Michael Blank
On Bob Dylan’s[1] Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, he wanted us to be present to what he had to say. So we had to lock up our phones in these neat gray pouches, only to be released when he was done saying what he wanted to say.[2]
So we were thinking, sitting, waiting for him to come on to play, and, without anything to scroll through, I decided to pull out a volume of Levinas’ writings from the book compartment of my bag (it contains multitudes). Making headway without the usual distractions, I wondered to myself if any other person in the room was reading the same. Then, a few minutes into Bob’s set, I realized he is in fact, himself, reading Levinas. Perhaps.
What I want to play with in what follows is a few fundamental ideas which recur both in Dylan’s later songs and in the writings of Levinas: the Other (and their face), the ease with which objectification/totalization occurs, and how this relates to the notions of Saying and Said. Putting these two figures in conversation broadens the reading of each.
Discursion
Emmanuel Levinas remains a touchstone in the Jewish philosophy of the twentieth century, though paradoxically his most important idea: Ethics precedes philosophy. Our first responsibility is for the Other; when we see their face, we are obligated to respond. But this is harder than it first seems, because he warns us not to, in doing so, objectify the Other. The Other must remain irreducible, or we risk making them into the Same (the term Levinas uses to refer to our own subjectivity).
Like Bob Dylan’s, Levinas’s relationship with his Jewishness is not straightforward. He was born in Lithuania, and studied philosophy with the likes of Martin Heidegger, but spent most of the second world war interned in a prisoner of war camp. After being freed, he left behind Jewish ritual for a time, and only later did he become immersed in Jewish texts. Similarly, Bob Dylan, while born Jewish as Robert Zimmerman (his maternal family were from Lithuania), has spent much of his life in an ambivalent relationship with his Judaism, even converting to Christianity in the 1970s. But, like Franz Rosenzweig, another of the great Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century who had a brief flirtation with Christianity, Dylan has also had moments of connection with his Judaism. Notably, he has been involved with the Chabad movement, and his sons celebrated bar mitzvahs.
These two figures are by no means an obvious pairing. But Dylan’s literary genius, and interaction with both history and philosophy, make him an intriguing figure to put in conversation with Levinas. Could it be that Dylan at this late stage is embracing Levinas’s notion of alterity, his notion of Otherness?
Drash, or Exegesis
Once I was attuned to noticing Levinas in Dylan, it became difficult to unhear. Here is where I noticed it first:
It looks at nothing here or there, looks at nothing near or far
No one ever told me, it’s just something I knew
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you[3]
Like Levinas, Dylan comes to this Ethics prior to philosophy. No one ever told him. It’s not in the books. But he sees the face of the Other and he gives himself up. His subtle shift from second person to third person and back to second person (and referring to multiple genders), suggests that this is not merely a demonstration of love. Importantly, this is not some abstract universal principle; the responsibility is to the face of the Other (‘you’) in front of me.
“We started from responsibility for the Other as substitution for him…this is an awakening irreducible to knowledge [savoir] and Reason.”[4]
I would be remiss not to point out that Bob Dylan starts with the I, and Levinas insists on beginning with the Other. Dylan is channelling his inner Martin Buber here, while Levinas modifies it. While Buber and Levinas both analyze relationships, they fundamentally differ on whether it begins with Oneself or not. For Buber, the I fundamentally remains the same, but dialogues with the Other. Levinas considers this form of dialogue in which the self is fundamentally the priority (as opposed to the Other), summarizing it as follows:
“This is a worth attached to man coming out of the value of the You, or of the man who is the other…Is not the very opening of the dialogue already a way for the I to uncover itself, to deliver itself, a way for the I to place itself at the disposition of the You?”[5]
Later in the same section, Levinas modifies Buber’s thought, arguing against the symmetry of the relationship articulated above. In Buber, I can meet the other “eye to eye,” an encounter of equals. But in Levinas, the duty to the Other, and the Other’s claim on me, will always come first: “There would be an inequality, a dissymmetry, in the Relation, contrary to the ‘reciprocity’ upon which Buber insists.” Equality, as per Buber, expects something of the Other in return, but for Levinas the ethical relationship exists regardless of what the Other does or says. That responsibility for the Other precedes any events. The Other is unique, and completely inequal. Levinas goes beyond dialogue, “a thinking of the unequal, a thought thinking beyond the given.”[6] The disagreement between Buber and Levinas’s relationship is defined by how the I is oriented to the Other. Levinas is critical of the subjective I who ossifies or thematizes the Other, defining them as an object (as opposed to allowing the subjective to define the Other).
Dylan is also bothered by lazy generalities. In “I Contain Multitudes,” Dylan castigates critics who want to define him by trite Universalisms. Like Anne Frank, who has been emptied of her particularism, he fears being objectified too, and ironically mocks the idea that everything can be made good in that realm of Universalism:
Tell me, what’s next? What shall we do?
Half my soul, baby, belongs to you
I relic and I frolic with all the young dudes
I contain multitudes
I’m just like Anne Frank, like Indiana Jones
And them British bad boys, The Rolling Stones
I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again[7]
The Other’s Face
But wait. Lest you claim—as you’re already doing, cynical you—that there’s nothing Jewish in Dylan, nothing for Levinas to speak with, halfway through his set, he channels his inner Moshe. In Exodus 33, God says to Moshe:
I shall place you in a crevice in the rock and I shall cover you with My hand until I have passed by… you shall see Me from behind; but My face shall not be seen.[8]
Levinas comments “The face glows in the trace of the Other… it is disturbance itself, imprinting itself (one is tempted to say engraving) with irrefutable gravity…. The God who passed by is not the model of which the face would be the image. To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in his trace…”.[9] Put differently, our human relations require an opening up to the Other’s face because the inability to see the face of God is not our model for interpersonal relationships. The use of ‘engraving’ (in French “se gravant”) in Levinas, and ‘carved’ in Dylan, seems more than coincidence:
I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there, it’s carved into your face
Should I break it all down? Should I fall on my knees?
Is there light at the end of the tunnel?
Can you tell me, please?[10]
I would argue that Dylan’s evocation of the ‘face’ imagery here is in direct conversation with Levinas’s concern for the face of the other, leading to responsibility for the other. Later in that song, Dylan returns to the language of ‘face,’ á la Levinas:
Can you look at my face with your sightless eyes?
Can you cross your heart and hope to die?
I’ll bring someone to life, someone for real[11]
This notion of sightlessness is foreshadowed by Levinas. Imagery runs the risk of objectifying the other, turning them into something they are not. A photograph, for example, can petrify a person into a single moment, as perceived by someone else, but Ethics requires allowing the Other to not be totalized.
“Ethics is an optics. But it is a “vision” without image, bereft of the synoptic and totalizing objectifying virtues of vision; a relation or an intentionality of a wholly different type.” [12]
And as if to confirm that he is engaging with his heritage, Dylan later on in “My Own Version of You” places himself firmly within a long history of Jews (of which Freud and Marx represent two in a long chain), both persecuted and ironically triumphant in their contribution to humanity:
Stand over there by the cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long before the first Crusade
Way back before England or America were made
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best-known enemies of mankind dwell
Mr. Freud with his dreams, Mr. Marx with his ax
See the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs
Got the right spirit, you can feel it, you can hear it[13]
So much pathos, such empathy. In the passage above, he has left the first person and moved into the third person. He is exhorting us. In fact, in another of his songs, he reads with the exuberance of a prophet:
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet
I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go[14]
It is lonely to be Ethical, to be aware of the Trace of the Other. There is that inner voice calling, the אהיה אשר אהיה. “To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in His trace.”[15] We can never see God’s face, never know God, but it is in the Trace that we find the Other. The Trace is that imprint that is left by God when we see Him from behind (see Exodus 33, quoted above).
Dylan’s Methodology
Hearing Bob Dylan in concert, in a rather ephemeral way, it seems hard to pin down exactly what he said. Instead, there’s more a sense of what he was trying to say that you can get from his lyricism, his musicality. The way he performed live was both different from his studio album, and also from previous live shows. He re-arranges, he says things anew. Christopher Ricks, in his exegesis of Dylan, points out that he often alters the lyrics of his songs.
What follows… has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various times… catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse.”[16]
Again, Levinas, on the difference between Saying and Said, encapsulates this. Language is fundamentally limited, so that there is always a gap between what a person attempts to communicate and that which is heard. The meaning behind our words—the Saying [dire]— necessarily requires translation, into that which is Said [dit], for the receiver of the words will always receive the meaning incompletely. The Saying is therefore the ethical event, that which is inexpressible (or nonthematizable):
“The unutterable or incommunicable of interiority that cannot hold in a Said is a responsibility prior to freedom.”[17]
Prior to my engagement in dialogue, the Saying is my incommunicable responsibility for the Other. Once I communicate with the other (the Said), my ethical act becomes one that can be represented, or categorised.
Midrashic License?
I don’t physically carry him around with me, but ever since reading it, I have been amazed at how Elliot Wolfson dedicates his book on the thought of Chabad to Dylan. Wolfson’s writing is filled with Derrida, Levinas, and Benjamin… but where does Dylan fit in to all that? Is he right at the beginning, prior to it all?
“FOR BOB DYLAN
the man in the long black coat“[18]
Who knows if Bob Dylan has read Levinas? But when we read them together, their conversation is fruitful. I would be remiss not to caveat it all; perhaps my reading is too loose. So I turn to a meikil posek who licenses my reading:
“Beyond any possible restitution, there would be need for my gesture to operate without debt, in absolute ingratitude.”[19]
Derrida opines that, if all representation is always a betrayal of the original intention (a Said, not a Saying), I should go beyond the words. Even if the author has written the words, in their absence, I can read without the presence of the Other. I must go beyond the original, not merely representing Levinas or Dylan, but pushing through to a new Saying. And in doing so, by reading Dylan next to Levinas, it allows for a new interpretation of what it means to be a Jew when we are only left with the Trace of God.
[1] This piece is a response to Bob Dylan’s performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 12th November 2024.
[2] I explain the difference between saying, le dire, and said, dit, below.
[3] Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You” (2020).
[4] Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind. (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 1998), 30.
[5] Ibid, 150.
[6] Ibid, 151.
[7] Dylan, “I Contain Multitudes” (2020). At the end of this stanza he says “I have no apologies to make / Everything’s flowing all at the same time,” according to the recorded lyrics, which I suggest might allude to Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows. Levinas has himself commented on Grossman’s work extensively, as a literary manifestation of alterity. However, when I heard Dylan perform live, I heard “Everything’s thrown all at the same time,” an evocation which can allude to Martin Heidegger’s idea of thrownness, in which our existence isn’t chosen, but leads to a form of alienation.
[8] Translation from Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Moses: A Human Life. (Yale University Press, 2016), 79.
[9] Levinas, Humanism of the Other, (University of Illinois Press, 2006), 44.
[10] Dylan, “My Own Version of You” (2020). On Dylan’s line ‘Can you tell me, please,’ see also R’ Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, Lessons on Likkutei Moharan volume 1 (Centre for the Writings of Rav Shagar, 2012, 220 [Hebrew]). There, Rosenberg puts Levinas in conversation with Rebbe Nahman of Breslov and with Jacques Lacan. He suggests that for Rebbe Nahman, transcendence is mediated through the face of the tzaddik. “Seeing my face in the face of the Tzaddik arouses me to Teshuva… the Tzaddik asserts the absoluteness that Levinas sees in every person’s face.”
[11] Ibid.
[12] Levinas, Totality and Infinity. (Duquesne University Press, 1969), 23.
[13] Dylan, “My Own Version of You” (2020).
[14] Dylan, “False Prophet” (2020). It is no accident that in False Prophet he mentions “the city of God is there on the hill.” City of God is of course a reference to one of Levinas’s Talmud interpretations on Makkot 9b, where he refers to the Cities of Refuge and the City of God i.e. Jerusalem.
[15] Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 44.
[16] Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin. (London: Canongate, 2003).
[17] Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 52.
[18] Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson. (Columbia, 2009).
[19] Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” 12.
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