“The Inverted Part of the Soul Is Not Closed from Within”: Ethical Grammar of Proximity in Emmanuel Levinas’s Thought

Abstract

This article proposes that Levinas’s philosophy of language constitutes a response to the collapse of linguistic structures in the wake of the Holocaust. Instead of attempting to repair or restore a pre-rupture metaphysics, Levinas establishes a new ethical grammar of openness rather than totality. Through a novel interpretive reading of Levinas grounded in Wittgensteinian philosophy, particularly the critique of private language (a connection Levinas does not explicitly articulate), this article argues that the rejection of private language functions as the structural foundation for the recovery of the language of proximity. The article examines three focal points where this ethical grammar is revealed: suffering, memory, and the proper name. Regarding suffering, the cry establishes an appeal constitutive of ethical responsibility; regarding memory, the transition from representational to immemorial grounds meaning in heteronomous command rather than community; regarding names, both God’s and the human names become traces of irreplaceable singularity. The discussion culminates in fecundity as a grammatical solution to linguistic collapse, a structure in which asymmetry becomes the fundamental relation between human being and Other, realized through interpretation and the Oral Torah. Levinas thus demonstrates that responsibility to the Other remains not an external addition to language, but its logical and grammatical foundation.