The Violence of Being. The Holocaust in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

Būties prievarta. Holokaustas E. Levino filosofijoje

Didier Pollefeyt didier.pollefeyt@kuleuven.be

Vilnius University, Lituania

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.

Generally, the (ethical) concept of God in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is immediately deduced from the idea of ‘the face of the other.’ God comes to my mind there, where the other addresses me in all his or her fragility as an ethical appeal to be respected in his or her irreducible alterity. Nonetheless, this concept of God does not fall from heaven within the philosophy of Levinas, but it gradually takes shape within the dynamics of his thinking.

In this contribution, we want to look for the existential presuppositions (in French: les expériences préphilosophiques) that started the movement of thought of Levinas. After all, philosophy does not happen in a vacuum but in and from dialogue with life. When we search for the vivid, pre-philosophical presuppositions of Levinas’ thinking, we naturally arrive at the traumatic experience that he, personally, and as a member of the Jewish people, was a part of: the Holocaust in the middle of the twentieth century and the untold horror that word evokes (Plant 2019: 3).

In this article, we would like to highlight the il y a-tic dimension of the Holocaust. The il y a is the Levinasian category of being that seems to us grafted onto the experience of the Holocaust. The main goal of this contribution is to make clear how all the later work of Levinas cannot be understood without this primordial category in his thinking: the il y a. It can make understandable how Levinas’ philosophy is a thinking that attempts to find a liberating way out of the fundamental ‘fascism’ of being and that understands God as ‘Otherwise-then-Being’ (Levinas 1974) who breaks open the anonymity of the il y a through the victims of the Holocaust (Hatley 2000); and broader, through every ‘useless suffering’ (Levinas 1988).

Emmanuel Levinas was born in 1906 in Lithuania¹. He grew up in a religious, Zionist-minded, middle-class family. His education is situated within the tradition of urban Judaism which, unlike Hasidism (a more rural form of Judaism), does not address God directly but meets God through the serious devotion to the Torah and Talmud. That is why he learned to read the Torah in Hebrew as early as six years of age. Both ghettos and pogroms were unknown to him.

When he was eight years old, World War I began. His family left Lithuania to emigrate to Kharkov in Ukraine. Here, as a child, he experienced the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1920, fearful of communism, his family left Kharkov to resettle in Lithuania that had become independent in 1918. This closed an era in his life that will always carry a Messianic halo for him.

In 1923, he went to study in France. In Strasbourg, Levinas started philosophical studies, which he completed with a doctoral thesis on Husserl in 1930. He obtained the French nationality, married, and completed his military service in 1932. Subsequently, he joined the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Paris which advocated for the emancipation of Jews in those countries where they did not yet enjoy civil rights. In this way, he constantly came into contact with the social and political problems that Jews were already facing before the war. In this vein, he wrote one of his first articles, De l’évasion, in 1935, in which he described the state of the time. The incessant despair, fatigue, and inescapable fate that emerged from the Germany of Leibniz and Kant, and Goethe and Hegel, are central. The threat of a world catastrophe is clearly perceptible in this work (Poirie 1987: 130).

In 1939, when Nazism started a world war, Levinas was mobilized as a soldier in the French army. During the war, Levinas served his country as an interpreter of Russian and German (Eaglestone 2019: 2-3). Upon the withdrawal of the 10th army, he was captured near Rennes (1940). After several months of internment in France, he was transported to Hanover, Germany. Here he was assigned to a special command with other Jews. Separated from the other French soldiers, he was ordered to work in a forest under the supervision of the Wehrmacht (the armed forces of Nazi Germany)². Although racial discrimination existed in the camp, he enjoyed special conditions arising from the provisions of the Geneva Convention that protect prisoners of war. During his imprisonment he read a lot, including works from Hegel, Proust, Rousseau, and Diderot.

In the camp, he came into contact with Christian charity in the figure of the camp chaplain, father Pierre³. Whilst in captivity, Levinas began writing his first work, De l’existence à l’existant. He finished it after liberation. Meanwhile, the fate of European Jews was unfolding, but news of the extermination seeps into Hanover slowly: a family member disappears, a family no longer answers. Levinas’ wife and daughter will finally survive the war thanks to a monastery in France, near Orléans (Poirie 1987: 130). His mother-in-law was deported and never came back from the camps, while his father and brothers were killed in Lithuania by the SS.

In the midst of the war, Levinas worked on one of his first texts, De l’existence à l’existant, which he completed shortly after the war. In this work, he developed a basic category that will form a key to understanding his thinking on the Holocaust: the il y a. The il y a, or being without being, is the original situation of doom that threatens to overwhelm every concrete being with its anonymous, absorbing presence (Levinas 1986: 17). It is precisely this threatening, formless being without being that awakens in an individual a liberation dynamic, an unstoppable desire for a way out of this fundamental calamity.

The il y a is the presence of a presence (Levinas 1986: 18-21). There is not this and there is not that, but there is also not nothing (Levinas & Nemo 1982: 45-51). It is about pure and brutal being with its inhuman neutrality. This il y a can never be experienced directly because there is not a subject opposed to an object, there is only the diffuse, all-encompassing, and overwhelming anonymous being. Only through a mental extrapolation can we provide oneself an existential access route to this boundary concept.

The experience of war now is – precisely because it is the concrete Sitz im Leben (in English: place in origin) of this notion – an appropriate avenue of access for understanding the il y a. During World War II, Levinas himself experienced the threat of the regression to being without question⁴. In the words of Levinas:

In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is produced as the pure experience of pure being. (Levinas 1979a: 21)

The Jewish people, under Hitlerism, were exposed to this il y a in the most pronounced way. This happens already before and along the establishment of the extermination camps. Jews were taken out of their houses, randomly executed on the streets. This is illustrated by many black and white pictures from this period in the history of the Third Reich. They show Jewish man, woman and even children killed in public areas, still with their daily clothes on, chaotically left behind on the pavers, with local citizens looking with aversion, curiosity and even glee. The ghettos created a new world on the way to the il y a: a world disconnected from the outer world, with no resources, no possibility to escape, a world where Jews were delivered to pure survival, in which Jewish live had no value anymore. In the ghettos, there is no relief, no future, but where you still had to exist. The activities of the Einsatzgruppen were perhaps the most horrific pre-camp expression of this delivery of the Jewish people to the il y a or ‘being-without-being’. Being taking out of the warmth of their houses, their beds, the care of their children, the love of their parents, sick and healthy, old and young, flew together like cattle, quickly and nervous, brought together in the anonymity of fields and forests, executed on the spot. This is the horror of the il y a, of not being someone any­more. Digging your own grave: it is like opening the il y a for yourself. Executed bodies, all put together, still warm, some even not death, buried in one tomb, dead or alive. This is an illustration of the il y a, existence where you can no longer be a human person, where the ethical encounter is suffocated, human beings underway to non-being, merciless, without hope for redemption, submitted to the violence of being. However, the most explicit place where the il y a overwhelmed the Jewish people and other victims were the extermination camps. Here, almost literary, everything was dissolved into nothingness. Striking are the (frequent) testimonies of the transport of the Jews to the camps. They include a very existential description of what Levinas means by the il y a. In freight cars, people were packed together by sixty to seventy at one time. For days they were shaken aimlessly, the destination unknown to them. They were plunged into utter darkness where no one recognized anyone yet. With no lights, no plumbing. Only the sweltering heat of being with and through each other, without ventilation or food. Children crying because their mother is becoming hysterical, young people copulating with each other, not bothering anyone anymore, elderly people dying without anyone looking after them. There is only the dark chaos where one is no longer a person but still does not (yet) cease to exist⁵.

Arriving at the camp, individuals are stripped of all that makes them persons, and they lapse into a state even lower than that of things (Patterson 2018: 127). Here began a life of total “de-subjectification”⁶, and total decay into gray uniformity: shaved, bare, disinfected, reduced to numbers without a name. This is the very meaning of the il y a: everything is dissolved and loses its personal contours (Morrison 2013: 38-39). In this sense we can rightly speak of the il y a-tic dimension of the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, a mode of ‘(not) being human’ never before seen in history emerges. In the chaos of the Shoah, Hitlerism creates the Muselmänner. In the analysis of Agamben, the Muselman is “not only or not so much a limit between life and death; rather, he marks the threshold between the human and the inhuman” (Agamben 2002: 55). The historian Poliakov describes how victims reached this stage after two months in the camps:

When they were still walking, they did it like automatons, once stopped they were no longer capable of any other movement. They fell to the ground, exhausted, everything was equal to them. Their bodies were blocking the way, they could be walked on, they did not move their arms or legs an inch; no protest, no cry of pain came out of their half-open mouths. And yet, they were still alive. The Kapos, the SS could even beat them, push them, they did not move, they had become insensitive to everything. They were beings without thought, without reaction, one could say without soul. (Poliakov 1985: 249, translation – D. P.)⁷

In summary, the Muselmänner is an individual on the way back from the il y a. All alike, being, but without thought, without reaction, without soul, inescapably at the mercy of dreary anonymity and brutality. Victims became ‘living dead’, walking corpses whose only mission was to die on command (Patterson 2018: 53-57).

What is the ‘ultimate’ sense of belonging to human species? And does such a sense exist? For many, the Muselman seems to constitute nothing other than an answer to this question. (Agamben 2002: 55)

In the words of Poliakov:

Impossible to get their names out of their mouths, let alone their dates of birth. Even gentleness was not powerful enough to make them talk. They only looked at you with expressionless eyes. (...) You could only smell a poisonous breath as if it was coming out of already decaying entrails. (Poliakov 1985: 255, translation – D. P.)⁸

Elie Wiesel recounts his Holocaust experience in a book with the telling title, Night (Wiesel 2006: 86, 106-113). Indeed, the Holocaust is the experience of darkness par excellence. Light means orientation. In the night, however, everything dissolves into nothingness. In the night, everything is equalized, everything sinks into namelessness. There is only the brutal, inescapable experience of ‘being there’. Who has experienced that being more than a mother with her baby standing naked in the snow waiting to be shot?

Thus, the il y a is the oppressive fullness of being that swallows up an individual and makes him or her nothing, leaving them to total abandonment (Morrison 2013: 38-39). All distinctions fall away between men and women, adults and children, scholars and illiterates, families and households, and between life and death. Everything is placed under one umbrella. One is already dead when one enters the camp:

“Over there. Do you see the chimney over there? Do you see it? And the flames, do you see them?” (Yes, we saw the flames.) “Over there, that’s where they will take you. Over there will be your grave. You still don’t understand? You sons of bitches. Don’t you understand anything? You will be burned! Burned to a cinder! Turned into ashes!” (Wiesel 2006: 30-31)

There is no more death, because there is no life (Morrison 2013: 38-39). To be Muselmänner is ‘to simmer’ in the il y a (Agamben 2002: 57). To be consumed by the absolute desolation of being is always the numbing same, without workdays nor holidays, without yesterday or tomorrow. There is only the desperate, scrambling now from which there is no escape. Even the most basic act of dying loses its personal character: there is no life and there is no death (Agamben 2002: 239; Plant 2014: 44-79). It is the total loss of power over one’s own autonomy. It is the total surrender to the nothingness of being, without being able to defend oneself anymore.

Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.

They crowd my memory with their faceless presence, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one Image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of thought is to be seen. (Levi 1982, cited in Agamben 2002: 44)

Likewise, the very act of suicide loses its significance as the ultimate act of freedom. When man is absorbed by being, he can no longer take his own life. After all, suicide presupposes a meaningful subject. It is as if Hitlerism understood this when it had signs installed in the camps with the following message: “Jews who wish to hang themselves are requested to put a name card in their mouth to facilitate identification.” In such a way, Nazism delivered man to a fatal immortality.

Martyrdom also became virtually impossible in Auschwitz. According to Poliakov, very human act lost its meaning:

This value of example, this crystallizing virtue that it possesses in human communities, was reduced to nothing in the camps. A Gandhi would have become the object of general ridicule. It is the generalized passivity of the prisoners that is most striking. (...) This obedience reached a real automation. (Poliakov 1985: 252-253) ⁹

This is Endlösung (in English: Final Solution) in the strictest sense of the word: everything loses its identity and is dissolved into the nothingness of being (Patterson 2018: 45). It is Holocaust in the etymological sense of the word: total annihilation by the (all-consuming) fire. Nazism is also called an anarchist totalitarianism. Auschwitz is an anarchic system: that is, when one enters, no one or nothing is the beginning (arche) or end, everything floats around, drowning in total disorientation. Totalitarian means an individual loses all that is personal to him or her in order to be submitted to the totality of being without name.

For Levinas, then, the Holocaust is unique in the strictest sense of the word:

Among the millions of human beings who encountered misery and death, the Jews alone experienced a total dereliction. They experienced a condition inferior to that of things, an experience of total passivity, an experience of Passion. (Levinas 1990: 11-12)

To differentiate between different forms of human suffering is certainly not allowed. But Claudel cannot look away from a suffering that is experienced as the abandonment of everything and everyone, a suffering at the limit of all suffering, a suffering that suffers all sufferings. That is no doubt what he is referring to when, without being flippant or guilty of trotting out a tired cliché, he uses the term ‘holocaust’. (Levinas 1990: 129-130)

Levinas attacks, in rather sharp terms, the young socialist who, in the fervor of his trade union activities, dares to compare the situation in the Renault factories with the situation in Auschwitz (Levinas 1976: 286-287).

The consequence of this total de-subjectification is for Levinas ‘horror’ (in French: horreur) (Morrison 2013: 38-39). Being weighs on you like fatal despair. As a human being, you disappear as an exponent of an anonymous event where you can no longer be human (Katz 2013). Nazism is a diabolical power that engulfs everything. In 1934, Levinas wrote an article titled, La philosophie de l’hitlerisme (Levinas 1934: 199-208). One will not find it in his own bibliography because Levinas later distanced himself from (the title of) this article. After all, how can one call Nazism a system, or a philosophy? On the contrary, the diabolical reverses every system into its opposite. Therefore, for Levinas, Hitlerism is the anti-system, the anti-state par excellence, an Unwelt (a non-world), an Ungrund (McLachlan 2016) where all things and people are perverted into being without more¹⁰.

Being, for Levinas, is fundamental mischief. It is the unruly, hostile, faceless matter (Sealey 2013). In the Holocaust, we also see this ever-present, inescapable being reflected in the materiality of the dead. Who is not familiar with the heavenly images of heaps of corpses: women, children, and the elderly, a shapeless accumulation of arms, legs, and heads? Throughout the crime of Auschwitz, the il y a returned irreversibly in this shapeless but material specter.

With this approach to being, Levinas’ philosophy clearly stands in reaction against Heidegger’s thinking (Moyn 1998; Fagenblat 2019). For Heidegger, ‘light’ is being. However, Levinas fought against the depersonalizing forces of nature during his punishment camp in the forest. He did not become a nature lover, but a city person. Nature, after all, is also formless wriggling and rock-hard struggle for life. Insofar as there is a (philosophical) affinity between Heidegger and Nazism, it must be sought in his anti-Levinasian conception of being. If being as primordial ground gives itself as a grace in nature, then we are not far from condoning the way in which being ‘gives itself’ in the historical form of fascist blood and soil theory (Levinas 1989: 123-124). For Levinas himself, however, Heidegger remains one of the greatest philosophers in history, and his relation to National Socialism is a catastrophe that does not explain his philosophy. Far more painful than his philosophy, for Levinas, is the fact that in his spiritual testament, Heidegger does not say a word about the Holocaust.¹¹

The starting point of Levinas’ thinking is thus not ‘God’ or ‘the face’, but the experience of the radical negation of the face in which God speaks. War is the most eminent expression and experience of the il y a. The il y a is the most primordial category in Levinas’ philosophy. It will come back in his later thinking. In Totality and Infinity it is present as the shadow side of the ‘elemental’ (Levinas 1968: 149-151), and in his Talmudic readings (Levinas 1994), the il y a explains Levinas’ dislike of all sacred deities. In the enthusiasm of religious ecstasy, the subject is destroyed, and they find themselves in the grip of the divine, a (non-biblical) anonymous power (‘the Sacred’) and not ‘opposite’ (‘the Saint’). In relation to this il y a-tic divineness, Levinas’ position is nothing more than atheism.

The question then in Levinas’s philosophy becomes: how does one escape the il y a that continuously threatens human existence. Even before World War II, in 1935, Levinas had raised the question of De l’évasion: how to escape the imminent premonition of les angoisses de la guerre qui approchait (in English: the anguishes of the approaching war) (Poirie 1987: 82). However, with the de facto apocalyptic revolution of nihilism in the following years (1939-1945), the question becomes even more stringent. For Levinas, the answer will only be found in the opposite of the il y a, not in destructive ‘sameness’ but in ‘otherness’; in the experience of the Other who appears in the il y a in its absolute vulnerability and as a place where God as the Total Other “comes to mind” (Levinas 1998). Saving the Other from the destructive powers of the il y a will become the first commandment, that we should even love more than Godself (Levinas 1979b). Even the concept of the Messiah will be redefined later by Levinas in the light of the il y a. The Messiah is not so much a figure that will for sure save all people: ‘I’ become the Messiah for the Other when he or she risks to be overwhelmed and destroyed by the il y a-tic powers of reality (Bergo 2009).

This research is part of the project “Modernity and Holocaust in Lithuania: philosophical analysis of moral dilemmas” (Vilnius University). This project has received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No S-MOD-21-8.