This ambiguity—on the one hand, she relays her experience without relation to the historical context or the others who had similar experiences, on the other, the way in which private experience and public context interact is a central theme of her text—allows her to create a textual space that preserves her own subjectivity and uniqueness while simultaneously opening out her experience for another to share. The difficulties inherent in such a project can be seen in the two monuments that bracket the text, one too public and the other too private. The private monuments, or mementos, her father’s pen and letter, preserve Kofman’s unique experience but cannot effectively communicate that experience to another. The public monument, mémé’s tomb, is accessible to all, but cannot express the complexity of Kofman’s private truth. Again, Rue Ordener, rue Labat can be seen, from one perspective, as a long meditation on the interpenetration of the public and private realms at multiple levels: memory, monuments, space, narrative, intertextuality and writing in general. This meditation is more than the delineation of a problematic, however. It creates a text that inhabits the space between purely private and purely public, preserving the complexity of Kofman’s experience while also allowing the reader to share her experience to the extent that they can. She accomplishes this by marrying text and space to create room for the reader. Yet Kofman is not the sculptor of a monument, with the reader as passive viewer. I have said that Kofman creates a textual space, indoor growing trays but it may be more accurate to say that she creates the conditions under which she and the reader can mutually create that space.
The reader is co-creator when, for instance, he or she supplies the missing context or works to understand the intertext. These lacunae, for instance the historical context of Kofman’s experience or an explanation of the relationship between The Lady Vanishes and Kofman’s own experience, create a space for the reader to inhabit. The goal is mutual transcendence, a meeting of the writer and the reader in the shared and co-created space of the text. This transcendence is, for Kofman, a central characteristic of writing as such. The ethical dimension of Kofman’s project, to preserve her own subjectivity and the subjectivity of others , and to invite a reader to understand her experience, may be expressed in Lévinassian terms. For Lévinas, the most basic relation that “quitte . . . L’ordre de la violence” [“quits the order of violence” , that is, in which a subject treats the other also as a subject, may be found in simple conversation between two people. That such a banal thing as conversation can accomplish this, Lévinas writes, is “la merveille des merveilles” . [“the marvel of marvels” ] He calls the kind of relation created by conversation an encounter with the face of the Other, who always preserves an element of ungraspable enigma. An encounter with the Other’s face does not allow the subject to objectify the Other, which would occur if the subject were to think they could understand the other in his entirety. Rather, such an encounter preserves the Other’s subjectivity. This is precisely Kofman’s concern: to create a monument that allows for an encounter between subjects. The encounter between the subject and the Other takes place within a space that is very similar to the physical and textual spaces in Rue Ordener, rue Labat. In his Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas Jacques Derrida observes that Lévinas’ philosophy is “un immense traité de l’hospitalité” . [“an immense treatise of hospitality” ] Hospitality presupposes a space in which to host, a space that the subject must build.
This home that the subject builds, is, like space in Rue Ordener Rue Labat, paradoxically both public and private. The home is of course the private domain of the subject, as Mayol writes in his discussion of the neighborhood. Yet the home is also undeniably not the subject, since it is exterior. Man, Lévinas writes, is “simultanément dehors et dedans, il va au dehors à partir d’une intimité. D’autre part cette intimité s’ouvre dans une maison, laquelle se situe dans ce dehors. La demeure, comme bâtiment, appartient en effet, à un monde d’objets” [“simultaneously without and within, he goes forth outside from an inwardness [intimité]. Yet this inwardness opens up in a home which is situated in that outside—for the home, as a building, belongs to a world of objects” ] The Lévinassian home is like Kofman’s text, as well as the spaces she describes in that text: a place where private subjectivity and the outside world interpenetrate one another. The home, for Lévinas, though, is not just another object in the “world of objects”: “Le recueillement nécessaire pour que la nature puisse être représentée et travailée, pour qu’elle se dessine seulement comme monde, s’accomplit comme maison” . [“The recollection necessary for nature to be able to be represented and worked over, for it first to take form as a world, is accomplished in the home” ] Without a home, “recollection” and representation are impossible. This is because the home functions as a shelter from the immediate experience of the world, from the elements. Only in this shelter can recollection take place, since the distractions of the present world are kept at bay: “le sujet contemplant un monde, suppose donc l’événement de la demeure, la retraite à partir des éléments, , le recueillement dans l’intimité de la maison” . [“the subject contemplating the world presupposes the event of a dwelling, the withdrawal from the elements , recollection in the intimacy of the home” ] In other words, the space of a home is a precondition for thinking and representation.
Similarly, Kofman constructs a textual space within which her recollections can take place and be represented. Put another way, with this text that details the destruction of a home and the subjective confusion this entails, Kofman is building another home. But where is the Other in this relationship between subject and dwelling? For Lévinas, a home, by virtue of being intimate, is necessarily human and therefore always presupposes an Other who welcomes the subjec. Thinking of the “distance” involved in recollection, that is, the way the subject must separate him or herself from the world in order to recollect, he asks, “A moins que la distance à l’égard de la jouissance [des éléments en dehors], au lieu de signifier le vide froid des interstices de l’être, ne soit vécue positivement comme une dimension d’intériorité à partir de la familiarité intime où plonge la vie?” [“would the distance with regard to enjoyment [of the elements outside], rather than signifying the cold void of the interstices of being, be lived positively as a dimension of interiority beginning with the intimate familiarity into which life is immersed?” Lévinas’ answer is yes, recollection does not take place in a “cold void,” but rather in the intimacy of the home. And intimacy “suppose . . . une intimité avec quelqu’un. L’intériorité du recueillement est une solitude dans un monde déjà humain. Le recueillement se réfère à un accueil” . [“presupposes an intimacywith someone. The interiority of recollection is a solitude in a world already human. Recollection refers to a welcome” ] And this welcome is one of “une hospitalité . . . une attente . . . un accueil humain” . [“hospitality, expectancy, a human welcome” ] Thus, recollection and representation can only take place in a space separate from the outside world, the home, in which another is always already there to welcome the subject. The home, then, is not just a place where the interior of the subject and the outside world interpenetrate one another. It is also an intimate place where the subject and the Other meet, mobile vertical grow racks where the Other welcomes the subject and lays the groundwork for recollection. In Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman similarly co-creates a space with the reader by leaving lacunae that the reader can inhabit. The Other does not just welcome the subject in the home, the Other is also welcomed into the home by the subject to engage in conversation. Lévinas has written more than once about being disturbed “chez soi” by another . In “Enigma and Phenomenon” he literalizes this idea of being disturbed “chez soi” by inviting the reader to imagine the writer disturbed at his work by the ringing of the doorbell. The Other disturbs the subject with his alterity, he is an enigma to the subject. Lévinas’ Other has a way “de quérir ma reconnaissance tout en conservant son incognito, en dédaignant le recours au clin d’oeil d’entente ou de complicité, cette façon de se manifester sans se manifester, [que] nous []appelons . . . énigme.” “ of seeking my recognition while preserving his incognito, disdaining recourse to the wink-of-the-eye of understanding or complicity, this way of manifesting himself without manifesting himself, [which] we call enigma” .Ringing someone’s bell already creates an obligation, a disturbance. Kofman is also asking the other person for something, creating a greater feeling of obligation and responsibility for her. In the first passage, her request, for a birthday gift, is benign. In the second passage there is more urgency and more danger for madame Fagnard. Kofman arrives at another’s threshold demanding a welcome. She asks more of the Other than is proper, forcing them out of themselves. She disturbs. As Bettina Bergo observes, “the fundamental intuition of Levinas’s philosophy is the non-reciprocal relation of responsibility. In the mature thought this responsibility is transcendence par excellence” . Kofman’s situation is literally a “nonreciprocal relation of responsibility”: she is a child asking for shelter and, by coming out of herself to ask for this welcome, she allows the Other to transcend herself as well. Kofman’s position on the threshold is significant for this discussion of mutual transcendence. Like the home itself in Lévinas’ formulation, the threshold is both outside and inside, it is the division between those two spaces. Yet neither Kofman nor the Other she disturbs can completely transcend themselves. At madame Fagnard’s house, she retains her enigmatic facet. Madame Fagnard “ne me fait aucune semonce et demande seulement qu’on ne fasse pas de bruit pour ne pas réveiller sa vieille mère infirme.” She does not ask why Kofman is at her door or take her to task for coming. Kofman’s welcome by mémé, however, is not a Lévinassian welcome. Kofman paints their arrival at her door similarly to her arrival at madame Fagnard’s house: “Elle était là. Elle soignait sa soeur atteinte d’un cancer à l’estomac. Elle accepta de nous héberger pour une nuit et nous offrit des oeufs à la neige. Elle était en peignoir, je la trouvais très belle, douce et affectueuse” . [“She was home. She was caring for her sister, who had stomach cancer. She agreed to shelter us for a night and offered us Floating Island for dessert. She was wearing a peignoir and looked very lovely to me, and she was so gentle and affectionate” ] Yet mémé does not allow Kofman her enigmatic aspect. Instead she consumes her, remaking her as “Suzanne,” a French, Christian daughter. In Lévinassian conversation, the subject must transcend himself or herself in order to grasp the enigmatic aspect of the Other, recognizing that he cannot find the solution to this enigma inside of himself. And the Other, also engaged in conversation, must do the same. The subject and the other cannot meet entirely: Transcendence “désigne une relation avec une réalité infiniment distante de la mienne, sans que cette distance détruise pour autant cette relation et sans que cette relation déstruise cette distance” . [“designates a relation with a reality infinitely distant from my own reality, yet without this distance destroying this relation and without this relation destroying this distance” ] Transcendence—conversation—is the subject fully grasping the distance between the other and himself. If the subject were to overcome this distance from the Other, he or she would be turning the Other into an object that can be understood in its totality, rather than an Other who retains an aspect of incomprehensibility. This transcendent relationship is especially true of a reader and a writer. Writing, a kind of conversation, assumes the absence of the interlocutors in both space and time.