The Status of Saying: Witness against Rhetoric in Levinas's Philosophy.

In regard to rhetoric, Emmanuel Levinas stands against its violence. In spite of the rhetoric, he justifies the notion of discourse in Totality and Infinity in order to prove the possibility of the ethical relationship between the Same and the Other. In later works, he also criticizes the ontological language, which is used in the tradition of occidental philosophy. He explores a third way and proposes the notion of Saying, opposed to Said, as ethical language, witness in Otherwise than Being. However, there is a paradoxical structure of language. Although the Saying precedes the Said, the system of language and even the ontological language, it has to be reduced to this latter when it is expressed as philosophical form. The present study situates what is at stake in the criticism of rhetoric and ontological language by Levinas and examines the notion of witness as opposed to these forms of language. Witness is a concrete form of ethical language that consists in "for the other" of the ultimate passivity of the subjectivity. Therefore, the Saying is possible only as witness where the subject is exposed to "a calling into question" by the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]