The Ethical Role of Aesthetic Experience in Levinas - By James Vanderzaag

While I was working on my MA, my cousin and frequent musical collaborator James Vanderzaag was finishing up his Masters of Philosophy. His work had significant overlap with mine, and I resonated deeply with his thesis. James’ idea that non-representational art can act as a portal to the other, and act on authentic understanding of the self in much the same way as an interaction with another human can, clicked for me. It fleshed out a notion that I had about art and music: that it was ethical, meaningful practice and product. I am honoured that James quotes me in his writing while making a case against the gratuity of art:

“Blanchot thus also responds to Levinas’ accusation of the gratuity of art. For Blanchot, to live an event as an image is not the same thing as seeing the image of an event, which would “attribute to the event the gratuitous character of the imaginary” (SL 262). But to live as an image is to have the situation command us, “[t]hat is, it releases us, from it and from ourselves. It keeps us outside; it makes of the outside a presence where ‘I’ does not recognize ‘itself’” (SL 262).

Recall that the image is constituted by its refusal or inability to refer, to lead thought to a referent. If one were to live life as a symbol or sign, their life itself would refer to themselves, to their projects. When living life as an image one finds oneself living in a way that doesn’t refer to themselves. Their actions are opaque in that they don’t refer to the goals of the ego. Nor do they situate what they encounter horizontally, or with reference to their life goals. In this life, what is related to is left opaque and encountered as a possible depth, which is to preserve its potential to get its meaning from what doesn’t appear for me. The risk one takes in the image not only loosens one from the world, but also decenters the ego, and opens up subjectivity to be oriented and responsive to an other. It is the ultimate risk because it dethrones me as I know myself.

I would like to illustrate the ethical significance of an exilic life through some thoughts shared by two different artists. The first is Nathan Stretch from the Kitchener based indie band Bass Lions giving an account of what happens to subjectivity when engaged in music.

Well if we live and make music how I’d like to, ‘in between’, then the only constant to our music-making is constant self-subversion. We are constantly burrowing up under our own feet right when we thought we were standing on solid ground. It’s nice to know we’re not on a linear track from start to finish, but rather on a circular and expanding journey. Maybe if we keep expanding, we’ll touch both the beginning and the end with our extremities at the same time (Audio Blood, Feb 3, 2008).

It seems to me that Stretch expresses his musical relationship as one that constantly undermines any foundation and the linear or goal oriented functions of human reason. It sounds like a journey that he can’t control or predict, and one that results in a loss of self through the expansion of the subject; one that stays within finite existence but is nonetheless a rupture of his world totality. Later, I will describe this experience as a sort of finite transcendence.”

James has generously agreed to let me link to his thesis here (see below)

Abstract:

Emmanuel Levinas concedes an ethical role for art to play in its secondary, discursive and conceptual form but denies that the primary, immersive and essential experience of art has any ethical significance whatsoever. This thesis seeks to find an ethical sense in the first hand experience of the work of art, an ethical sense that would satisfy Levinas’ own ethical thinking. I begin by formulating what would count as an ethical resource in Levinas’ own terms, and then reconstruct Levinas’ aesthetic account to locate its disengagement. Then I use Maurice Blanchot’s account of aesthetic experience, which is also a phenomenology of the work, to respond to Levinas. Blanchot describes a moment in aesthetic experience, what he calls the original experience, that is a genuine encounter with alterity, that calls me into question and displaces the ego from its sovereignty within subjectivity. This moment must be accepted as part of Levinas’ aesthetic account because it describes a prior condition to the aesthetic experience that Levinas describes. The original experience then provides a way of seeing an ethical role in the experience of the work of art, that of pushing back my tendency for totalization and opening me up to an encounter with alterity.

Link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_RFfCf8kwvNnimuTS1W_TuEH2KjzNEF/view?usp=sharing