Levinas, Decreative Hermeneutics, and Holocaust Testimony

With a view to facilitating the application of Levinas’s phenomenology to the problem of interpreting the testimony of affliction, this chapter proposes a reinterpretation of Levinas’s phenomenological reduction that places his phenomenology in greater relief by making more explicit the transcendence, over conscious action, of the phenomenological sense of ethics he calls the ethical relation. Based on Simone Weil’s notions of decreation, attention, and non-willed action, the reinterpreted decreative reduction produces “traces” of Levinas’s ethical relation in the experience of one’s unpremeditated response to the Other, specifically in the form of actions whose abrupt spontaneity, a radical disruption in one’s going-on-in-the-same-way, defy description as intentional acts. Awareness of an outcome so dissimilar to the experience of a conscious motivated response can then bring to mind the ethical relation, one’s sensibility to the Other’s response-eliciting alterity, especially when the Other or their experience is far from being “familiar.” I show how the decreative reduction can be used as a hermeneutics and apply this decreative hermeneutics to the problem of interpreting the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan.