Lecture by Elliot R. Wolfson

Phenomenology of the Nonphenomenalizable:
Metaphor and the Ethics of the Invisible in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas

Abstract

I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the phenomenological fascination with the nonphenomenalizable can be pinpointed as the essential thought that informed Levinas’s critique of ontological realism—the narcissistic reduction of the other to the same—throughout his life, the philosophical venture toward transcendence that is referred to early on as the "matter of getting out of being by a new path."
Although Levinas does not give ample credit to Heidegger, his pushing phenomenology to the limits of the phenomenological, establishing the criteria, as it were, for a postphenomenological phenomenology that stands upon but overturns the Husserlian notion of phenomenology as the eidetic science that interrogates the intentional structures of the apparent, is indebted to, or at the very least demonstrates a strong affinity with a crucial dimension of Heidegger’s attempt to think the idea of phenomenology through to its end.
In this essay, I will reexamine the implications of this turn in phenomenology—the appearance of nonappearance—as it relates to Levinas’s notion of the ethics of the invisible face. The prism through which I will analyze this topic is the role of metaphor and invisibility as the nonphenomenal condition of all phenomenality in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas.

Elliot R. Wolfson, a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.
His main area of scholarly research is the history of Jewish mysticism, but he has brought to bear on that field training in philosophy, literary criticism, feminist theory, postmodern hermeneutics, and the phenomenology of religion.

He is the author of many essays and books including Though a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (1994); Language, Eros, and Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (2005); Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (2006); Venturing Beyond—Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (2006); Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (2009); and A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (2011).