latter mystery no more of the letter, but of the spirit.” Jankélévitch, Debussy et le Mystère, 9–10. 49. “Do not say until where you are. / Do not say since where is God. / Do not say words in vain.” Cecília Meireles, Cânticos (São Paulo: Moderna, 1982). “Cântico III.” 50. Just after the manifestation of the transfigured Jesus and the appearance of Elijah and Moses, Peter asks: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (Mark 9:5; Luke 9:33). 51. Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, 110. 52. Jankélévitch, De la Musique au silence, v. I, 298. 53. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 89. 54. Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, Charis: Essai sur Jankélévitch (Paris/Milano: Vrin/ Mimesis, 2013), 24, note 32. 55. Jankélévitch, De La Musique au silence, v. I, 346–347. 56. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 103. 57. It is necessary to remember that the open and universal character of mystery, defended by Jankélévitch and already examined in the first section of this essay, reveals that the philosopher extracts his conception of the word from Christian and

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not from Greek tradition, where mysterion was used in an esoteric context: “Mystery, for Christianity, is thus a non-deductible event of God’s self-communication, which excludes all kinds of esoterism as long as destined to all men and to all accessible in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, Christian mystery clearly contrasts with pagan mysteries.” Enciclopedia filosofica, 2016 ed., s.v. “Mistero.” 58. Santiago Kovadloff, O Silêncio primordial (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2003), 67. 59. Jankélévitch, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 90. 60. Cf. Jankélévitch, De la Musique au silence, v. I, 345. 61. Cf. Ibid., 348. 62. The dependence of charm on material circumstances may be specially observed in the philosopher’s musical aesthetics: as it happens in a poem, where the slightest alteration of a word or a mere syllable could destroy its captivating atmosphere, the substitution from modal to diatonic intervals would inevitably eliminate the divinum Nescioquid characteristic of Fauré’s style (and “spirituality”). Cf. Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’ineffable, 70–71; 134–135. 63. Cf. ibid., 71. 64. Ibid., 130. 65. Plato, The Republic, Translated by G. M. A. Grube, 2nd. ed. revised by C. D. C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992, Book VII, 533d. 66. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, fascicule XCV, 1169. 67. Josef Weismayer, “Spirituelle Theologie oder Theologie der Spiritualität?” in G. Virt (Hg.), Spiritualität in Moral. Festschrift für Karl Hörmann zum 60. Geburtstag (Wien: Wiener Dom-Verlag, 1975), 59–77. Apud, Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 1990 ed., s.v. “Spiritualité,” 1153–1154. 68. Ibid., 1153. 69. Ibid., 1163. 70. Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life: Four Broadcast Talks (Atlanta: Ariel Press, 2000), 135. My emphasis. 71. Cf. Saint John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 15, § 23. 72. Cf. ibid., Stanza 7, § 10. 73. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2005), 137; Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. I, 70. 74. “I don’t know what I am. I am not what I know. / A thing and not a thing, a dot and a circle.” That famous distich of Angelus Silesius (The Cherubic Pilgrim, book I, § 5), often quoted by Jankélévitch, may sum up the partial knowledge which marks the human condition. Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’ineffable, 112; La Mort, 28; Quelque part dans l’inachevé, 28. 75. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, v. 1, 111. 76. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, fascicules XCII-XCIII-XCIV, 1145. 77. “Divine I-know-not-what.” Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’ineffable, 135. 78. Jankélévitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, v. II, 168. 79. Berlowitz and Jankélévitch, Quelque part dans l’inachevé, 52. 80. Perhaps we could relate enrichment to the secret and transformation with mystery: it is the discovery of a hidden formula or the prediction of a number combination that results in tangible gains.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergson, Henri. Les Deux sources de la morale et de La religion. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932. Berlowitz, Béatrice, and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Quelque part dans l’inachevé. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Crowley, Marie Therese. Beyond the Fringe of Speech: The Spirituality of Evelyn Underhill and Art. Thesis. School of Theology. Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Fitzroy, Victoria: Australian Catholic University, 2008. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Ascétique et Mystique. Doctrine et Histoire. Fondé par M. Viller, F. Cavallera, J. de Guibert, S. J. Continué par A. Rayez, A. Derville et A. Solignac, S.J. Avec le concours d’un grand nombre de collaborateurs. Fascicule XCV. Spiritualité-“System.” Paris: Beauchesne, 1990. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Ascétique et Mystique. Doctrine et Histoire. Fondé par M. Viller, F. Cavallera, J. de Guibert, S. J. Continué par A. Rayez, A. Derville et A. Solignac, S.J. Avec le concours d’un grand nombre de collaborateurs. Fascicule XCII-XCIII-XCIV. Savonarola-Spiritualité. Paris: Beauchesne, 1989. Dictionnaire de Spiritualité. Ascétique et Mystique. Doctrine et Histoire. Fondé pr M. Viller, F. Cavallera, J. de Guibert, S. J. Continué par A. Rayez, A. Derville et A. Solignac, S.J. Avec le concours d’un grand nombre de collaborateurs. Fascicules LXX-LXXI. Monde-Mythe. Paris: Beauchesne, 1980. Gontijo, Clovis Salgado. “A Imaterialidade do Inefável: Traços Imponderáveis da Percepção Auditiva e da Experiência Musical em Vladimir Jankélévitch.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 74, no. 4 (2018): 983–1012. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Lexington: Pacific Publishing Studio, 2010. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Debussy et le mystère. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1949. ———. De La Musique au silence. v. I. Fauré et l’inexprimable. Paris: Plon, 1974. ———. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. La Mort. Paris: Flammarion, 1966. ———. La Musique et les heures. Paris: Seuil, 1988. ———. La Musique et l’ineffable. Paris: Seuil, 1983. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. v. 1. La Manière et l’occasion. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. v. 2. La Méconnaissance; Le Malentendu. Paris: Seuil, 1980. ———. L’Irréversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion, 1974. ———. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. Traité des vertus. Paris: Bordas, 1949. Kovadloff, Santiago. O silêncio primordial. Tradução de Eric Nepomuceno e Luís Carlos Cabral. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2003. Lia, Pierluigi, Mistero, in: Melchiorre, Virgilio (org.). Enciclopedia filosofica. Milan: Bompiani, 2016.

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Lisciani-Petrini, Enrica. Charis: essai sur Jankélévitch. Paris/Milano: Vrin/Mimesis, 2013. ———. “Lo ‘charme’ della musica.” In Vladimir Jankélévitch, La musica e l’ineffabile. Traduzione e introduzione di Enrica Lisciani-Petrini, XIII–LX. Napoli: Tempi Moderni, 1985. Meireles, Cecília. Cânticos. 2ª ed. São Paulo: Moderna, 1982. Pareyson, Luigi. Os problemas da estética. Tradução: Maria Helena Nery Garcez. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1997. Plotin. Traité 38 (VI, 7). Introduction, traduction, commentaire et notes par Pierre Hadot. Paris: Cerf, 1999. Ruysbroeck, John of. The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage; The Sparkling Stone; The Book of Supreme Truth. Translated from the Flemish by: C. A. Wynschenk Dom. Edited by Evelyn Underhill. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1916. San Juan de la Cruz. Obras completas. 7ª ed. preparada por Eulogio Pacho. Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 2000. (Maestros Espirituales Carmelitas, 3) Underhill, Evelyn. Light of Christ. Oxford: Mowbray, 1981. ———. Mysticism: The Preeminent Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Image Books, 1990. ———. The Spiritual Life: Four Broadcast Talks. Atlanta: Ariel Press, 2000. Worms, Frédéric. “La Conversion de L’Expérience: Mystique et Philosophie, de Bergson au Moment De L’Existence.” ThéoRèmes (2010). http:​//jou​rnals​.open​editi​ on.or​g/the​oreme​s/76;​ DOI: 10.4000/theoremes.76.

Chapter 10

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, and the Emergence of a Musical Aesthetic Paul Atkinson

Vladimir Jankélévitch’s writings on Henri Bergson succeed, through the use of images and musical analogies, in extending rather than merely summarising what Bergson has said and thus satisfy Jankélévitch’s own aim “of rethinking Bergson as Bergson wanted to be rethought.”1 This is a truly Bergsonian gesture, inasmuch as Bergson’s philosophy is a method of thinking in time that should remain dynamic and open to what has not yet been said. As well as affirming Bergson’s processual ontology, Jankélévitch’s work provides a means of reimagining Bergson’s philosophy in terms of an aesthetics of music. This evokes Susanne Langer’s declaration that “Bergson’s dream [. . .] of la durée réelle brings his metaphysics very close to the musical realm—in fact, to the very brink of a philosophy of art.”2 Time as real duration [durée réelle] can only be revealed in sensual experience and therefore drives metaphysics towards aesthetics. However, this movement is not unidirectional because music as an art of time also provides a means of reimagining duration. Bergson often refers to music in relation to his metaphysics, but without a detailed analysis of the medium most of his claims do not extend beyond mere gestures toward art’s central role in revealing time as duration. In contrast, Jankélévitch’s writings on music not only demonstrate an attention to aesthetic differences grounded in a profound knowledge of musical discourse but also, due to his adherence to Bergsonism, a willingness to expose the limits of this discourse. Jankélévitch’s non-systematic articulation of musical difference could be used to understand the virtual and qualitative differences immanent to Bergsonian durée. In other words, a philosopher who foregrounds the charm and ineffability of music could provide the means for speaking about the aesthetics and metaphysics of a nominalist philosopher. What is suggested here is a way of thinking through music that 177

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involves the use of musical figures and images to further differentiate Bergsonian durée rather than projecting a musical language onto it. This approach aligns with Bergson’s theory of intuition in which he calls for the use of images and mobile concepts, which cleave to the real and do not betray the variability of becoming, to supplement our understanding of time. Music and durée may both be ineffable, but this does not mean that they are untellable. THE MELODY OF DURÉE Henri Bergson’s references to music are always oblique, with the odd mention of composers in his letters, notably Claude Debussy, and the implied preference for audition over opticality in his philosophical works. There is even an expression of regret that he did not pursue the piano in spite of the fact that his father Michael Bergson was a composer and pianist who held the post of director of the Conservatoire de Genève.3 The philosophical invocations of music mostly contract into one word, “melody,” which is a key figure in explaining the continuity of time, as it later was for Husserl who used it to describe the relationship between protention and retention.4 Melody invokes an image of time as durée that is continuous, concrete, and enduring and intimately conjoined with human experience and the operation of memory. Durée is roughly translated as duration, but it should be noted that it is fundamentally different from the use of the term in the sciences to refer to the measurement of a length of time. Instead, it refers to how time endures and resists the advent of the future while holding onto the past. In his book on the special theory of relativity, Duration and Simultaneity, Bergson presents melody as a founding image of durée and also as a counterimage to Einstein’s conception of time as little more than a frame of reference: A melody to which we listen with our eyes closed, heeding it alone, comes close to coinciding with this time which is the very fluidity of our inner life; but it still has too many qualities, too much definition, and we must first efface the difference among the sounds, then do away with the distinctive features of the sound itself, retaining of it only the continuation of what precedes into what follows and the uninterrupted transition, multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation, in order finally to rediscover basic time. Such is immediately perceived duration, without which we would have no idea of time.5

Melody is a mobile concept that invokes a definite time period and which remains “flexible, mobile, almost fluid”6 insofar as it invokes the variability of sensual experience. In holding on to the sensual form of an actual melody and then removing the architecture of music, or suppressing the optical images used in the description of time, Bergson hopes that we are left with

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a concrete, but nevertheless “fleeting” image of the absolute continuity and qualitative complexity of time. Melody is flexible enough to incorporate all the qualities of a processual theory of time in a way that does not lead to contradiction or paradox. One of the distinguishing features of a melody is that the succession of notes remains continuous with the present perception, for it would lose its melodic form if each note was truly discrete, as is the case in logical or numerical sequences. The melody, like durée, is absolutely indivisible such that trying to cut it would be like trying to cut a flame with a knife.7 Despite the metaphor of the flame, in which the observer stands before a processual object such as a flowing river, for Bergson, the uninterrupted transition of melody is something we inhabit. The listener or performer alters with the melody in the time of hearing or even vocalising, maintaining an internal tension that separates yet draws together the past and future. On the level of the single note, to hear sound presumes that the present has a certain thickness, what William James would refer to as a specious present, in which we “feel” time as a “synthetic datum” that must endure.8 It makes no sense to talk about a discrete sound because even a single note is comprised of a multitude of vibrations that endure over a definite duration, and vibration itself is a continuum, albeit one that follows a pattern of repetition. The note exists as a multiplicity but one that cannot be readily divided, for at what point can we say that the vibrations are sufficient to determine that it is a note, no longer a note, or something more than a note. In music, it would be nonsensical to argue that the note has the same value regardless of the time in which it is heard. Within the time of the note, we hear both the same note and a different note with each successive vibration, such that it is both multiple and unitary. The same applies to the melody, which only exists if each note is implicated in the next. The notes already heard operate at the fringe of each succeeding note, maintaining the continuity of the melody while varying the nuance of the tone. The obvious question is why we hear sound as discrete wholes rather than a qualitatively variable continuity? For Bergson, this is because perception attends to stable aspects of phenomena so we can act on them, and because our memory continually operates on the present, seeking out qualitative differences that resonate with past experience.9 It is about extracting from the ipseity of the present what we already know, even if this is a degradation of the processual real. Sound might be a qualitatively variable immanent movement, but this immanence is always in state of tension with generalizable qualities, for example pitch, that transform the ontologically unrepeatable into units that ostensibly repeat. This retrospective action of memory is hypostatised through language, visual representation and associated spatial metaphors, which are in turn projected on to what we hear. This is why Bergson beseeches us to listen with our eyes closed for it is only through

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suppressing our sight, and the ocular representations that are attendant on it, that the radical continuity of melody and, by extension, time can truly be experienced, or to return to an earlier metaphor, can be truly inhabited. This deployment of melody as a mobile concept also establishes a strong link between metaphysics and aesthetics, for to properly hear a melody is, in itself, an aesthetic intuition that discloses the temporal foundation of all experience. Art is to be valued inasmuch as it “consists in revealing to us nature”10 manifest in the creativity of life and the ipseity of time, which Bergson likens to a melody: “Deep in our souls we should hear the strains of our inner life’s unbroken melody,—a music that is oft-times gay, but more frequently plaintive and always original.”11 Due to the imposition of spatial models, perceptual habits, and languages that emphasize the substantive, we have lost direct access to this melody and the metaphysics that should follow in its wake. Art’s role is to remove the “veil” of spatialization and allow us again to hear a melody of a truly processual time and, by so doing, completely rethink metaphysics. THE SUPPRESSION OF MUSICAL METAPHOR Jankélévitch follows Bergson in pursuit of the aesthetic intuition of durée and also aims to hear with his “eyes closed,” but this is a much more difficult task for a philosopher who writes on music and is thoroughly attentive to musicological structures and the conditions of performance. Unlike Bergson, he has to remove many more layers—metaphysical, rhetorical, and optical—than a spatialized language that imposes a division between notes. The question is not just how music can lead to metaphysics but how metaphysics casts a veil over the lived experience of music and time. In the integration of music into metaphysics, Jankélévitch claims that there is a tendency to posit transcendental ideas that supplant the sensual given, particularly pronounced in the work of Schopenhauer, and cautions that metaphysics and “all such metamusic, music thus romanticized, is at once arbitrary and metaphorical.”12 This metaphysical corruption can take a variety of forms, from broad statements on the correspondence between key signatures and affective states, to the allegorical reading of musical form, for example the assumed resemblance of the sonata form to the human condition.13 At first glance, one would assume that the addition of metaphysical allegory would give greater depth to music, for with each new statement music acquires another layer of meaning. Although he is somewhat unwilling to use a spatial metaphor, Jankélévitch accepts there is depth insofar as music invokes discussion and reflection in a temporal period that runs “perpendicular to the time of the performance.”14 In general, though, the imposition of a transcendental metaphysics actually

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renders music more superficial,15 for the greater the conceptual architecture appended to music, the more its sensual form flattens out to accommodate it. Music recedes to the degree to which metaphysics pursues its own logic. It should be noted that Jankélévitch does not completely reject a metaphysics of music, if it derives from a concrete understanding of time, as in Bergson’s metaphysics.16 Philosophy should allow the temporality of music, as durée, to inform metaphysics rather than co-opt music into its own discursive structure. At a different level of enunciation, Jankélévitch decries how often music is discussed in terms of the natural languages, in particular spoken and prose forms. For example, the movements of a classical sonata are often characterized rhetorically in terms of exposition, development, and recapitulation, which presumes a structure of meaning incommensurate with its sonority. It is also common to discuss performance in terms of a dialogue between the instruments, and he refers specifically to Ravel’s duo sonata for violin and cello,17 in which the musicians play separate lines that respond to or repeat the themes and melodies of their partners. To present another example, in German lieder, the piano might imitate the sound of a bird, such as a cuckoo, which in turn reflects or responds to the anguish of the singer/protagonist. To characterize music in terms of the interplay of enunciation and response appears quite reasonable, for it is common to hear musicians referring to music-making as a conversation between musicians or between the audience and the musician. This, however, depends on the value attributed to dialogue. Jankélévitch states that there is no actual dialogue because music is not underscored by semantic progression. The musicians do not speak to each other or a listener; instead they produce sounds in the presence of another, which means that the listener is a witness rather than an interlocutor. Appeals and cries in a musical work do not require the listener to respond, for there is no second person address, and it is more appropriate to consider music as an act of speaking to oneself.18 Outside of dialogue, rhetorical analogies are not easily applied to music due to language’s referential function, most clearly realised in the difference between prose and musical repetition. In prose, repetition fixes meaning, confirms an idea and aids comprehension such that it would be unlikely to exactly repeat a clearly stated phrase. In contrast, musical repetition is commonly used because each act of repeating a melody, motif, or rhythm actively transforms the piece as a whole.19 The work undergoes “continuous alteration” as the memory of previous iterations accumulate.20 Because prose gestures beyond itself to something that can be known, the particular manner and time of its articulation can be forgotten or neglected as soon as the meaning is grasped. Music is not founded on the separation of the enunciation and the enunciated and therefore it can never eschew its sensuality, which is implicated in the particular time of its becoming and the accretion of repetitions.

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Even if the description and analysis of music is restricted to musical structure, metaphors still impede sensual engagement due to the imposition of what Jankélévitch refers to as optical idols (italics in original).21 He states rather grandly that “three-quarters of all musical vocabulary, from Design to Form to Interval to Ornament, is borrowed from the realm of vision” and that it “would need a second Bergson to root out the mirages of spatialization that are scattered throughout musical aesthetics.”22 Many of these metaphors are imported from other artistic discourses, in particular those of the visual arts, where music is discussed in terms of “architecture,” “colour,” and “structure.”23 Seemingly out of place in the description of a temporal art, these metaphors abound due to the representation of music in terms of the two-dimensional structural arrangement of the score. Jankélévitch highlights how we talk about how pitch ascends and descends, or refer to the verticality of chords and the horizontality of melody, even though music as a sonorous form does not have an “up and down.”24 Victor Zuckerkandl argues that this notion of upward or downward movement does not even adequately account for how we listen to a scale. As the tones ascend up the scale, at least according to the logic of the score, there are actually changes in tension when moving away or toward particular key notes, such as moving away from the dominant, or moving toward the tonic.25 In this case, tension does not follow the downward or upward movements of pitch and the spatial descriptors “high” and “low.” Their continued use is simply a matter of convention. The idea that our sensual engagement with music is veiled by a musical and an extramusical language matches Bergson’s argument that time has been denatured through the application of spatial concepts. It is not surprising, however, that musicologists are suspicious of Jankélévitch’s claims, stating that his own writings serve to guide the listener in how they could or should hear a piece of music. Steven Rings contends that Jankélévitch’s writings ask the listener to attend to particular features of the music in the form of the imperative “écoutons” or let us listen, which has a deictic function that alters the way the listener listens or the performer performs.26 Judy Lochhead notes the importance of Jankélévitch’s work in demanding that we consider the degree to which language is implicated in all aspects of music, but also notes that it contains a “performative contradiction,” inasmuch as his actual statements “enhance musical experience.”27 Musicological resistance to Jankélévitch’s nominalism is thoroughly understandable due to the value placed on musical theory in performing and listening to music. Music is not fully commensurate with ontology because, like all the arts, it is fabricated, and the principles underlying this fabrication actually aid the listener in discerning differences. An experienced listener, someone who is aware of the core principles for composing a fugue, will hear that fugue differently to the inexperienced listener. Both will be presented with the same sonorous whole,

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but the experienced listener will have many more options in how they could listen: Will they follow one line of the music, listen to the subject echo across the lines, try and balance the subject and counter-subject, attend to changes of key in the subject, and so on? These shifts in attention, prompted by a musical language, are thoroughly implicated in the becoming of the music even when the music is recorded and there are no variations in the performance. The main question is whether musical language stands before listening, and, most importantly, before composition and performance, which is quite different to the post facto reading of music according to metaphysical and spatial metaphors. The phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne accepts that when listening to music the sensuality of sound takes precedence over any form of representation, but notes there is a difference between listening to sound and producing it. The composer is attentive to how a piece will be heard, but they also compose in relation to a “technical precondition”—the various structures of sound and temperament that are afforded by an instrument—and an “intellectual condition” expressed as the historical and intellectual principles of music-making.28 The notion of a technical precondition is clearly illustrated in Joseph Smith’s examination of the “augures printaniers chord” deployed in Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps, which first appeared to musicologists to be incredibly complex and resistant to traditional harmonic analysis. However, when analysed from the point of view of composing at a piano, Smith states that it is just a “juxtaposition of a dominant seventh chord in E flat in the right hand and chord of F flat major in the left hand. It is very simple: there is no harmonic analysis called for; it is simply a question of how the composer placed his hands on the keyboard.”29 With regard to the intellectual preconditions of music-making, Dufrenne points to the importance of harmony as a structure that operates in an “ideal space” before the composition and the act of listening.30 Dufrenne presents a similar argument with respect to rhythm, arguing that measure and beat precede the composition, as a means of organizing the succession of notes in space as well as time.31 If musical composition is dependent on both musical theory and the materiality of the instrument, then the sonorous form of music is always, to some degree, informed by spatiality. Of course, Jankélévitch can never truly escape the use of such spatial and visual metaphors in his analyses of particular composers, but he argues that while these structures have value in analyzing a work, they are not immanent to music. The listener retrospectively projects these extramusical forms and ideas onto the music, even at the point of just having heard something, as a means of “stabilizing” it. These forms are not heard as “pure audition,” for the “ear—caught in the immediacy and innocence of succession as experienced live—does not perceive such things at all.”32 There are certainly musical practices that rely on the opticality of composition, principally serialism

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with its experiments with tone rows, but Jankélévitch argues such experiments in inversion and symmetry remain “opaque to the ear.” Indeed there are no symmetries in music because hearing is always embedded in duration, where the past is integrated into the present such that it changes with each successive moment, which does not allow for the mirroring of form.33 The simple structures and their spatial repetitions and inversions might be visible on the page, but not in the processual integration of music into the lived experience of the listener. The score is often accorded primacy because it presumes to reduce music to its simplest form, the tones, from which melodies are derived and upon which the complex analytical framework of musicology depends. This reduction of music to tones and the principles of rhythm and harmony effaces the myriad qualitative differences (overtones, attack, resonance, and so on) that are actually present in a performance. One way to address this would be to thoroughly reimagine the structure of the score in order to incorporate a much greater range of musical qualities as some twentieth-century composers have done, but this would lead to a higher level of complexity without truly revealing the temporal and sonic conditions of hearing music. For Jankélévitch and Bergson, hearing, and indeed all experience, is coincident with becoming, which itself can be discovered in the simplicity of a melody. Bergson argues that metaphysics, and this argument can be extended to music, must “draw closer to life,” which involves incorporating the complexity of experience into the simplicity of an intuition.34 Jankélévitch argues that there are two types of simplicity in Bergson’s philosophy, chronological and logical simplicity, which have quite different aims. Logical simplicity refers to the reduction of phenomena to genera or constituent components and the explanation of events in terms of clearly definable causes. In contrast, chronological simplicity refers to the apprehension of lived experience as a temporal whole.35 In many respects, chronological simplicity is naïve because it is available to experience without recourse to a set of learned abstract concepts.36 When applied to music, Jankélévitch states that melody can be reduced to a series of discretely defined notes, for it would only be by accident that we would find the song (chant). Now, of course, a musical scholar is able to hear the melody upon reading the score, but only because the melody lies latent in each note waiting to be awakened or animated.37 Bergson argues that this division of a melody into separate notes is a retrospective or indeed retrograde action, underpinned by a projection of vision onto hearing. The listener projects themselves outside of the music, but also outside the time of the music, to imagine the melody from a conductor’s perspective in the counting of beats against a score, or as individual notes on a keyboard. The divisibility of the melody is a fiction derived from this introjection of an external image.38 To better understand music in the time of its hearing, as pure

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audition, chronological simplicity must always take precedence over logical simplicity, which is retrospective, regardless of whether or not the scholar or musician first encounters the music through the score. The problem with addressing music through the intuition of durée is that it might involve rejecting those aspects of form and structure that, in many respects, define the arts. Dufrenne criticises the invocation of Bergsonian durée in the analysis of music because it does not have a temporal theme by which to punctuate or order time, and without such a theme music is rendered unintelligible and meaningless.39 Merleau-Ponty also criticizes this reversion to durée and pure becoming to explain motion without an accompanying examination of lived spatiality, arguing that it leads to a situation in which “the phases of movement gradually merge into one another” and where “nothing is anywhere in motion.”40 With regard to Jankélévitch’s writings on music, Craig Ayrey notes a similar problem, arguing that many of Jankélévitch’s claims are vague and inaccurate and cannot be subject to criticism because they do not address musical development.41 He even goes as far as to argue that if Jankélévitch truly believed his own declarations about music, then most of Music and the Ineffable should remain “blank.”42 Even the notion of “pure audition” requires some scrutiny because hearing cannot be fully extracted from all the other senses without some reference to embodiment, most obviously in the marking of time through kinaesthesia and touch. Why should the internal vibration of the ear be privileged over the rhythmic movement of a body that can never be truly separated from external worldly movement? These issues are worthy of investigation, but reference to a thoroughly unrepresentable and despatialized time or music, stripped of external reference or metaphor, does not mean that an either/or position is actually adopted by Jankélévitch or Bergson. Bergson argues that metaphorical language should not be considered solely in terms of its capacity to hypostatize becoming, for it also plays a role, particularly in the arts, in creating images (appearances or semblances rather than optical images) that due to their mobility can properly reveal time. These images invoke rather than designate or nominate the lived experience of time. In his most famous essay, “The Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson states that although images fail to reveal the complexity of enduring time, they are still preferable to concepts because they remain attached to the concreteness of an event while maintaining the qualitative tension immanent to thought and durée.43 The early discussion of melody is an example, but Bergson states that it is important to use a range of images, something that is readily achieved in art, because they can “direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize upon” without risking fixing the event or experience in a single concrete image.44 Bergson is quite strident in rejecting spatial concepts and all forms of representation in the description of time, as Jankélévitch has done in music,

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but only to clear the ground for a new metaphysics of becoming. What Jankélévitch’s writings on music offer is an abundance of mobile images that are able to invoke durée obliquely at the very fringes of representation. BETWEEN METAPHYSICS AND AESTHETICS Jankélévitch’s musical images and musical examples provide a means of differentiating sensual experience in a way that extends some of Bergson’s own claims about the relationship between durée and aesthetics. These images are broadly drawn together in the figure of charm, in which the aesthetic value of music is derived from its diffluence, variability, and evasiveness, in contrast with conventional notions of beauty that are dependent on stability, balance and spatial organisation. In beauty all is present to the senses, whereas charm assumes that the listener is embedded within becoming, where the sensual is revealed as much in change, loss, “incompleteness,” and “coming into being,” as it is in the directly perceptible.45 Despite the emphasis on incompleteness, charm is manifest in the whole, but one that is open to becoming. It is an inflection, shade, or nuance of this whole, an almost nothing [presquerien], that attests to the impossibility of truly dividing time into ever smaller units.46 This residual feeling of continuity is the ontological and aesthetic basis for all music, and is directly invoked in the aforementioned discussion of melody, in which a variable present underscored by memory draws together the breadth of a tone as well as the succession of notes. Bergson also acknowledges the centrality of this immaterial wholeness in aesthetic engagement when he argues that each work carries with it a particular emotion. He is not here talking about specific human emotions that can be named, but a type of emotion comprised of a qualitative multiplicity of feelings that infuses the whole of a musical work and attests to its uniqueness.47 The problem with most of Bergson’s references to music is that he overly emphasises the process of aesthetic unification—the contraction in perception of an aesthetic whole. What he does not sufficiently address is how feeling and sensation recede or disappear from view, or pass beyond the horizon of perception. This is understandable as Bergson subscribes to a theory of pure memory in which the whole of the past is retained and, under certain conditions, is available to consciousness. However, intuition is limited by perception and attention. It can only invoke the tension immanent to durée through drawing upon various mobile images that embody or subtend the qualitative movements of lived experience. Jankélévitch’s mobile images are able to resituate us within durée by invoking a certain incompatibility and disjuncture between states of listening to music. The remainder of the paper will address three of the most significant images: polyphony, brachylogy, and inexpressivity.

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In Bergson’s theory of durée the past is not locked away, waiting to be recalled. Memory coincides with the present at all times through recollection and habit, which means that the present is always a multiplicity of interpenetrating states that cannot be fully reconciled. Jankélévitch states that this relationship between memory and the present resists logical description, which requires the clear separation of past and present states and an excluded middle, but can be imagined musically as polyphony. In polyphony there are multiple voices that come together to form a sonic whole and yet always remain distinct from each other, leading to a subsistent tension between wholeness and differentiation.48 In musical theory, polyphony is often analysed in terms of harmony, music’s vertical aspect, where notes sound together either contrapuntally or as the accompaniment to a single melody. Jankélévitch adapts polyphony to Bergson’s process metaphysics, arguing that polyphony like durée is an “irrational symbiosis of the heterogeneous.”49 Jankélévitch swaps the spatial metaphor of harmony for an organic metaphor of symbiosis in order to accentuate the living temporality of music as an indivisible interpenetration of sounds. Even if all the voices in a polyphonic work sing the same tone (the exact pitch), there remains a supplementary sensual difference that resists analysis—a difference associated with the duplication of sounds, the increase in volume, timbre, and so on. The effect of such minor physical differences can be quite varied, the composer Olivier Messiaen argues that the number of notes played simultaneously actually changes the rhythmic quality of music, including its tempo.50 Every addition or variation in music, however small, changes the constitution of the whole, which is something that it not easily accounted for in an analytic system, and it is only through thinking according to the presque-rien of musical difference that we tend closer to an intuition of durée. Jankélévitch’s metaphysical beliefs often inform his aesthetic judgements, with composers lauded insofar as their works align with particular ideas, such as the projection of a Bergsonian notion of sincerity onto the works of Fauré.51 In his book on Bergson, Jankélévitch states that Debussy and Liszt’s compositions contain musical themes that mutually affect each other through paradoxical counterpoints (contrepoints paradoxaux) comparable to Bergsonian durée.52 In this description, polyphony is understood as a melange of sounds in an open organic unity, which, like consciousness, forms itself at every temporal moment, such that it is both complete and incomplete53—what Bergson would call a qualitative multiplicity. In durée, the different voices are not harmonically organized in terms of pleasing ratios and moments of musical resolution, for qualitative differences continually diverge and ramify. In a dynamic totality, counterpoint indicates an internal tension in which differentiating movements also combine to create the sonorous whole. Using polyphony to describe durée provides a means by which to situate thought

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within the particular tension of diverging and converging qualitative movements. Polyphony is a mobile concept or image that adds another nonmaterial dimension to the intuition of durée, in which the tension between the layers of a qualitatively differentiated present, as well as the overlapping of past and present, give time a fibrous thickness. Bergson momentarily addresses this in Duration and Simultaneity when he argues that simultaneity begins as a concrete perception of multiple interconnected events, or the simultaneity of flows: We stated that it is the very essence of our attention to be able to be divided without being split up. When we are seated on the back of a river, the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life’s deeps are for us three separate things or only one, as we choose. We can interiorize the whole, dealing with a single perception that carries along the three flows, mingled, in its course; or we can leave the first two outside and then divide our attention between the inner and the outer; or, better yet, we can do both at one and the same time, our attention uniting and yet differentiating the three flows, thanks to the singular privilege of being one and several.54

In this example, the constant oscillation in attention between events that are spatially separated provides the basis for imaging the multiplicity of durée. Similarly, polyphony requires an oscillation in attention, but better functions as a mobile image of durée because sound does not have to be spatially located or require the clear separation of moving objects. We could imagine divergences in timbre, voice, pitch, attack, and rhythm that at the same time recombine to create new sounds—timbre coalesces into a tone, fast rhythms become texture, voices unify in a melody, and so on. In music, there are many other ways of imagining the irreconcilability of qualitative difference, and in his book on Ravel, Jankélévitch refers to the composer’s use of bitonality (a type of polytonality), in which different lines of music played at the same time are associated with different key signatures.55 He extends this notion of bitonality to include irreconcilable textures and rhythms. For example, in the beginning of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole, the sounds of clocks are simulated by a group of metronomes operating at different tempos alongside the orchestra. The timbre of the metronomes contrasts with the orchestral timbre but also highlights polyrhythmic and textural differences, which Jankélévitch argues are part of Ravel’s general search for “inaudible timbres” and a “bitonality of resonance.”56 The difference in resonance of the instruments is not resolved within the harmonic structure of the work. For a theorist who focuses on sensual fullness in hearing and pure audition, this reference to the “inaudible” appears out of place, but what it gestures toward is a notion of sound that is not merely found in what is heard,

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but in the duration between different timbres, rhythms and key signatures. On the level of rhythm, the duration between metronome beats appears to expand and contract if we listen without reference to the visible image of the metronome—that is, with our eyes closed—and this succeeds in foregrounding durée, or the concrete lived experience of time, but if we focus on a single metronome the regularity of meter becomes apparent and pushes durée into the background. Robert Erickson argues that complex rhythms that deploy a multiplicity of meters, in particular those with slow tempi, can actually expand the present such that it becomes more tangible as lived experience.57 The listener is able to hear, or more accurately feel, the variability of the present due to the difficulty in reconciling the tones with a comprehensible beat. The inaudible is heard virtually as a quality between sounds or as a irreconcilability of sonic qualities. This virtuality of sound is most readily evinced in the timbre between timbres, or a key between keys, and is testament to music’s depth, but one that is only suggested rather than posited in discourse. The bitonality of timbre prevents any harmonic resolution regardless of the relationship between tones, and in the bitonality of keys, a single tone could gesture toward two key signatures at the same time creating a tension of differentiation. Bergson presents a comparable example in an article on Félix Raivaisson, in which he claims that while looking at white light we do not see that it is actually comprised of a range of independent colors (those revealed through a prism).58 Even though the colors are unseen, it would be impossible to remove them and still have white light, and consequently should be considered virtual. Likewise, the images of time as duration must always operate in a dimension that can never be fully explained in terms of the operation of the senses, for they draw upon the virtuality of time, in which the presque-rien of difference is the condition for music’s charm. Another way in which Jankélévitch invokes an aesthetics of durée is through his account of music as a movement from the expressive to the inexpressive, which forms part of his general critique of Romanticism. The expressive is overly burdened with the articulation of affect, often through the changes in tempi and the accentuation of the key tones, which differs significantly from the inexpressive with its consistent or disaffected modulations in speed. Expression presumes that the musician can express a thought or feeling through their instrument, a form of suprasensibility in which meaning is posited outside and before the actual music.59 We hear accounts of how Beethoven’s and Brahms’s inner torments found expression in particular works, or commonly witness pianists moving their bodies in ways to suggest that they are bringing forth some inner feeling. As Jankélévitch critiques the representation of music in terms of the extramusical and has indicated that music does not have depth, he welcomes Impressionism’s departure from the affective narrativization of Romanticism. He argues that Impressionism

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reveals the objectivity of the sonic impressions and, in doing so, diminishes the focus on the composer or performer’s psyche,60 and as such is about a sensual connection with the world rather than the upsurge of inner feeling. For Jankélévitch, an important aspect of Impressionism is its capacity to disclose the transitory and fleeting nature of music rather than its broader development. In this brachylogy (condensed expression), Impressionism reveals time as something “provisional,” where the listener cannot arrest sounds because they pass too quickly or are never fully grounded. This can be contrasted with the sentimental effusiveness of Romanticism and its accentuation of “the perennial, that which lingers, the slow impregnation of all consciousness.”61 As a point of reference, Jankélévitch refers to Claude Debussy’s piano piece, The Interrupted Serenade from his book of preludes, in which development is continually disrupted to create a “symbiosis” of sounds, in contrast with the Romantic push toward closure and rhetorical development.62 The music stutters, stumbles and slows down without holding on to key notes or maintaining legato continuity. The impression constantly invokes the time of its own disappearance and becoming in which the listener is suspended in waiting and expectation. Bergson has been associated with Impressionism in music and painting due to the fleetingness of durée and due to his interest in Camille Corot (a proto-impressionist),63 but he never embraced such a description. Rather than insisting that durée is something passing, a mere effect of the senses, he emphasized instead the capacity for intuition to reveal things in themselves. It is in this context that we can understand Jankélévitch’s interest in the “inexpressive style,” a secondary response to Romanticism. It is significant that Jankélévitch briefly mentions Bergson’s theory of pure perception alongside his account of the inexpressive, as something that directly reveals reality rather than being swept along by sensations or impressions:64 “The expressionist expressed sentiments having to do with sensation; the impressionist takes note of his sensations about things; and inexpressive music allows things themselves to speak, in their primal rawness, without necessitating intermediaries of any kind.”65 He refers to a number of works that direct the listener to the sound of the object rather than to its musicality, including the “roar of motors in Alexander Mosolov’s The Foundry” and Olivier Messiaen’s use of bird song,66 but it is Ravel who is most keenly associated with the inexpressive. He argues that Ravel’s nonmusical sounds are heard in their “brute truthfulness,” from the “peacock who shrieks” to the “chittering of nocturnal insects,” because they strip music of its melodiousness:67 It must be said that Ravel does not record feeling around sensations, like Fauré, nor sensations about things, like Debussy, but the things themselves; it is nature itself, with its colours and its smell of damp grass that figures in this music, live

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nature in flesh and blood, and not through the intermediary of any person. We can touch her and smell her, we can feel her present and living in matter as in creatures.68

Quite remarkably for a composer who is often heralded for his precision and whom Igor Stravinsky even referred to as a “Swiss clock-maker,” Jankélévitch makes the quite radical claim that Ravel’s work reveals nature without a witness or narrator. It should be said, however, that one must always be cautious when claiming that music directly invokes the real, for this raises the many criticisms directed at programmatic music, including Jankélévitch’s own rejection of music’s capacity to narrate events.69 It could easily be argued that without the descriptive titles of many modernist French works—that is, Ravel’s peacock, the cricket, the swan, not to mention Debussy’s descriptions of water—the listener would not find themselves in “nature itself.” In what way can we actually talk about an inexpressive real that unveils nature in the very act of listening rather than through the atemporality of reference? Jankélévitch gives some clue in his book on Ravel, where he argues that the composer often employs a “pointillist” precision that can be contrasted with the broad sweeping natural forms of Romanticism: “In the pointillist music of Ravel the great streams and fountain jets of Liszt break down into showers of drops; everything sparkles, gleams and scintillates, and all the silent amethysts of the night can be seen glinting in the depths of the garden.”70 To illustrate this, Jankélévitch refers to the water themes in Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and Le Cygne, where collections of shorter notes (demisemiquavers and semiquavers) interweave with the overarching melody. In Le Cygne, the movement of the water is rendered in septuplets and contrasts with the smooth gliding movement of the swan presented in the vocal line.71 What does it mean to present water as nature itself? This is somewhat explained in a discussion of charm, where Jankélévitch compares the gleaming light associated with the movement of water to the uncertainty of night in which objects lose their form: “[w]ater in motion drowns form, and night blurs its contours.”72 To state that the water is scintillating or gleaming is certainly an optical metaphor, but when imagined temporally, it highlights the impossibility of formal completion. Light in its scintillation disappears almost as quickly as it reveals itself, and provokes fascination while preventing the listener from lingering. It is an extreme brachylogy that does not merely disrupt the melody but prevents the completion of form at a microlevel of the truncated tone, which means that hearing is as much a matter of acknowledging the constant recommencement and disappearance of sound as it is attending to particular tones. The presque-rien of the miniscule or diminishing presents itself through the oscillation of appearance and the creative flourishing of the present.73 As such it should be thoroughly

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distinguished from the presque-tout in which the almost nothing recedes asymptotically to complete the line as a fully comprehensible whole. The diminishing portion of a line always has the homogeneity of space as its measure and as a means of resolving difference, but the presque-rien can never find such resolution. It may diminish but in doing so it becomes less spatial and more intensive; an indivisible quality that can inflect the whole.74 The almost- nothing of music demands a type of intuition that oscillates between the intuition of the whole, where qualities contract into a qualitative multiplicity, and the continual rebirth of becoming. This does not mean that a musical work should only be comprised of very short duration notes; what matters is a type of attention that always subtends the two states. In Le Cygne, the voice of the main melody enforces water’s ephemerality because it draws attention away from the diffluent and fluid septuplets, and disrupts the listener’s capacity to fully stabilize the sensual form. In the context of durée, each note gestures toward the next as well as to what has just passed in an evolving continuity, in which changes in the speed of the performance will significantly change the quality of the sound, in the same way that a variation in viewing distance changes a pointillist painting. Listening to music can be compared to Bergsonian contraction, whereby perception condenses material movements to create new qualities, and where the prolongation of duration is intimately connected to the coming into being of qualitative difference. Bergson suggests that in the limited duration of our perception, we see a particular color by contracting the billions of vibrations of light into a continuous qualitative surface, and that inversely, if we could extend our memory over a longer period, these colors will begin to devolve into vibrations.75 Similarly with sound, when the internal rhythm of the sound is sufficiently slow “as in the case of the deep notes of the musical scale, for instance—do we not feel that the quality perceived analyses itself into repeated and successive vibrations, bound together by an inner continuity.”76 Bergson never properly analyzed this oscillation between states, but it is an aesthetic and ontological image that could be most successfully explored in music. The variation in the tempo of music can invoke the real of durée by staging the coexistence of two states, one of which is felt as an impulsion, and indicated in constant differentiation, and the other as a recognizable quality— a sensual coexistence that retains the tension immanent to time. Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music also seeks to invoke this sensual tension through a range of concrete images that reveal durée as the alteration between processual states and, in doing so, realizes some of the aesthetic implications of Bergson’s philosophy. Notions such as the condensed expression, or brachylogy, mark a significant shift from the Bergsonian emphasis on the continuous gesture, and lead us to think about the disappearance as well as creation of form. The characterization of durée as polyphony, further expanded through

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polytonality, asks us to imagine qualitative difference as the interpenetration of irreconcilable voices. These coexisting movements invoke the inaudible as a virtual tension between divergent qualitative variation and sensual unification. It is about the contraction and dissolution of forms, which is modulated by the variability of speed and our ability to grasp difference, and where musical aesthetics disabuses us of faith in the completely cognizable. NOTES 1. Vladimir Jankélévitch, “With the Whole Soul,” in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, eds. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 156. 2. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 113. 3. Philippe Soulez and Frédéric Worms, Bergson: Biographie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 22. 4. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). 5. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 44–45. 6. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 198. 7. Bergson, Duration, 49. 8. William James, Psychology, Briefer Course (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 245. 9. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 70. 10. Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Kobenhavn and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1911), 140. 11. Ibid., 136. 12. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 12. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Ibid., 70. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid., 12. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. Ibid., 20. 19. Ibid., 22–23. 20. Ibid., 24. 21. Ibid., 90. 22. Ibid., 90–91.

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23. Ibid., 90. 24. Ibid., 13. 25. Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 102. 26. Steven Rings, “Talking and Listening with Jankélévitch,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 220–221. 27. Judy Lochhead, “Can We Say What We Hear?—Jankélévitch and the Bergsonian Ineffable,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 235. 28. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 251. 29. F. Joseph Smith, “Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Aesthetics,” in Aisthesis and Aesthetics, eds. Erwin W. Straus and Richard M. Griffith (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970), 212. 30. Dufrenne, Aesthetic, 256. 31. Ibid., 257. 32. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 17. 33. Ibid., 92. 34. Bergson, Creative, 126. 35. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 16. 36. Ibid., 17. 37. Ibid., 27. 38. Bergson, Creative, 174. 39. Dufrenne, Aesthetic, 270. 40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 276. 41. Craig Ayrey, “Jankélévitch the Obscure(d),” Music Analysis 25, no. 3 (October 2006): 345. 42. Ibid., 344. 43. Bergson, Creative, 195. 44. Ibid. 45. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 95–96. 46. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957), 44. 47. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1935), 40–41. 48. Jankélévitch, Bergson, 18. 49. Ibid. 50. Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie: (1949– 1992), Tome 1 (Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1994), 47. 51. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gabriel Fauré: ses mélodies, son esthétique (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1938), 16. 52. Jankélévitch, Bergson, 9.

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53. Ibid., 9–10. 54. Bergson, Duration, 52. 55. Vladimir Jankélévitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 105. 56. Ibid. 57. Robert Erickson, “Time-Relations,” Journal of Music Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 190. 58. Bergson, Creative, 267. 59. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 25–26. 60. Ibid., 30. 61. Ibid., 31. 62. Ibid., 18. 63. Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian AvantGarde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 59. 64. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 32. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 33–34. 67. Ibid., 34. 68. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 118. 69. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 55. 70. Jankélévitch, Ravel, 120. 71. Ibid. 72. Jankélévitch, Ineffable, 94. 73. Jankélévitch, Le je-ne-sais-quoi, 50. 74. Ibid., 47. 75. Bergson, Matter, 203. 76. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Antliff, Mark. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Ayrey, Craig. “Jankélévitch the Obscure(d).” Music Analysis 25, no. 3 (October 2006): 343–357. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991. ———. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1935. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by M. L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Duration and Simultaneity. Translated by Leon Jacobson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965.

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———. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. Kobenhavn and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1911. Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Translated by Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Erickson, Robert. “Time-Relations.” Journal of Music Theory 7, no. 2 (Winter 1963): 174–192. Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917). Translated by John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. James, William. Psychology, Briefer Course. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Music and the Ineffable. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ———. Henri Bergson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999. ———. “With the whole soul.” In The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, 155–166. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Ravel. Translated by Margaret Crosland. New York: Grove Press, 1959. ———. Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957. ———. Gabriel Fauré: ses mélodies, son esthétique. Librairie Plon: Paris, 1938. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. Lochhead, Judy. “Can We Say What We Hear?—Jankélévitch and the Bergsonian Ineffable.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 231–235. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Messiaen, Olivier. Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie: (1949–1992). Tome 1. Paris: Alphonse Leduc, 1994. Rings, Steven. “Talking and Listening with Jankélévitch.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 218–223. Smith, F. Joseph. “Towards a Phenomenology of Musical Aesthetics.” In Aisthesis and Aesthetics, edited by Erwin W. Straus and Richard M. Griffith, 197–228. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970. Soulez, Philippe and Frédéric Worms. Bergson: Biographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002. Zuckerkandl, Victor. Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Index

Absolute, the, xi, xv, 2–9, 13, 26, 158; experience of, 8; the Other and, 126–28; silence and, 162, 169. See also creation; God acting-without-being. See faire-sansêtre aesthetic, 28–29, 150, 159, 162–66, 186–88; experience, xxiii–xiv, 146, 150, 166, 180, 189; Kierkegaard’s conception of, 51n15; musical, 164, 174n62, 177–78, 180–82, 186–88, 190–92 affect, 23, 30, 137, 145, 150, 162, 180, 189; algos. See pain almost-being, xii almost-nothing. See presque-rien alterity, 82, 109, 126, 129; death as, xvi, 78–79, 82 Améry, Jean, xx, 104 apophasis, xxi–xxii, 109, 137 Aristotle, 3, 70–71n45, 125; virtue philosophy of, 28, 125 atmosphere, 157, 163, 167–68, 169, 174n62 atonement, 41, 44, 106, 140

audition: pure, 183, 184–85, 188 Aufhebung, 102, 104. See also Hegel, G. W. F. The Bad Conscience. See La Mauvaise conscience (1936) beauty, 65–66, 166–67, 186 becoming, xviii, 20, 23, 28, 32, 80, 86, 96–99, 101, 103, 104, 120, 123, 159, 178, 181–86; being and. See being; duration and, 120–21, 185; music and, 181–83, 185, 190, 192 being, xvi, 3–7, 8, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 47, 63, 67n10, 69n32, 69–70n36, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 86, 89n23, 90n57, 98, 100, 106, 118, 119–20, 126, 128, 129, 145, 149, 165, 166, 171n5, 188, 190, 192; acting over. See doing; acting-without. See faire-sans-être; almost-. See almost-being; becoming and, xviii, 20, 23, 95, 97, 98, 99, 119, 186; coming into, 186, 192; doing over, xii, 3, 21, 24, 26;

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Index

as essence, 22, 24; homogeneity of, 78; non-, 63, 83, 146; nothingness and, 3, 4, 5, 11, 70n39, 78, 81, 85; positivity of, 78; repentance of. See repentance; Schelling’s biography of, 118; towards-death. See death. See also creation; existence belatedness. See Nachträglichkeit beloved: death of, 77, 82, 83, 84, 85; the other as, 128, 129 Bergson, Henri, xvii, xviii, xxiii, 3, 29–30, 60–64, 66, 72n57, 89n28, 96–97, 111n18, 121, 123–24, 127, 130, 159, 170, 171n5, 177–80, 181, 182, 184–86, 186–88, 190, 192 brachylogy, 190–92 Broken Lullaby, 140, 144, 150, 152n33 Buber, Martin, 91n65, 108, 126 charis. See grace charity, xi, xviii, 21, 30, 42, 45, 46, 107–9, 123–24, 129, 167. See also grace; love charm, xxiii, 58, 67n8, 67n10, 105, 157–58, 159–60, 165–69, 177–78, 186; I-do-not-know-what (je-ne-sais-quoi), 166; of music 67n8, 174n62, 177, 186; spirituality as 157–58, 165–69. See also gift; grace; love Christianity, xxii, xxiii, 158–60, 161– 62, 166–68, 172n12, 173–74n57. See also grace, mysticism, religion, spirituality chronos. See time conscience, xx, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 41, 51n6, 51n14, 104, 105, 117, 122, 123, 130, 153–54n63;

bad, xiii, xv, xx, 21, 24–25, 40–45, 49–50, 100, 103–5, 111n18, 123, 137–40, 141–42, 145–46; good, 28; moral, xv, 20, 21, 41, 138, 153–54n63; in a state of grace, 108; virtuous, 21 consciousness, xxi, xxiii, 24, 33n9, 59, 66, 67n10, 68n16, 86, 87, 90n57, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 117, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 129, 185, 186, 187, 190; of death, 79, 80, 84, 86, 87; experience of, 63; half-. See half-consciousness; higher order, xv, 68n16; metaphysical, 117; moral, 33n9; self-, xiv, 123; semi-, 123; volitional, 24 conversion, 11–12, 21, 32, 42, 43, 44, 46, 49, 52n43, 106, 122, 125, 138, 142, 143, 160, 171n5; attentive, 42; moral, 43, 44, 46 counterpoint, xxiv, 187 courage, xi, 20, 25, 31, 32, 47, 49, 84, 96, 100–101, 111n40, 122–23; virtue of, 101, 123 creation, x–xii, xiv–xv, 3–7, 8–9, 11–12, 20, 21, 24, 29–31, 95, 120–23, 191; concept of Grund and, 120–21, 123; creativity and. See creativity; decision and, 5–6, 122, 125; ethics and, 20, 21, 29–31, 129; ex-nihilo, 4, 6, 9; love and. See love; as a ‘pure act’ (actus purus), xi, 3–4, 7, 9; re-creation and, xxi, 8, 10;

Index

virtue and. See virtue(s). See also being; existence; God creativity, 33, 180, 185, 188, 191–92 creator. See God Das Andersgekonnthaben, 145 death, xv–xviii, 75–77, 78–79, 80–87, 89nn23, 24; being-towards, 82–83; of beloved. See beloved; birth and, xv, 80–81; concept of Grund and, xviii, 119; Epicurus on, 89n24, 90n43; experience of, 75–76, 81, 83, 85; first-person perspective on, xvi, 76, 83–84; in Frantz, 139, 140, 141, 148, 150; instant of. See instant; life and, xv, xvi, 77–78, 79, 80–81, 86–87, 98, 119; love and. See love; in Manchester by the Sea, xiii, 39–40, 41, 43, 48; mystery of, xxii, 75–77, 86–87, 159–60; nonsense of, xvi, xxii, 75–76, 77–78, 86–87; nothingness of, xvi, xxii, 75–76, 78; of the other, 76, 77, 82–85, 95n55; phenomenology of, xxii, 76–80, 81–82, 83–85, 91n77, 160; as pure fact, 80; as pure negation, xv, 79, 86–87, 119; quiddity of, 79, 80; second-person perspective on, 76, 77, 82–85, 95n55; silence and, 89n23; third-person perspective on, 76; uniqueness of, 76–77 Debussy, Claude, xii, 70n39, 178, 187, 190–91 Debussy et le mystère de l'instant, xxii, 159–61, 165, 168, 171n5, 173n48

199

decision, 5–6, 22, 33, 101, 103, 122, 125. See also creation; humility Deleuze, Gilles, 72n57 demi-conscience. See half-consciousness Derrida, Jacques, 45–46, 53n54, 69n34, 76–77, 113n88, 154n65 despair, 39, 48, 49–50, 105–6, 137, 140, 149–50 dialectic, 19, 64–65, 66, 70–71n45; between instant and interval, 95–96 disappearing appearance (apparition disparaissante), xvi, 27, 32, 78–79. See also almost-nothing (presquerien) diseases of temporality, xix–xx, 95–97, 102–3, 105, 107, 109, 110n3; melancholy and, 104, 105. See also remorse duration, xviii, xix, xxii, xxiii, 3, 24, 95, 97, 100, 101, 130n6, 141, 177–78, 179, 180, 181, 184, 185–86, 187–89, 190, 192; Bergsonian philosophy of, xix, xxiii, 3, 32, 79, 95, 118, 119, 120, 122, 177, 178, 181, 185, 187–89, 192; a man of, 141; memory and, 28, 178; music and, xxiii, 177, 178, 179, 180, 185–86, 187–89, 192; time as, 77, 79, 95, 118, 119, 120, 122. See also time Duration and Simultaneity (1922), 178, 188 la durée. See duration duty, xx, 11, 12, 21, 24, 26–27, 30, 47, 53n56, 103, 106, 149; to forgive, 11, 12; hyperbolic form of, 27; love and. See love dynamis. See enérgeia

200

Index

ego, xviii–xix, 21, 31, 124–25, 130; as organ-obstacle, 31. See also egoism egoism, xviii–xix, 9, 108, 121, 125–26, 129. See also ego ektupôn, 65–66 élané, xxii, 31, 100, 101, 124 enérgeia, 28, 124 Enneads, xiv, 6, 57–58, 64, 67n5, 68n14, 68n16 epekeina, xv–xvi, 5, 7, 78 equity, 25, 31, 108 essence. See being ethics, ix, xi, xii, xix, 7, 19, 20, 21, 28, 30, 32, 39, 40, 50, 51n15, 76, 77, 82, 88n13, 90n55, 103, 105, 108, 110, 117, 127, 130, 137, 138, 141, 142, 147, 163; based on symmetrical relations, 84; experience of, 141; forgiveness and. See forgiveness, 12; foundation of, 26; hyperbolic, 108; love and. See love; maximalist, 30; metaphysics and, 33, 77, 88n13, 90n57; music and, xi; normative, 30, 33; ontology and, 82; rational, 30; of remorse, 105, 142, 147; virtue. See virtue ethics eudaimonia, 21, 25 evil, xv–xvi, xxiii, 10–12, 40, 45, 100, 107; death as, 80; forgiveness and. See forgiveness; lesser, 24, 32; necessary, 24, 32; remorse and. See remorse existence, xi, xviii, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 22, 63, 67n10, 72n57, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 91, 102, 119, 124, 128, 163, 166, 169, 170;

creaturely, 173n42; wonders of, 78, 79, 80, 91n77. See also being; creation faire-être, 2, 3; See also faire-sans-être faire-sans-être, xiv–xv, 2–3; See also faire-être Fauré, Gabriel, 157, 158, 174n62, 187, 190–91 Fauré et l’inexprimable (1974), 157, 158, 159 fidelity, xi–xii, xxi, 20, 24–25, 30–32, 96, 97, 100–101, 109, 111n40, 141–42, 144; grammatical versus pneumatic, 141–42; to oneself (la fidélité à soi), 141–42; virtue of, 101 first act, the. See creation fondement. See Grund forgiveness, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xxi, xxii, 2, 7, 10, 11–12, 13, 39–40, 43, 44, 45–49, 50, 51n6, 52n43, 53n54, 53nn56–58, 53n66, 96, 100, 101, 102, 106–8, 109, 113n88, 114n110, 117, 121, 122, 137, 139, 140, 145, 146, 150, 153n61, 161, 170; evil and, 10–12, 45, 53n54, 53n57, 121; freedom and, 11, 12, 107; gift of. See gift; God’s, 2, 13; grace and, 11, 12; hyperbolic character of, 10, 45, 107, 108; justice and. See justice; love and. See love; pure, 45–46; as a relation, 11; remorse and, x, xiii, 39–40, 137, 139, 140; self-, xiii, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 50, 54n79;

Index

of the unforgivable, 53n57; virtue and, 102 Forgiveness. See Le pardon (1967) Frantz (2016), xx–xxi, 40, 142–44, 146, 148, 149, 150–51, 152n33, 153n61 freedom, xi, 5, 6, 7, 11, 15, 165n31 Freud, Sigmund, xiv, xx, xxi, 139, 143–44, 148 friendship, xi, xxii, 126, 143 futurition, xii, 86, 97, 98, 101, 102, 129, 134n130 gift, xiii, xiv, 31, 44, 45–47, 52n43, 53n63, 96, 107, 108, 109, 137, 159–60, 163, 166; of forgiveness, 45–47, 52n43, 96. See also grace; love God, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 31, 89n23, 158, 161, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 173n49; forgiveness and, 12, 13; love and, 2, 6, 7, 31, 158, 161. See also Absolute; creation; mystery; religion; spirituality good, the, xi–xii, xiii, 9, 10, 12, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 49, 60, 76, 100, 107, 108, 121, 123, 137, 142, 166; instant and, 111n40; intention and, 123 grace, xi, xiii, xiv, xxiii, 11–12, 30, 32, 47, 85, 96, 105, 107, 108–9, 110, 114n110, 123, 132n55, 137, 141, 147, 158, 159–60, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170; Christianity and, 158; event of, 137; the order of, 105, 107, 109; thaumaturgic, 117. See also law; love gramma, 165, 173; pneuma and, 165, 173 ground. See Grund Grund, xviii, 118–19, 120, 121, 123, 125, 131n19, 131n34, 132n56;

201

humility and. See humility; as organ-obstacle, 121; radical novelty and, 120; Schelling’s philosophy of, 118–19, 120, 123 habitus. See hexis haecceity, 76, 84. See also hapax (hápax legomenon); ipseity; semelfactivity half-consciousness, xiv hapax (hápax legomenon), xvi, 45, 81, 84, 99. See also haecceity; ipseity; semelfactivity Hegel, G. W. F., 51n6, 102. See also Aufhebung Heidegger, Martin, 80, 82–83, 88n13, 89n33, 90n57 Henri Bergson (1931), 52n41, 68n14, 68–69n22 heroism, 22. See also virtue(s) hexis, 24, 25, 27 Holocaust, the, ix, xx, 90n55, 98, 144 Hope, x, xxi, 32, 49, 50, 79, 140, 142, 146, 150 Hume, David, 25, 81 humility, xi, xviii, xix, 25, 31, 100, 117, 118, 121–23, 124–27, 128, 129–30, 159–60; charity and, 123; conception of Grund and, 118, 121, 123, 125, 129, 130; dignity and, 127–28, 129–30; forgiveness and, 121; humiliation and, 126; as hyperbolic sacrifice, 122, 123, 124, 125; love and. See love; as nihilization of the self, 124; as radical inferiority, 124; virtue of, xviii–xix, 25, 31, 117, 121–23, 127, 129. See also grace; modesty

202

Index

I-do-not-know-what. See je-ne-sais-quoi immanence, 66, 79, 81, 85, 101, 111n40, 158, 162, 167, 171, 177, 179, 183, 185, 186, 192 imprescriptible, the, 106. incandescent point. See instant ineffability, xv, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 58, 62, 64, 67n8, 89n23, 95, 100, 108, 159, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172n13, 173n46, 177–78, 185; music and, xv, 59, 64, 67n8, 161, 165, 177, 178, 185; silence and, 89n23 inexpressivity, xv, 58, 77–78, 161, 162, 163, 166, 189, 190, 191. See also mystery instant, xii, xv, 5, 19, 20, 22, 23–24, 28–29, 32, 33, 67n10, 78–79, 95–96, 97, 98, 99, 100–102, 107, 111n40, 122, 129, 130; of death, 78, 79; virtue and, 20, 32, 99–101, 111n40, 122, 129. See also duration; interval intangibility, xv, xxi, xxiii, 2, 7, 147, 161, 164, 167, 168, 170. See also touch intention, xii, xiii, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27–29, 32, 34n20, 40–41, 42, 50, 53n58, 76, 105, 108, 123, 125, 141, 143; action and, 40–41; evil, 42; forgiveness and, 53n58; good, 22, 24, 28, 32, 123; instantaneous, 27–28; love and, xii, 20, 24, 108; the purity of, 26; virtuous, 22, 24, 28, 32 interval, xii, xv, xvi, 20, 28–29, 32, 57, 78, 86, 95–96, 99, 100, 101–2, 111n40, 121, 122, 123, 182; virtue and, 20, 28, 32, 96, 99–101, 111n40, 122. See also duration; instant

intuition, 19, 23, 68n21, 69n23, 100, 107, 125, 126, 130, 170, 178, 180, 184, 185–88, 190, 192; sudden, 84 ipseity, 23, 31, 76, 81, 85, 106–7, 108–9, 128, 142, 158, 179, 180; of death, 76, 81; of a person, 31, 85, 108. See also haecceity; hapax (hápax legomenon); quiddity; semelfactivity irreversibility, xvi, xix, xx, xxi, 19, 23, 39, 81, 87, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102–4, 109, 137; experience of, 19, 23–24, 97–98; undoing and, xiii, xvii, xxi, 105, 111n18, 137, 140, 143–44, 146. See also temporality; time L'Irréversible et la nostalgie (1974), xx, 103, 110n3, 112n72 irrevocability, xvii, xix, xx, 39, 81, 95, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 140, 141, 145, 146. See also irreversibility je-ne-sais-quoi, xxii–xxiii, 29, 67n10, 99–100, 158–59, 161–62, 166, 167, 170–71. See also presque-rien Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien (1957), 88n12, 100, 159 Jewishness, ix, 104 Jews, xx justice, ix, 25, 45, 46, 100, 105, 106–8, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 149; forgiveness and, 11, 46; love and. See love; as punishment, 12; reason and, 121, 122, 123, 126; remorse and, xxi, 149; as restoration of the status quo, 96 Kairos. See time Kant, Immanuel, 19, 20, 60, 61, 63, 68n21, 126

Index

kharis. See grace Kierkegaard, Søren, 78, 86, 147 language: Bergson’s theory of, 180, 182, 185; death and, 76, 78; discursive, 166; of existence, 119; foreign, 68–69n22; inaudible, 64; knowledge and, 161; musical, 178, 179, 182–83; as organ-obstacle. See organobstacle; poetic, 165; spatializing, xxiv, 180; verbal, 159, 165 law, 12, 27, 30, 33, 41, 76, 84, 96, 97, 98, 101, 108, 109, 110, 113n88, 165; of love. See love; the order of, 105, 107, 109; of retaliation, 12 Levinas, Emmanuel, xvi, 82, 84, 91n65 listening, 163, 164, 165, 167, 182, 183, 186, 191, 192 living spirit. See pneuma, pneumatikos logos, 25, 30, 64, 78, 159, 165 love, xi, 7–10, 12–13, 21, 24, 25, 26, 30–31, 32, 33, 42, 44, 45, 46–49, 53n59, 75, 81–82, 83–85, 100, 105–6, 107, 108, 109, 110, 117, 122–23, 125, 127, 128, 129, 142, 144, 150, 151, 160, 161, 167; as agape, 108; as caritas, 109; creation and, 7–10, 13; death and, 81–82, 83–85, 90n55; divine, 7–10, 13; duty and, 24, 108; forgiveness and, 12–13, 46–48, 49, 53n66, 108; of god, 158, 161; human, 8–10, 13; humility and, 127, 129;

203

hyperbolic character of, xi, 10, 107; justice and, 96, 100, 105–6, 107–8, 109; law of, 26, 33; metaphysics of, xi, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 117, 129; mystery of, 161; philosophy of, 7–10, 13, 83, 84, 100, 105–6, 117, 122, 123, 129; pure, 30–31, 32, 42; self-, 100, 123, 125, 126; virtue and, 24–25, 26, 30–31, 32, 33, 100, 122. See also beloved; charity; charm; gift; grace; virtue(s) Making-exist. See faire-être Manchester by the Sea (film), xiii–xiv, 39, 40–43, 44, 45–49, 50, 52n19 Marcel, Gabriel, 88n12 La Mauvaise conscience (1936), ix, xiii, xv, xx, 20, 40, 42, 44, 45, 51n6, 51n13, 51n15, 100, 111n18, 138, 139, 141, 144, 146, 153–54n63, 154n65 melody, xxiii, xxiv, 178–80, 181, 184, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192; duration and. See duration; kinetic, 58 memory, xvii, xix–xx, xxiv, 61, 85, 96, 97, 101–2, 103, 178, 179, 181, 186–87; Bergsonian philosophy of. See Bergson, Henri; diseases of. See diseases of temporality Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 185 metanoia. See conversion metaphysics, ix, xi, 2, 3–4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 20, 21, 27–28, 62, 68n21, 69n34, 77, 88n13, 117, 126, 128, 129, 167, 177, 180–81, 185–86, 187;  aesthetics and, 180–81, 186–87; Bergsonian. See Bergson, Henri; of creation. See creation;

204

Index

experience and, 128; of forgiveness. See forgiveness; ground of, 117; of humility. See humility; of love. See love; morality and. See morality modesty, xi, xviii, 24–25, 100, 121–22, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127. See also virtue(s) morality, 2, 8, 12, 21, 23, 26, 27, 28–29, 31, 32, 123–24; attentive, 149–50; closed, 124; hyperbolic act of, 124; metaphysics and, 12, 117; open, 124; paradox(es) of. See paradox. See also virtue(s) La Mort (1966), xvii, xx, 75–76, 85–86, 88n13, 89n28, 91n77, 161 mourning, xiii, 106, 139, 141, 144 music, xv, xxiii–xxiv, 41, 62, 75, 148, 151, 157, 159, 161, 164, 165, 167, 177–78, 179, 180, 181–86, 189, 190–91; experience of, xxiii–xiv, 180, 182, 184; and the ineffable. See ineffability; philosophy of, ix, xi, 67n8, 177–78, 179, 180, 181–86, 189, 190–91, 192 musicality, xxii–xxiii, 190 La Musique et l'ineffable (1961), xv, 59, 64, 67n8, 68n20, 159, 161, 163, 165, 174n62, 185 mystery, xxii–xxiii, 117, 127–28, 129, 157, 159–61, 165, 166, 167, 168–69, 171, 171n5, 173n48, 173–74n57, 174n80; Christianity and, xxiii, 157, 159, 160, 161, 166, 172n12, 173–74n57; creation and, 30; of death. See death; of love. See love; philosophy of, 128–29, 159–60, 161;

problem and, 88n12; secret and. See secret mysticism, xxii–xxiii, 129, 158–60, 161, 162, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170–72, 171–72n5; Christian, 157, 159, 160, 161; experience of, 129, 158, 170, 171–72n5, 172nn11, 12; non-religious, 158–60, 162, 170–72. See also Christianity; religion; spirituality Nachträglichkeit, xx, 137–39, 140 negativity: figures of original, xii–xiv, xv, xviii Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 25, 44, 80, 103–4, 147 nocturnal: experience, 167; objects, 162, 168, 190; philosophy, 162, 168, 190 Le Nocturne (1942), 158, 159 nostalgia, xiii, xix, 41, 96–97, 102, 103, 104, 105 nostos. See return nothingness, xii, 3–6, 62–63, 70n39, 147; being and, 3, 4; creation and, 4–5; of death. See death; of evil. See evil; god and, 6; metaphysics of things and, 3; presque-rien and. See presque-rien; silence and, 62, 70n39 L'Odyssée de la conscience dans la dernière philosophie de Schelling (1933), xviii, 111n18, 118–19 openness: to the divine, xxiii, 160; humility and, 122, 125, 126; as receptivity, xix, 146; towards the future, 97, 103, 104; to the world, 122, 125, 126

Index

opticality, xvii, 59, 167, 178, 180, 182, 183, 185, 191; ocular-centrism and, xxiii, 163, 178 organ-obstacle, xvii–xviii, 28–29, 32, 53n63, 86–87, 89n28, 101, 117, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129–30 other, the. See alterity otherness. See alterity pain, xxi, 41, 43, 49, 104, 137–38, 140, 146–47, 152n31; moral, 137, 138, 140, 146–47; of remorse. See remorse paradox, xvii, 6, 8–9, 11, 19, 20–21, 24, 29, 30, 32–33, 107–8, 179; counterpoint and, 187; of death. See death Le Paradoxe de la morale (1981), 129 paradoxology, 19 parakolouthēsis. See consciousness Le Pardon (1967), ix–x, xxii, 2, 40, 44, 90n55, 102 Pardonner? (1986), 53n57, 106 Pascal, Blaise, 75, 80, 85, 87n1, 107, 125 Penser la mort? (1994), xvii, 77, 89n33, 91n77 perception, xv, xvii, 58, 163, 164, 179, 186, 188, 192; auditory, 163, 192; Bergson’s theory of, 190. See also Bergson, Henri Phaedo, 77–78 Philosophie première. Introduction à une philosophie du presque (1954), xi, xii, 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13  philosophy: of art, 177, 181, 191, 192; Bergsonian. See Bergson, Henri; Cartesian, 15n22, 90n57; critical, 60, 61, 63; of death. See death; of experience, 57–60, 61–63, 64–66, 68n20, 128–29;

205

first, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 80–81, 82; of forgiveness. See forgiveness; of je-ne-sais-quoi. See je-ne-saisquoi; Kantian. See Kant, Immanuel; moral, ix, xi, xxi, 7, 8, 12, 19, 20, 21, 32–33, 95, 117; of music. See music; non-religious. See spirituality; of particularity, 82; of presque-rien. See presque-rien; of psychology, 20; of religion. See religion; of remorse. See remorse; of virtue. See virtue(s); vitalist. See vitalism phronesis, 21, 25 Plato, 71n48, 77, 79, 124 Platonism, 62, 66 Plotinus, ix, xiv, 15n31, 57–59, 64, 66, 66–67n3, 67nn5, 6, 68n16, 69n33, 70n39, 70–71nn45, 46, 71n48, 124, 161, 166 pneuma, pneumatikos, xxi, 26, 30–31, 64, 141–42, 144, 159–60, 164, 165, 168, 170, 173n42; gramma and, 159–60, 173n48 polyphony, xiv, 187–88, 192–93; unity in, 187 polytonality, xiv, 188, 192–93 presque-rien, xii, xvi, xix, 70n39, 78–79, 81–82, 99–100, 125, 126, 129–30, 169–70, 186, 192. See also je-ne-sais-quoi primultimité, 99 psychoanalysis, 137–38 pure act. See creation pure activity. See Absolute, the pure love. See love Quelque part dans l’inachevé (1978), 158, 159, 170 quiddity, xix–xx, 3, 23, 24, 77, 85, 129. See also quoddity

206

Index

quoddity, xix–xx, 23, 24, 40, 85, 128–29, 145; as a pure fact, 128–29. See also ipseity; quiddity Ravel, Maurice, 188, 190–91 Ravel (1939), 190–91 Raveling, Wiard, xxii reason, 7, 10, 12, 13, 19, 22, 29, 45, 49, 50, 69n29, 71, 85, 107, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130, 166; for forgiveness. See forgiveness; Kant’s philosophy of, 68n21, 71. See also Kant, Immanuel receptivity. See openness reconciliation, xix, xx, 11, 96, 102, 104, 109–10, 113n88 redemption, 41, 43–45, 48, 50, 52n27. See also atonement regret, xiii, xiv, xix, 41, 49, 51n15, 96, 102, 103, 104–5, 150, 152n31, 178; remorse and, 51n15. See also atonement; conscience; diseases of temporality; repentance religion, ix, 75, 79, 138, 158, 162, 163, 169, 170, 171n5; Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and, 123–24, 171n5; music and, 157. See also Christianity; conversion; spirituality remorse, x, xiii, xiv, xix, xx–xxi, 21, 39, 40, 41–45, 46, 47, 48, 49–50, 51nn13–15, 51n17, 53n66, 96, 103, 104–6, 107, 137–38, 139, 140, 141–43, 145–47, 148, 149–51, 153–54n63; forgiveness and. See forgiveness; hyperbolic, xxi, 107, 145, 149; justice and. See justice; pain of, 41, 43, 51n14, 140, 146, 147, 148, 149; regret and. See regret; reparation and. See reparation;

work of, 137–38, 139, 140; wrongdoing and, 105–6, 145. See also atonement; conscience; diseases of temporality; repentance reparation, 106, 112n75, 113n88, 141, 146; and Wiedergutmachung, 106, 112–13n75 repentance, xxi, 10, 45, 49, 53n54, 102, 105, 106, 137, 138, 139, 149; of being, xxi, 149; of conduct, xxi, 149. See also regret; remorse Republic, 24, 71n48 resentment, xix, xx, 41, 96, 97, 101, 103–4, 105, 107 return, 42, 77, 81, 104, 106, 108 Romanticism, 189–90 sacrifice, xviii, 9, 10, 13, 21, 30, 31, 47, 49, 123–25, 130; concept of Grund and, 120, 123, 124, 125; hyperbolic, xviii, 124; self-, 21, 31, 124 Sartre, Jean-Paul, xvi, 80–81, 86, 90n43 Scheler, Max, xxi, 138 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, ix, xx, 5–6, 62, 88n13, 111n18, 118–19, 129–30 Shoah. See Holocaust, the secret, the, ix, xxii, 28n84, 64, 77, 88n12, 127–28, 140, 141, 159–60, 161, 165, 167, 173n48, 174n80; mystery and, 28n84, 88n12, 127–28, 159–60 semelfactivity, xiv, xvi, 74. See also haecceity; hapax (hápax legomenon); ipseity sensation, 60, 61, 186, 190; remorse as, xix, xxi, 41 sensual, the, 23–24, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, 190, 192, 193; experience, 177, 178, 186, 189, 193

Index

sentiment, 9, 21, 30, 103, 107–8; moral, xx, 21, 30 silence, xv, xviii, 47, 58, 60, 62–64, 65–66, 68n20, 69n33, 69–70n36, 89n23, 161–62, 191;  death and, 89n23; experience of, xv, 63, 64, 68n20; the ineffable and. See ineffability; materiality of, 69n33; noise and, 69–70n36 Simmel, Georg, 118 simplicity, 76, 161, 184–85; chronological, 184–85; logical, 184–85; music and, 184 sincerity, 23, 24–25, 31, 44–45, 104, 109, 141, 142, 187; in remorse, 45, 142; virtue of, 24–25, 31 spatialization, 180, 182 Spinoza, Baruch, 27, 72n57, 77, 125, 137 spirituality, xvii, xxii–xxiii, 12, 23, 58, 66, 96, 157–58, 159, 161–64, 165, 166–68, 169–70, 171, 173n42, 174n62; agnostic, 23; charm and, 157–58, 165–69, 174n62; christian, 157–59, 161, 164, 169; experience of, 163, 165; as immateriality, 157–58, 164–65, 166, 168–65; mysticism and, xxii–xxiii, 157–58, 166; non-religious, xxiii, 157–58, 169, 170–71; as poetics, 157–58, 162–64. See also Christianity; mysticism; religion St. John of the Cross, 89n23, 124, 160, 162, 163, 168 St. Thomas, 27 subject, x–xii, xvii, xx–xxi, 9, 21, 28, 29, 31, 51n14, 65, 84, 123–24, 137–39, 140–42, 143, 145, 147, 158, 167, 170, 183, 185;

207

Cartesian, 90n57; ethical, x, xi–xii, 21, 28, 137, 140, 142; object and, 67n10, 123, 130, 139, 140, 142, 145, 167; passive, 139, 140, 147; of remorse, xiii–xiv, xx–xxi, 137–39, 140–42, 143, 147, 149, 152n31 sur-essence, 5 synéidesis. See consciousness temporality, xix, 80, 83, 86, 97, 101, 103, 118, 138, 181, 187; diseases of. See diseases of temporality; duration and, 118; of music, xxiv, 181, 187. See also duration thanatology, 76, 77, 80, that-ness. See quoddity thaumazein, 22, 71. See also wonder this-ness. See quiddity time, xii, xvi, xviii, xxiii–xxiv, 10, 19, 20, 22, 23–24, 28–29, 39, 42, 44, 45, 58, 78–79, 83, 85, 87, 95, 96–99, 100, 101, 102–3, 104, 109–10, 111n18, 118–19, 120, 122, 125, 126, 138, 140, 141, 143, 161, 167, 177–80, 181, 182, 183, 184–85, 186, 188–90; as chronos, 100, 111n40; concept of Grund and, 118; of death. See death; duration and. See duration; forgiveness and. See forgiveness; as hapax. See hapax; human experience of, 87, 97–98, 100, 119, 143, 185, 189; instant of. See instant; interval of. See interval; irreversible. See irreversibility; as kairos, 23–24, 29, 111n40; lived, 22, 96, 97, 102, 103, 143; music and. See music

208

Index

tonality, 188–89, 192–93; bi-, 188–89 touch, x, xxi, xxii, xxiv, 75, 89n24, 163, 165, 185, 190–91. See also intangibility Traité des vertus (1949), xi, xxi, 2, 19–20, 26, 32, 33, 117, 118, 121, 123, 171n5 transcendence, xi, 5, 10, 12, 23, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 84, 101, 108, 111n40, 158, 160, 162, 163, 166, 169, 170, 171, 180 trauma, 96, 97, 102, 103, 112n72, 138, 147, 151 tupon. See ektupôn Underhill, Evelyn, 159–60, 168, 171n5 undoing. See Ungeschehenmachen Ungeschehenmachen, 143–44, 145 unity: of Jankélévitch’s project, 7, 12; of mind and world, xv, 58–61, 66, 79; polyphonic. See polyphony; of the subject, xiv, 79; of virtues. See virtue(s) Vermeer, Johannes, 163 victim, xx, 11–12, 96, 98, 102–3, 106–7, 110, 143, 147 virtuality, 29–30, 33, 177, 189, 193; virtue as. See virtue(s) virtue ethics, ix, xiii, 19–21, 23, 25–27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 108; naturalistic, 23, 25, 26

virtue(s), xi–xiii, xxi, xxiv, 19–20, 21–23, 24–28, 29–32, 32–33, 96, 99–01, 108, 109, 111n40, 117, 121–23, 125, 127, 129, 141, 147; of beginning, xi, xxi, 100–101; continuation, xi, xxi, 29, 100–101; creation and, xii; forgiveness and. See forgiveness; as hexis, 27; of humility. See humility; initiation, xi, xxi, 100–101; instant and. See instant; intention and, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28; interval and. See interval; love and. See love; metaempirical, 122; potentiality of, 29–30; of sincerity. See sincerity; subject of, 21, 22, 28; unity of, 20–21, 30–31; as virtuality, 29–30, 33 virtue theory, 19–21, 22–23, 24, 26; characterological, 22 vitalism, 61, 159 vouloir vouloir. See ‘willing to will’ wholly-other. See epekeina ‘willing to will’, 22, 24 wisdom. See phronesis wonder, 22, 71, 79, 85, 87, 99n77, 125, 127–28

Notes on Contributors

Paul Atkinson teaches within the Academic and Professional Writing program at Monash University, Australia. He has published widely in journals and edited collections on a range of media, from cinema and animation to dance and the visual arts, in addition to his work on philosophy and aesthetics. He is particularly interested in the relationship between time, visuality, and corporeal movement, which is central to his upcoming book, The Aesthetics of Duration: Henri Bergson and the Visual Arts (London: I.B. Tauris, forthcoming, 2019). José Manuel Beato is a researcher at the Institute for Philosophical Studies and at the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra (Portugal). He was a recipient of a PhD studentship from Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology from 2014 to 2018 (F.C.T. SFRH/ BD/92466/2013). His main research interests focus on French Existentialism and Phenomenology. His MA dissertation has explored the idea of “ontological feeling” in the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel. His publications include: “A propósito de Métaphysique du sentiment: entrevista com Renaud Barbaras” in Revista Filosófica de Coimbra (2018) and “A Escuta do Irreversível: Filosofia e Música em Vladimir Jankélévitch” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (2018). Francesco Ferrari is project coordinator of the Doctoral School “ReligionConflict-Reconciliation” at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. He is a moral philosopher specializing in reconciliatory processes, whose research mainly addresses authors from the Jewish philosophy of the last century. He coedited the 11th volume of the Martin Buber-Werkausgabe (Schriften zur 209

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politischen Philosophie und zur Sozialphilosophie, 2019) and published three monographs (La comunità postsociale, 2018; Religione e religiosità, 2014; Presenza e relazione, 2012), as well as several papers concerning Buber’s thought. He also published articles and book chapters on Arendt, Derrida, Ricœur and—more recently—Améry and Jankélévitch. After his project on the role of “lived time” as resource and obstacle toward reconciliation, which took place during the DFG-Project “Hearts of Flesh—not Stone. Encountering the Suffering of the Other,” he is currently working on the interconnection between trust, extraneity, and recognition in reconciliatory processes. Tim Flanagan received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Dundee as a recipient of the UK Government’s Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORS). He currently teaches Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. Further to earlier work on the history of philosophy in Deleuze, his current projects include the monograph Baroque Naturalism in Benjamin and Deleuze: The Art of Least Distances and work as coeditor of a forthcoming series on Process Philosophy (both with Palgrave Macmillan). Clovis Salgado Gontijo has a dual background in Music and Philosophy (MA in Music, Piano Performance, Texas Christian University, 2002; PhD in Philosophy with an emphasis on Aesthetics and Theory of Art, Universidad de Chile, 2014). His doctoral dissertation, devoted to the evocation of the night motif in Western Art and to the special kinship between nocturnal and musical experiences, was published under the title Ressonâncias noturnas: do indizível ao inefável (São Paulo: Loyola, 2017). As a scholar of Vladimir Jankélévitch, he made the first Brazilian translation of La Musique et l’neffable (A música e o inefável. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2018). His main areas of research are the Philosophy of Music, Christian Mysticism, apophatic discourses, and the connections between aesthetic and spiritual experiences. He is currently an assistant professor in the Philosophy Department of Faculdade Jesuíta de Filosofia e Teologia, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Andrew Kelley is associate professor of Philosophy and presently serves as the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Bradley University (Peoria, Illinois, USA). He has published articles on Vladimir Jankélévitch and translated two of Jankélévitch’s books into English, Forgiveness (2005) and The Bad Conscience (2014), both with the University of Chicago Press. His current research includes a monograph on Jankélévitch’s metaphysics, as well as several smaller projects concerning Levinas, Bergson, Gusdorf, and Brunschvicg.

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Marguerite La Caze is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland. She has research interests and numerous publications in European and feminist philosophy especially concerning questions of ethics, politics, and aesthetics, including philosophy and film. Her publications include the monographs Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence: The Grieving and the Unrepentant (Lexington, 2018) Wonder and Generosity: Their Role in Ethics and Politics (SUNY, 2013) The Analytic Imaginary (Cornell, 2002), Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Michael Levine (Ashgate, 2003) and the edited collection Phenomenology and Forgiveness (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). She held an Australian Research Council (ARC) Australian Research Fellowship (2003–2007) and an ARC Discovery grant “Ethical Restoration after Communal Violence: A Philosophical Account” (2014–2018). Aaron T. Looney studied English literature and philosophy at California Lutheran University, received a master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and completed his Master’s and doctoral degrees in philosophy at the Eberhard Karls University in Tuebingen, Germany, where he has taught since 2012. His research interests focus on anthropology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion, especially in contemporary continental philosophy and Augustine. He is the author of the first English-language monograph on Vladimir Jankélévitch, Vladimir Jankélévitch: The Time of Forgiveness (Fordham University Press, 2015) and has contributed essays on various topics within Jankélévitch’s oeuvre in both French (“L’amour, la loi et les dispositions de l’âme,” in Cités 70, 2017) and German (“Unstrafbar, Unsühnbar, Unvergebbar—Vladimir Jankélévitch und die Grenzen zwischenmenschlicher Vergebung” in Vergebung: Philosophische Perspektiven auf ein Problemfeld der Ethik, Mentis 2014). Giulia Maniezzi is assistant professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse (France). She received her PhD in Moral Philosophy at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan (Italy) and at the Institut Catholique de Toulouse (France). Her research interests are Vladimir Jankélévitch’s philosophy, the reception of Henri Bergson’s works, French spiritualism, and French contemporary philosophy. She is the author of the upcoming monograph Fino al sacrificio. La condizione morale dell’uomo in Vladimir Jankélévitch (VitaePensiero, Milano 2018). She also published several articles on Jankélévitch’s philosophy in Italian and French peer-reviewed journals. She is currently working on a project about Louis Lavelle’s unpublished manuscripts.

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Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt. She is a political theorist with a focus on memory studies, historical justice, cultural theory of trauma, and restitution. Her publications have appeared in Angelaki, Contemporary Political Theory, and Textual Practice. She is the author of Reconciling Community and Subjective Life. Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kértesz (Continuum, 2010), and of Restitution and the Imaginary: Undoing, Repair and Return in Modernity (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). She is also the editor of On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe (Lexington, 2011).