Art does prevent sleeping. Exoticism and Violence in the Philosophy of E. Levinas

The experience of art according to Emmanuel Levinas is exotic, a moment of suspension or reversal of consciousness in which formless objects are thrown to the spectator. Exotic is also the experience of insomnia, the limit between sleep and awakeness in which the horrific sound of the impersonal being is heard. Both moments are, in the philosophy of Levinas, abyssal situations related to the ontological categories of subjectivity, as they are connected with a disabling alterity that distorts the encounter with the other man, and so threatens the possibility of ethics. Without that possibility, death isn't possible either: art does not allow dying.