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24
Dylan Trigg
The Horror of Darkness
Toward an Unhuman Phenomenology
Night takes me always to that place of horror. I have tried
not moving, with the coming of nightfall, but I must walk
in my slumber, for always I awaken with the thing of dread
howling before me in the pale moonlight, and I turn and
flee madly. H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing in the Moonlight
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Speculations IV
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Speculations IV
Anonymous Materiality
In the early Levinas, we find a metaphysics that
provides a keyor perhaps a symptomfor how
phenomenology can think beyond the hold of human experience. Far from the image of Levinas as
a philosopher of the face, these early works reveal
another side to his philosophy that is characterised less by the face-to-face encounter and more
by the facelessness of appearances. In these early
works, his project is to describe the origins of the
subjectan existentas it appears against the impersonal horizon of existence. Indeed, the whole
task of his first book, Existence and Existents, is to
attempt a phenomenology of the instant when
the subject appears.
At first glance, it looks as though he is following
a traditionally phenomenological line of thought,
stating that A being has already made a contract
with Being; it cannot be isolated from it.12 He thus
seems to lock us into a kind of phenomenological
prison, in which the inseparability of being and
world is reinforced. Indeed, the inseparability of
existence and existent is preserved in Levinas. Yet
it is precisely for this reason that the rupture of the
two terms is possible.
For what Levinas wants to argue in his early
metaphysics is that the adherence of beings in
Being is not given in an instant[but]rather
accomplished by the very stance of an instant.13 It is
with this elevation of the fractured, indeterminate
emergence of the instant that Levinass philosophy
will itself emerge.
The reason for this ontological elevation of the
instant is primarily because the idea of an instant
engenders itself to an account of becoming that
permits alterity. That the relation of being in Beings
is not given in an instant[but]rather accomplished by the very stance of an instant means that
Levinass ontology is fundamentally concerned with
the otherness of duration. An instant, for him, is an
event, a becoming with its own emergence, which
carries with it the arc of an origin, as Levinas puts it:
Beginning, origin, and birth present a dialectic in
which this event in the heart of an instant becomes
visible.14 Put another way: if something comes into
existencebe it a maggot, a crab, or a dragonfly
then it does so from the backdrop of a generalised
and pre-existing plane of Being. Things are born
into something, Levinas remarks: New life figures
12
Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso
Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 1.
13
Ibid., 2.
14
Ibid.
16
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