The ethics of poetic expression in Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot

Levinas believed that Blanchot identified artistic inspiration with his understanding of the il y a, that is, an inauthentic attitude toward life and the Other. Levinas, who tried to overcome the neutrality of the il y a, criticised Blanchot's desire to establish ethics as a prima philosophia. Levinas asked himself in what way the artwork could give access to the ethical, which is why he explored the relationship between expression and responsibility. He concluded that poetic speaking was excluded from his understanding of ethical language. Therefore, Levinas was against poetic activity, in ethical terms, because poetic activity (dis)possessed the subject/artist in such a way that the creator was not able to control his writing, which converted art into the worst kind of irresponsibility. This paper will focus on Levinas' first aesthetic period, and on the ideas collected in the essay La Realite et son ombre, published in 1948.