Of a non-saying that says nothing: Levinas and pyrrhonism

ENAlerting us to a significant fact about Levinas’ invocation of skepticism in his parenthetical qualifier, Robert Bernasconi notes, “Levinas draws on the recurrence of (a certain form of) skepticism - in spite of the attempt of logic to exclude its return - in order to suggest that skepticism is witness to reasons that reason does not know.” Strangely, though, Levinas himself, and to my knowledge all of the commentators on Levinas’ recourse to skepticism’s eternal recurrence, fail to pay serious heed to this fact even when they acknowledge it, as Bernasconi does. The basic sweep of Levinas’ gloss of skepticism and of the role that the recourse to skepticism plays in Levinas’ work has been well documented.2 Levinas first notes the fact that skepticism constantly returns - famously, as the “legitimate child” of philosophy - despite its self-refutation. He then defends this constant return through the introduction of his distinction between saying and said to show that skepticism does not, really, refute itself - its gesture remains aloof from, and untouched by, a logos that, over and over again, would deny its very possibility. He then marshals this discussion in order to defend his own theorization of the priority of ethics over all theory, against criticisms that it too, like skepticism, is selfrefuting, aporetic, illegitimate.