Balductum Musings

Tag: spirituality

  • Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series

    Summary of the Series

    (Based on Colby Dickinson’s guide)

    Frameing the Homo Sacer Series

    • Agamben’s concept of being captures and divides human existence to dominate existence.
    • Language and other apparatuses, such as potential and actual, divide being to control and dominate.
    • The sovereign figure creates a dichotomy between sovereign power and ‘bare life’ to legitimize its rule.
    • Overcoming this division of being becomes the recurring leitmotif throughout the series.
    • This subject is introduced in the first volume, Homo Sacer, and recurs with increasing significance throughout subsequent volumes.

    Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen

    • The book explores the concept of the homo sacer, a figure of Roman law who exists both inside and outside society.
    • The homo sacer’s life cannot be accepted by the gods or protected from violence, leading to the existence of ‘bare life’.
    • The homo sacer is the excluded life upon which the sovereign depends to establish any political relations.
    • The sovereign is both inside and outside the law, a state of existence that allows them to declare exceptions to the rule of law.
    • The camp, a biopolitical tool to sequester unwanted bodies, is a concept that demonstrates how bare life involves the removal of one’s form of life from it.
    • Agamben discusses several significant distinctions related to the division of human existence, including the distinction between an exception as an ‘inclusive exclusion’ and the example as an ‘exclusive inclusion’.
    • He also discusses the tension between constituting power and constituted power as it exists, paralleling Aristotle’s philosophical distinction between potentiality and actuality.
    • The figure of the homo sacer is outside both human and divine law and approaches a zone prior to the distinction between sacred and profane, religious and juridical.
    • The modern transference of the sacred into all of our bodies has placed our bodies at the center of Western politics, making the ‘capacity to be killed’ the ‘new political body of the West’.
    • Agamben seeks alternative forms of political resistance, referencing Melville’s figure of Bartleby, the Scrivener, whose response becomes a form of resistance.
    • Messianism is developed as a theory of the state of exception, suspending even the sovereign’s emergency powers.

    “State of Exception” translated by Kevin Attell

    • The state of exception is a key political, philosophical, and metaphysical concept, residing in a zone of indistinction between law and lawlessness.
    • Agamben explores this zone, comparing it to civil war, insurrection, and resistance.
    • The state of exception is seen as an attempt to include the exception within the juridical order, creating a zone of indistinction where fact and law coincide.
    • The state of exception is a ‘fictitious lacuna’ that safeguards the existence of the norm.
    • Agamben explores the possibility of including the right to resistance in the constitution, suggesting some form of lawlessness is inscribed within law and order.
    • He examines the nature of revolutionary violence in Schmitt and Benjamin, suggesting that a theory of sovereign indecision could create a messianic force that disrupts the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence.
    • Agamben critiques the Schmittian inheritance, arguing that the state of exception is often associated with sovereign dictatorships.
    • Agamben suggests that the West maintains a tension between the normative/juridical (potestas) and the anomic/metajuridical (auctoritas) where auctoritas can only assert itself in the suspension of potestas, fragilizing law itself.
    • The state of exception is ultimately an empty space where a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.
    • Despite the current tension, Agamben suggests that a pure law, pure language, pure violence, or pure means without ends could illuminate a new use of human praxis and new uses of law.

    Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm translated by Nicholas Heron

    • The book focuses on the theory of civil war, highlighting the state of exception as a threshold between the family and the polis.
    • It explores the tension between the sovereign and the multitude that constitutes the political body, a concept explored in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
    • The ‘people’ is a body always divided against itself, representing a body that cannot be present and must always be represented.
    • Agamben reveals the modern roots of politics are tied to a theological-eschatological tension between the ‘lawless’ one and the ‘one who restrains’.
    • The book suggests that understanding the theological origins of modern political concepts can help humanity rethink political relations.
    • Agamben’s understanding of theological concepts and histories is also highlighted in the book.

    “The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath” translated by Adam Kotsko

    • The book investigates the origins and use of the oath in the West, aiming to illuminate the modern crisis in language and authority.
    • The oath is a rhetorical device that allows language to appear truthful and part of its actualisation.
    • The oath helps deal with a fundamental weakness in language by establishing a bond through the use of language itself.
    • The quest to discover a more archaic stage of human language is not a search for a historical stage but a force working within history.
    • The oath is seen as a sacrament of power made possible through the sacrament of language.
    • The decline in the legitimacy of the oath in the West is labelled the ‘death of God’, which is the death of the name of God.
    • Living without the force of the oath in the modern era changes the usual political associations based upon oaths.
    • Philosophy critiques the primacy of names to critique the oath and implement specific forms of resistance.
    • Language becomes the site where human beings are put at stake, as per Agamben.

    “The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government” translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini

    Theological Foundation of Political Concepts

    • Agamben’s work explores the Trinitarian uses of oikonomia (economy) as a tool to observe the governmental machine.
    • The book reveals a bipolar machine, a split Kingdom and Government, and the tension between glory and oikonomia.

    The Role of Western Christian Liturgies

    • Western Christian liturgies provide unique insights into political operations.
    • The nature of acclamations, doxologies, and the Eucharistic sacrifice link liturgy and oikonomia, revealing the juridical nature of liturgies in Christian celebrations.

    The Shift in Political Theology

    • Early Christian theologians reverted the Pauline ‘economy of the mystery’ into ‘the mystery of the economy’, emphasizing the role of economy over divine mystery.
    • This shift led to a focus on economic ordering over divine being, leading to new religious and political forms.

    The Role of Oikonomia in Western Politics and Theology

    • Oikonomia becomes the central concept of Western politics and theology, joining the paradigm of government and the state of exception.
    • Divine being is not split but divided on the level of oikonomia, not regarding its being.

    The Paradox of Glory

    • Glory is manifest within the circular logic of glorifying God, as God is deserving of glory.
    • Glory takes the place of the inoperativity of power, symbolizing the empty throne.
    • The Sabbath, as the historical marker of inoperativity, is revealed as being’most proper to God’ and marks an understanding of the Kingdom in Christianity.

    Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty translated by Adam Kotsko

    • Explores the link between liturgy and office in the Western theological tradition.
    • The’ministry of the mystery’ merges with the mystery of liturgy as the’mystery of effectiveness’.
    • The office, often referred to as the ‘divine office’, becomes more efficacious than the law and more effective than any ordinary human action.
    • The mystery of effectiveness coincides with the mystery of operativity, equating office with ontology and duty with ethics.
    • Liturgical mystery exists because of ‘an economy of divine being’, oikonomia, an operativity of the divine being.
    • The mystery of praxis and operativity allows Agamben to re-address the nature of substantiality and effectiveness.
    • The office of the human is distinguished from that of the animal, rendering life governable for humans.
    • Agamben aims to think beyond the links between duty, office, effectiveness, and the will, aiming to formulate an ‘ontology beyond operativity and command’.

    “Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive” translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen

    • Agamben’s investigation of the figure of the homo sacer, the Muselmann, in Nazi concentration camps.
    • Discusses the formation of subjectivity through witnessing desubjectification processes.
    • Introduces a modal ontology based on potentiality/actuality and incapacity/capacity for subjectivity.
    • Examines the concept of the remnant, allowing for a reconsideration of significant testimonies of those who suffered in the camps.
    • Analyzes the figure of the Muselmann as a unique case of anthropological insight.
    • Reflects on the limits of language in establishing the human being.
    • Highlights the potential and failure of the human to distinguish itself from the animal world.
    • Discusses how the concentration camps provide insight into the nature of the human being.
    • Discusses the possible testimony of victims to Nazi destruction who could not testify for themselves.

    “The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life” translated by Adam Kotsko

    • Explores the concept of a ‘form-of-life’ in monasticism, a life inseparable from its form, through the relationship between rule and life.
    • The form-of-life is often the ‘third thing’ sought after in the Franciscan movement, but it often fails to be realized.
    • Monasticism attempts to merge life and time through manual labor and prayer, presenting constant meditation as a fundamental duty.
    • The monk’s life becomes an ‘uninterrupted Office’, leading to a total liturgicization of life and vivification of liturgy.
    • The Franciscan order aims to’reclaim a life, not a rule’, identifying with life and living the Gospel.
    • The book centers on Francis of Assisi’s attempts to live a forma vitae as a life that cannot be separated from its form.
    • Francis’ search for a ‘third thing’ between doctrine and law, as well as between rule and dogma, illustrates how normative rules cannot capture the essence of this third thing.
    • The Franciscans tried to develop an ‘ontology of use’, where being and becoming, existence and time seem to coincide, to bring use and time together.
    • Agamben demonstrates how the radicality of the order’s founder avoided rendering faith into a habit or custom, relying on use over possession.

    “The Use of Bodies” translated by Adam Kotsko

    • Agamben’s research on the role of the body in Western thought and the nature of an instrumental logic in relation to our bodily being.
    • The book explores the role of one’s private, autobiographical life in philosophical conversation, providing insights into Agamben’s own history and the personal lives of philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, and Emmanuel Levinas.
    • Agamben critiques the notion of possession and its alternative, the ‘originary ontological relation’ that ‘has the form of a use’.
    • The book emphasizes contemplation as a ‘use-of-oneself’ and the experience of the world as ‘absolutely inappropriable’.
    • The book explores how one might define a form-of-life as hidden within the present and not lived outside of it.
    • Living beyond all inscribed forms of life means living too beyond the identities that have been placed upon humanity, allowing for new forms-of-life lived beyond the law.
    • Agamben promotes a constructivist approach to identity over an essentialist notion of identity.
    • The book highlights new possibilities for the human being and emphasizes use, contemplation, inoperativity, the poverty of being, and potentiality as the fundamental ontological category.

    “The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans” translated by Patricia Dailey

    • Agamben views Paul’s letter to the Romans as the fundamental messianic text of the West.
    • Messianic time is not added to normal time, but is Sabbath time, interrupting secular time.
    • The concept of kairos, present within chronos, is used to divide chronos from within, leading to the division of division.
    • The division of division introduces a ‘zone of undecidability’, presenting the messianic vocation as the revocation of all vocations.
    • Agamben presents Paul as a philosopher of the highest order, linking him to Walter Benjamin’s thought.
    • The messianic becomes a crisis in the separation between law and religion, leaving grace as an excess in relation to law.
    • The form of life lived beyond the law is difficult to achieve within Christianity, leading to a split within faith.
    • There is no doctrine content to faith, but only the messianic suspension of all identities, a task the Church has denied throughout its history.
    • The Time that Remains aligns with larger arguments in the Homo Sacer series, making it an unofficial part of the series.

    “The Open: Man and Animal” translated by Kevin Attell

    • The book explores the suspension of the identity of the subject, a concept not formally part of the Homo Sacer series.
    • It argues that humans struggle to articulate what distinguishes them from other animals.
    • Agamben develops a concept of ‘the open’, a space where the human subject is developed by excluding its own animality.
    • This distinction is fabricated by the presupposition of being that captures and divides it to dominate human existence.
    • The book suggests that by ignoring the animal’s poverty, humans create themselves in the void, creating a’suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man’.
    • The book suggests that letting the anthropological machinery idle allows for new uses for humanity beyond its attempts to define and identify beyond poverty.

  • Levinas (2) – Evasion and the “Il y a”

    “The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)” by Levinas

    • Levinas’s work, On Evasion (1935), marks the beginning of his philosophical training.
    • The text explores fundamental states of mind, such as necessity, shame, and nausea, similar to those of Heidegger in Being and Time.
    • Levinas criticizes the notion of Being, calling for a new approach to ontology.
    • The book introduces the theme of the necessary departure from ontology, or escape from Being.
    • Levinas criticizes the idea of Being as unsatisfactory and calls for a new route to leave it.
    • The being explored in On Evasion experiences physical and affective states such as need, pleasure, shame, and nausea.
    • The being is characterized by a “need for excess” or “excedancer,” which is not due to a fundamental lack but a desire to transcend itself.
    • The self feels desires that can be satisfied and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and inexhaustible.
    • The need to evade takes on a dramatic form as it is the need to escape existence as such, escaping the brutal truth that there is being.
    • The self’s identity contains the need to escape from itself, a movement outwards with no specific destination.
    • The self’s desires that can be satisfied admit of disappointed satisfaction, as it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind.

    Understanding Human Duality and Ontological Claustrophobia

    Understanding Pleasure, Shame, and Nausea

    • Pleasure symbolizes the unfulfilled promise of self-emancipation, often mixed with pain.
    • Shame is the shame of being oneself, revealing the self that uncovers itself.
    • Nausea is the pure being of being oneself, experiencing oneself without reflective knowledge or any idea.

    Ontological Claustrophobia

    • This suffering is not due to a lack of the power of being, but fullness.
    • The power of being drives the desire to leave being, and the need to escape is existence itself.

    The Concept of “There is”

    • Levinas’ main concept is “There is being” (il y a de l’être), which is impersonal existence.
    • Il y a is inextinguishable, beyond any conceivable or defined existence.
    • Being is rooted in a time and a space, found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y.
    • The il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity, as it does not admit any subjectivity.

    The “There is”

    • Levinas’ main concept before his development of the ethical relationship.
    • The il y a is always present, like the ever-deepening abyss upon which beings exist.
    • Levinas adds images of the il y a, such as the silence of a child’s room and the void that can be imagined before creation.

    The Concept of ‘Ilya’ in Philosophy and Art

    Empirical Illustrations of ‘Ilya’

    • Film and music create silence, revealing the presence of absence and existence without existing.
    • The energy released in the initial singularity of the universe is also ‘ilya’.
    • The concept of ‘ilya’ is impenetrable to reason and philosophical inquiry.
    • Levinas offers an empirical example of ‘insomnia’, the absence of sleep but not of consciousness.

    The Perception of ‘Nocturnal Space’

    • The perception of this nocturnal space produces horror due to the insurmountable fatality of being irredeemable.
    • The ‘there’ in its deaf neutrality never disappears, even when the individual subject emerges from it.

    The Emergence of Consciousness from ‘Ilya’

    • The emergence of consciousness from ‘Ilya’ is ‘hypostasis’, where the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral background of the ‘there is’.
    • Consciousness, the subject, and personal identity emerge from the ‘Ilya’, they do not pre-exist it.

    The Attachment of Beings to Being or Existence

    • Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa.
    • There is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity.

    Fatigue and Resistance to Existence

    • Fatigue is the way of appearing of the need to escape, rejection of existence that cannot be rejected.
    • It is the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that presupposes existence.

    The ‘Ilya’ will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflections, but will still exist as it exists in existence anonymously.

    _________________________________

    The Overflowing of the Self (On Evasion)

    On Evasion (1935) marks the beginning of Levinas’s own work. Despite the enormous importance he has had as an introducer of phenomenology in France almost at the same time as it was taking shape in Germany, and that at the age of only twenty-six, his lucid understanding of the new philosophy has mainly meant the last stage in his philosophical training (an enormously elevated training). On Evasion already raises its own issues, and in a personal style. It is undeniable that the shadow of Heidegger still extends over this brief text, as it will also (in a more tenuous way) over the two subsequent books: the exploration of fundamental and revealing states of mind, such as necessity, shame and nausea in On Evasion are of the style of those that the German philosopher makes of anxiety, fear and care in Being and Time. But there is also an uneasiness, a dissatisfaction with the notion of Being. He declares that “the old problem of ontology” must be reformulated in a new way. Read within the context of his philosophy, Of Escape stands out for introducing one of Levinas’ great themes: the necessary departure from ontology, the departure (escape) from Being.

    In this, his first work, Levinas already denounces as unsatisfactory the idea of Being predominant in the philosophical tradition: “It is a question of leaving Being by a new route, even at the risk of destroying certain notions that seem evident to common sense and to the wisdom of nations” (DE 127). This approach is situated “beyond” Husserl’s phenomenological intellectualism — of his transcendental ego — and of the entity seen from the being as it is presented in Being and Time. The being that Levinas explores experiences physical and affective states: need, pleasure, shame, nausea. In On Evasion there is a phenomenological and existential analysis of these states that retains many features of the method of the two masters, but which is already distinguished from them by the determination with which the particular dimension of the human being is emphasized.

    This being is characterized by his “need for excess” (besoin d’excedancer, this term is one of the few Levinasian neologisms). This need consists of not feeling satisfied within one’s own being, in one’s particular sphere, and in the desire to transcend it or to go outside oneself. This need is not due to a fundamental lack, but quite the opposite: the being desires to transcend itself precisely because it is full, because the fundamental aspect of the experience of fullness is to go beyond itself. The self feels desires that can be satisfied — hunger, thirst, learning… — and that affirm it, and a metaphysical desire to transcend itself that is impossible to fulfill and at the same time is inexhaustible. It is a duality specific to the human being that has a dramatic form:

    Existence is an absolute that asserts itself without referring to anything else. It is identity. But in this reference to himself, man distinguishes a type of duality. His identity with himself loses the character of a logical or tautological form; it assumes, as we shall show, a dramatic form. In the identity of the self, the identity of being reveals its nature of entrapment because it appears in the form of suffering and is an invitation to evasion. So evasion is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break the most radical, most irredeemable entrapment, the fact that the self is itself. (DE 98)

    The need to evade takes on a dramatic form because it is the need to escape existence as such, to escape the elementary and (as Levinas defines it) brutal truth that there is being (il y a de l’être). Being is insurmountable because existence is something permanent and basic. In a few pages we will see how this statement is argued in From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other. Now it is important to remember that human beings by their very nature want to get out of themselves. Being is experienced as imprisonment, as being chained, riveted to oneself. To be is already an invitation to get out of being. The very identity of the self contains the need to escape from itself. This need is for a movement outwards with no specific destination, a restlessness that does not seek repose. Desires that can be satisfied — those that concern the self as an identity with itself — in reality only admit of a disappointed satisfaction, because at the same time as the self pleasurably experiences its fulfillment, it also feels the non-fulfillment of the great Desire, that of leaving the self behind. Adopting the Heideggerian distinction between the ontic (that which concerns the entity) and the ontological (that which concerns being), Levinas’ description of the duality of the human being is that it is disappointingly realized in the ontic and painfully frustrated in the ontological. The being desires to escape from itself and cannot.

    The aforementioned analyses of the states of pleasure, shame and nausea are linked to the observation of human duality. Pleasure augurs the emancipation of the self, a promise of evasion that is not fulfilled: that is why it is mixed with pain. (We almost lose ourselves in pure joy when drinking cool water in summer after a long walk, when listening to a favorite piece of music, when suddenly and unexpectedly understanding something that happened ten years ago. Almost but not quite: we do not lose ourselves.) Shame is the shame of being oneself, of not being able to break with oneself, of not being able to hide one’s nakedness from oneself: “What shame uncovers is the self that uncovers itself” (DE 113). In nausea one experiences the pure being of being oneself: one experiences oneself without reflective knowledge, before any idea, in its simplest and most oppressive neutrality. The self feels attached to itself, enclosed in itself, “without any window to anything else” (DE 120).

    All these states reveal what John Llewelyn calls “ontological claustrophobia”. It is of the utmost importance to understand that this suffering is not produced by a lack of the power of being — it is not the frustration of a desire unsatisfied by incapacity — nor by the fact described by Heidegger and Sartre that the being has found itself, at birth, involuntarily thrown into existence. The suffering of ontological claustrophobia is not denial or deprivation, but fullness. It is consubstantial with the fact of being fully being: the power of being drives it to desire to leave being. The need to escape is existence itself.

    For Levinas, to be means primarily and almost exclusively to be human. All the states and the existence of the human being are described in their concreteness. The problem of being, the need to escape, is revealed to the human being in his or her daily life, in the fact of being placed as substance in existence, in his or her embodied present. It is this very model of the human being that will be the object of reflection in later books.

    Il y a (“there is”) (From Existence to the Existing)

    Existence is permanent and basic, irrepressible, which is why the Desire of the self to escape from itself is frustrated. “There is being” (il y a de l’être), has been declared as an elementary truth in On Evasion. This is the main concept of From Existence to the Existing: il y a, or “there is”. Il y a is impersonal existence — il y a as in il pleut (“it’s raining”), il fait nuit (“it’s dark”) or il fait chaud (“it’s hot”) — anonymous, general, indeterminate, neutral, in itself: it is “existing without existing”, prior to the constitution of the individuated human subject. Any further definition is necessarily paradoxical: it is presence within absence, the sound that is heard when everything is silent, Being without beings, the fullness of emptiness. The il y a is inextinguishable, it is beyond any conceivable or defined (particular) existence. Being is rooted in a time and a space; the il y a is found in the delocalized ubiquity of its y. It is existence without a world. Since it does not admit any subjectivity, the il y a lacks the principle implied in subjectivity.

    The “there is” (Il y a)

    The il y a is Levinas’ main concept before he develops his reflection on the ethical relationship Although it is hardly ever explicitly mentioned in works subsequent to On Evasion, From Existence to the Existing and Time and the Other, this enigmatic presence is always there, like the ever-deepening abyss or background upon which beings exist. To the initial equation of the il y a with insomnia — in which there is no proper consciousness, no subject, no representations, only “there is” — Levinas will add two more images in an interview (included in Ethics and Infinity): “My reflection on this subject starts from childhood memories. You sleep alone, the grown-ups go on with their lives; the child experiences the silence of his room as a ‘buzzing’. […] Something similar to what you hear when you put an empty shell to your ear, as if the void were full, as if silence were noise. Something that can also be experienced when you think that even if there were nothing, you cannot deny the fact that “there is”. Not that there is this or that, but that the very scene of being is open: there is. In the absolute void that can be imagined before creation, there is».

    Three more empirical illustrations can be added. Film buffs are familiar with the empty shots that the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu inserts between scenes: the characters leave the field of the camera and the camera remains motionless. For a moment, what the viewer sees is the pure presence of absence, existence without existing, il y a. Music, by creating silence — silence in music and in everything else does not happen from the outset, but is produced — also reveals this fundamental il y a. Astrophysicists explain to us that the snow that can be seen on the screen of analog televisions when no channel is tuned in is, in part, the energy released in the inconceivable initial instant of the big bang that gave rise to the universe. This energy, already contained in the initial singularity, has remained timelessly in the universe: it is also il y a.

    It can therefore be related to eternity: to the timeless eternity of the unnameable being.

    The notion of il y a, prior to any thinkable object, is impenetrable to reason, to the philosophical inquiry subsequent to this initial description. It is what in philosophy is called incomparable. It is more acceptable to intuition. That is why Levinas offers an empirical illustration of it: insomnia, which is the absence of sleep but not of consciousness. In the small hours of the morning, insomnia blurs everything, there is neither wakefulness nor sleep, consciousness is not there but neither does it cease to be. There is a presence without a beginning. The self is not there in insomnia as I am not there. Something similar happens in the twilight state, that no man’s land, a state without content. There is a presence, but a neutral, anonymous presence. In both states there is existence or presence without a subject.

    The perception of this nocturnal space, which is not empty but full of the nothingness of everything, produces horror, because “the fatality of being irredeemable” is insurmountable: it cannot be circumvented by death, by sleep or by dreaming. Levinas quotes several Shakespearean passages to express (not explain) this horror: Hamlet’s soliloquy on to be or not to be (“but in that sleep of death, what dreams may come we shall remember”), Macbeth’s anguish in the face of Banquo’s ghost (“Macbeth hath killed sleep”)[10]. The “there” in its deaf neutrality never disappears. Even when the individual subject emerges from it to pass into existence, they take it with them, they do not detach themselves from it.

    The emergence of consciousness from the il y a is hypostasis. This term — which Levinas takes from the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus — should be understood as production and realization, in which the subject acquires a separate existence from the neutral and anonymous background of the “there is”. Consciousness, the subject and personal identity emerge from the il y a, they do not pre-exist it. The sense of movement is clearly expressed in the title: from existence (il y a) to the existent (being, human being).

    Beings or existents are attached to being or existence, and vice versa. They are like light emerging from darkness but retaining this darkness within itself. However, there is an emergence, a hypostasis, whereby being is individuated and acquires a separate identity. Levinas examines this process based on three conditions that make it possible. If in On Evasion he has analyzed existential states such as pleasure, shame and nausea in their relationship with the need to leave the self, in On Existence to the Existing he examines laziness, fatigue and effort as states that accompany hypostasis. These analyses are phenomenological and are on the metaphysical, essential level; they do not refer to an effort or to an empirical or sporting tiredness. They are situated in the ontic perspective, which concerns the entity, being or existing as such.

    Fatigue is the way of appearing of what Levinas has called the need to escape: rejection of existence that cannot be rejected, because il y a de l’être (“there is being”). It is the reluctance of being at the moment of hypostasis, of its emergence and presentation. It would be the propensity to sleep due to the effect of the weight of being. Fatigue is also the ego’s resistance to existing, a resistance that, as such, already presupposes existence. Like tiredness, it occurs at the moment of hypostasis. Its effect is to delay: it delays the emergence of being into existence. Like tiredness, it is a concrete way in which reflexivity assumes particular and personal existence.

    The il y a will almost completely disappear as an explicit principle in Levinas’ later reflection, but it will not lose its basic presence as the background of being. In later books it will exist as it exists in existence: anonymously. If in this il y a de l’être, in Levinas’ books il y a de l’il y a, “there is there is”.