In June 1975, John Cage was a guest composer at Morton Feldman's first “June in Buffalo” seminar. At regular meetings during the week he had the attending young composers talk about and play their music, and he would comment. Since there were too many composers for the allotted time, Cage assigned everyone a number and used the I Ching to choose which composers should speak. One young woman was incensed by the arbitrariness of this method, and every day became more vocal opposing it. The other young composers, myself included (for I was there), regarded Cage's slightest whim as divine mandate and considered the young woman a pain in the neck. Opinions that she should shut up abounded between sessions. Finally, at one of the sessions Cage entered and began by saying, “I've been thinking it over, and I've decided that Mary's right. We'll drop the chance operations, and whoever wants may talk about their work.”

Of all the lessons I learned from Cage, that was the biggest, the most startling, and the most profound: the Confucian principle that ideas exist for the sake of people, not the other way around. Mary probably was right, but our unquestioned assumption of Cage's greatness threw any disagreement from so obscure a source into relief as a falsehood not worthy of examination. Cage was more open-minded than any of us. Nor was the lesson primarily, or at least exclusively, an ethical one.

Postmodernism is best understood as an ensemble of discourses that is not only internally diverse but also contradictory in its relationship to modernism. For postmodernism is both a rejection of modernism, because it jettisons the modernist fascination with system and form, and a transformation, in the sense that it reveals aspects of modernism that were previously undervalued. Given that the range of influences which contributed to the career of John Cage is as tangled as the diverse currents that feed postmodernism, it is not difficult to find parallels between Cage's aesthetics and the postmodernist ethos. Add to this Cage's apparent appetite for unresolved paradoxes, and it is tempting to argue that this is the sense in which Cage is most consistently postmodernist. However, not all Cage's contradictions are postmodernist contradictions. Indeed the difficulties presented by trying to decide whether Cage is modernist or postmodernist, demonstrate just how hard it is to draw a rigid line between the two mindsets.

Before considering further the affinities between Cage and postmodernism, it is necessary to map some of the salient features of postmodernism, while noting that Cage's activities are not only described by this category but also contribute to its formation. The postmodern response to the rationalizing processes of modernity falls into two main strands. One offers an intensification of modernity, drawing on the energy of post-industrial new technologies and comfortably inhabiting the increasingly manufactured worlds we have created. The other strand counters the incursions of technocratic systems on nature and communities and is characterized by, for example, the ecology movement and new-age beliefs. Of course, there are many shades and variations of opinion between these hyper-modern and anti-modern extremes.

John Cage's first substantive essay was written in 1928 and delivered in Los Angeles as a prize-winning speech at the Southern California Oratorical Contest. Entitled “Other People Think,” it addressed “American Intervention in Latin America” – in particular, the control of Bolivia's finances by a cartel of American bankers and the Marine Corps’ military intervention in Nicaragua. It was hortative and predictive: “We must learn that the day is coming when no one will need our aid … our posterity must not be slandered as the devotee of a Golden God” (Kostelanetz 1971, pp. 48–49). Cage liked it.

Cage was revising his final essay, “Overpopulation and Art,” at the time of his death, having delivered it at Stanford in January 1992. It too is hortative; indeed, it is remarkably directive in its admonitions: “first the wOrld's prime / Vital / problEm is how / to multiply by thRee … / … / … the overall / Performance realizations of the world's / comprehensive resoUrces … / … / next instead Of ownership / indiVidual / 24 hour usE of facilities / … / and then stOpping / the remoVal / of fossil fuEls / fRom the earth / … / third alOng with / the remoVal / of nations thE / Removal of schools …” (Perloff & Junkerman 1994, pp. 28–30).

John Cage was an American original. His inventiveness, which he claimed as originating from his father, has an “American-ness” that has a long history, dating back to the very beginnings of European migration to the “new world.” Historian Brooke Hindle asks, “how could the custodians of an empty continent, far distant from the economic power centers of Europe and from its busy workshops and rising factories, move on to take leadership in one line after another of mechanization and innovation?” (Hindle 1981, p. 3). While that question requires an entire book for Hindle to answer, by the time Cage was writing music, the notion that the United States was an important source of newness, innovation and invention was well established. Cage's sense of invention–whether it be the discovery of new sounds through percussion or the creation of the prepared piano in the 1930s and 1940s, or the more (in)famous explorations into chance and indeterminacy in the 1940s and 1950s – is the stuff of legend and, as well, the very things most strikingly not European in Cage's work.

Other so-called American originals intentionally grounded their work in a way that differentiated it from Europe. Authors that later became especially influential to Cage, Ralph Waldo Emerson and particularly Henry David Thoreau, saw themselves as writing a way out of European influence. Emerson wrote, “It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans” and “why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model?

In the summer of 1952, a remarkable theatrical presentation took place in the dining hall of Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina. The audience – students and faculty at the school's summer session – were seated in a square broken by aisles into four triangles whose apexes merged toward the center. On each chair sat an empty cup, purpose unspecified; many people used them as ashtrays. John Cage (according to his recollections a decade later) stood on a ladder at one edge of the square dressed in a black suit reading from his “Juilliard Lecture.” Another ladder served as a podium for M. C. Richards and Charles Olson, who ascended it to read poetry. Suspended from the ceiling were four all-white paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, providing the backdrop for slides and a film by Nicholas Cernovitch. Rauschenberg stood below them operating an Edison horn record player, switching scratchy recordings on and off. Merce Cunningham danced down the aisles followed by a dog, and David Tudor played the piano. According to Cage, the performance lasted 45 minutes (the time it took to read his lecture), at the end of which the cups – even those used as ashtrays – were filled with coffee.

In later years, Cage's 1952 Black Mountain Piece would assume epic proportions, touted as the first of many mixed-media, multi-disciplinary, anti-establishment “happenings.” At the time, though, it seemed far less momentous. “I laughed a lot,” recalls Lou Harrison. “There was so much going on and it seemed so absurd” (Harrison 1995).

Throughout his career, John Cage was an active author, his first musical essays dating from around 1937, and few American composer-authors can rival him in terms of the sheer quantity of musical prose that he generated (Copland and Sessions come to mind as potential peers). Even fewer equal him in formulating an explicit, thoroughly detailed aesthetic, and those who are content with the simplistic image of Cage as the all-permissive composer who espoused a goal to “let sounds be themselves” need to recall that he ultimately wrote several hundred pages' worth of essays and lectures qualifying exactly what he meant by that statement. His first twenty years' worth of writings became available to the general public only in the early 1960s, concurrent with or even before the publication of most of his compositions. Historically, therefore, these prose works were not read by Cage enthusiasts as tangential afterthoughts but served as the initial springboard by which many were first introduced to the composer, sometimes long before the actual opportunity to hear one of his compositions ever arose. In fact, in the context of Cage's total creative output, these writings are not to be regarded as mere peripheral supplements to his music, art or poetry, but as the central means to the comprehension of such works. It would be impossible to accurately summarize the aesthetic parameters of Cage's writings in the brief space of this chapter.

Levinas survived the Second World War under difficult and humiliating circumstances, while his family, with the exception of his wife and daughter, perished. These experiences may well have shaped his sense that what is demanded of us is an 'infinite' willingness to be available to and for the other's suffering. 'The Other's hunger - be it of the flesh, or of bread - is sacred; only the hunger of the third party limits its rights', Levinas writes in the preface to Difficult Freedom. To understand fully what Levinas means here would be to understand his whole philosophy. I want to make a beginning at such an understanding.

LEVINAS’S MISSION TO THE GENTILES

Levinas’s audience is typically a gentile audience. He celebrates Jewish particularity in essays addressed to Christians and to modern people generally. He is fully aware of this. Thus he writes ‘Lest the union between men of goodwill which I desire to see be brought about only in a vague and abstract mode, I wish to insist here on the particular routes open to Jewish monotheism’ (df 21–2) – and again,

The main text for addressing the concept of 'substitution' is Levinas's essay of the same name. The essay exists in two versions. The first version was delivered as a lecture in Brussels in November 1967 and was revised for publication in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain in the following year (bwp 79-95). Although the essay was published on its own, as a lecture it had been preceded the day before by a reading of 'Proximity', the contents of which are familiar from the text of 'Language and Proximity' (cp 109-26). The second and better known version of 'Substitution' was published in 1974 as the central chapter of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (ob 99-129). I shall focus on the first version of 'Substitution' in the conviction that Levinas's train of thought is more readily identified in his initial formulation of it, referencing the second version only when it departs from the first in some significant way.

Why is it that Levinas's work has attracted so much - and such varied - feminist attention? One answer turns on a historical coincidence. Philosophical interest in Levinas's work, especially in the anglophone world, blossomed spectacularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the years which also saw the first full flowering of 'feminist philosophy', a strange and sometimes exotic plant that has still to establish itself in the academy. Given the intellectual climate (which has now chilled considerably), it would have been surprising if there had been no feminist interest in Levinas.

However, there is also an explanation particular to Levinas’s work itself, and one which explains why it was already drawing feminist fire as early as 1949, in Simone de Beauvoir’s magnificent and omnivorous study The Second Sex. In a move which he may may not have lived to regret, Levinas chose to make a discussion of what he called ‘the feminine’ central, or at least integral, to much of his work from the 1940s up to and including Totality and Infinity in 1961. Although there has been feminist interest in other aspects of Levinas’s work, I will restrict myself here to a discussion of the role and the nature of ‘the feminine’ as he understands it and the main features of the feminist controversies that this has provoked. For ‘the feminine’ is a term that has attracted vastly different – indeed diametrically opposed – responses from feminists, ranging from the wholly affirmative to the absolutely dismissive. Reading the feminist responses to Levinas within the terms of a debate over the meaning of the feminine, I will conclude with a suggestion for an alternative contemporary feminist reading.

A work of literary translation, says Walter Benjamin, exists as though stationed outside of a forest it cannot enter and as calling into ‘the wooded ridge’ in order to receive an echo that gives back in its own language that which reverberates in the alien one. The work of Levinas is such an invocation, an effort at translating incommensurables, a troping of that which cannot be troped, an unassimilable excess that resists apprehension in propositional discourse. This ‘more’ that remains beyond spoken or written language is the otherness of the other person, an otherness that cannot be configured as a content of consciousness but that issues an imperative that obliges me to assume responsibility for the other.

Like the otherness of another human being, the more of the infinite overflows the idea that attempts to contain it, its superabundance both traduced and expressed in acts of translation into the language of philosophy. The other human being in the sanctity of her or his manifestation as a human face and the infinite as an ideatum whose excessiveness goes beyond any idea we can have of it can only be the objects of an insatiable desire. Any translation (always already merely putative) demands a contraction of this content so that on the one hand it is communicated and on the other retains its ethical authority, the exteriority from which it derives. In order for there to be translation, there must be a pre-existent store of concepts, a speculative language without which translation could not come about, yet one that is disrupted by the more, the exorbitance, of an alterity that is beyond it.

The human face we encounter first of all as the other's face strikes us as a highly ambiguous phenomenon. It arises here and now without finding its place within the world. Being neither something real inside, nor something ideal outside the world, the face announces the corporeal absence (leibhaftige Abwesenheit) of the other. In Merleau- Ponty's terms we may call it the corporeal emblem of the other's otherness. But we do not thereby resolve the enigma of the other's face. This enigma may be approached in different ways. In contrast to the later Merleau-Ponty, who tries to deepen our experience more and more, looking for the invisible within the visible, the untouchable within the touchable, Levinas prefers a kind of thinking and writing which may be called eruptive. Many sentences, especially in his last writings, look like blocks of lava spat out by a hidden vulcan. Words like 'evasion', 'rupture', 'interruption' or 'invasion' indicate a thinking which is obsessed by the provocative otherness of the other. They suggest a special sort of immediacy. In contrast to Hegel's immediacy, which is only the beginning of a long process of mediation, Levinas's immediacy breaks through all kinds of mediations, be it laws, rules, codes, rituals, social roles or any other kind of order. The otherness or strangeness of the other manifests itself as the extraordinary par excellence: not as something given or intended, but as a certain disquietude, as a dérangement which puts us out of our common tracks. The human face is just the foyer of such bewilderments, lurking at the borderlines which separate the normal from the anomalous. The bewildering effects lose their stimulating force if the face is taken either as something too real or as something too sublime.

Quite a few readers of Levinas's work either do not know his Talmudic readings or relegate them to a secondary position. They consider that despite the possible interest the exegetical effort exhibited in them might evoke, these readings remain of no major value for a philosopher. There would be, on the one hand, the philosophical work - the only work worthy of attention - and, on the other, the books consecrated to Judaism. The firmness of this line of demarcation seems none the less highly open to question, if one remembers that Levinas defines Europe by a double loyalty, a loyalty made up of tensions and conflicts between the Bible and the Greeks; the prophets and the philosophers; the good and the true (ti 24). But if borders are also created to be crossed, the one which separates philosophy from the Talmud can be crossed either legally or clandestinely, as in every crossing of a border. But in the present case, who has the authority to decide which is which? Given the question marks attending what is 'proper' to the philosopher and what is 'proper' to the Talmudic scholar, it would seem that this authority does not exist, despite the often violent stands taken by one or the other side to chase the stranger off its territory. The fact that Levinas himself wanted to publish his philosophical writings and his Jewish writings with different publishers should not lead us to think that Jewish sources were foreign to his philosophy or that his questioning of the Hebrew word remained free of all contamination by Greek influences.

Emmanuel Levinas's writings are rich in comments and reflections on art, poetry and the relations between poetry and ethical theory. Of particular importance is the question of language, because there appears to be a kind of symmetry between language as an ethical relation and the language of poetry, both of which expose us to regions of subjectivity or existence on the hither side of cognition and being. The ethical and the poetic are evidently species of saying (le Dire) in contrast to the propositional character of the said (le Dit), yet neither one is translatable into the other, and in fact they are in some sense at odds with one another.

This chapter attempts to expound Levinas's philosophy of language by seeking to 'explain the reference made in the final crowded sentence of Otherwise than Being to

I begin by giving brief accounts of two of the philosophies of language that dominated the intellectual scene when Levinas's main works were being composed.

STRUCTURALISM

The cluster of ideas that goes under the name structuralism derives largely from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, though, as Levinas reminds us, structuralism is anticipated by the philosophical ideal of a mathesis universalis proposed by Descartes and Leibniz (ob 96). While nineteenth-century theoreticians had focused mainly on the evolution of language, Saussure projects a science that subordinates the diachronic to the synchronic. Distinguishing acts of speech (parole) from language regarded as a system (langue), he aims to show how the units assembled in a linguistic system signify not ‘positively’ by standing independently for objects signified, but ‘negatively’ through the combinatorial differences between them.

In Difficult Freedom and elsewhere, Levinas writes of the radically anachronistic nature of Judaism. He sees it as simultaneously the youthfulness that, attentive to everything, would change everything and the senescence that, having seen everything, would seek only to return to the origin of everything. Its difficult, if not impossible, relation to the present is bound up with its refusal of the 'modernist' imperative that one 'desire to conform to one's time'. Simultaneously youthful and aged, engaged (committed) and disengaged, such would be the figure of the prophet: 'the most deeply committed (engagé) man, one who can never be silent, is also the most separate, the one least capable of becoming an institution. Only the false prophet has an official function' (df 212). Levinas's religious (Talmudic) writings are always concerned with illustrating, rehearsing and reflecting upon this anachronistic wisdom, finding both in the Biblical expression of monotheism and in its endless rabbinical revisions and interpretations a wisdom that is absolutely irreplaceable. Irreplaceable, above all, by philosophy; but perhaps, above all, not just by any philosophy, or, rather, not by philosophy under just any name:

The metaphor that best captures the movement of Levinas's thinking is the one Derrida uses when he compares it to the crashing of a wave on a beach: always the 'same' wave returning and repeating its movement with deeper insistence. Regardless of what theme or motif we follow - the meaning of ethics, responsibility, the alterity of the other (autrui), subjectivity, substitution - there is a profound sense that the 'same' wave is crashing. This is just as true when we focus on those moments in philosophy that indicate that there is 'something' more (and 'something more important') than being and ontology. Levinas keeps returning to Plato's suggestion that the Good is beyond being, and to the moment in Descartes's Meditations when Descartes discovers that the ideatum of infinity positively exceeds its idea, that infinity transcends any idea of finite substances. Or to switch metaphors, no matter which of the many pathways we take - pathways that seem to lead off in radically different directions - we always end up in the 'same' place, the 'same' clearing. This is not the clearing of Being, but rather the 'place' where ethics ruptures Being. But even when the outlines of Levinas's thinking come into sharper focus, our perplexity and puzzlement increase. We want to know how he arrives at his radical and startling claims. What are the considerations and motivations that lead him to insist on our asymmetrical and non-reciprocal relation to the other, our infinite responsibility to and for the other? Some have suggested that the place to begin is with the influence of Heidegger on his thinking, with the way in which much of Levinas's thought can be viewed as a critical dialogue with Heidegger.