Me voici

A brief note: this essay was originally written in Dutch. English is not my native language, and this translation keeps something of the cadence of the language in which I first thought and wrote it.

She can no longer speak. An illness has taken her language away. When I enter her room, it is quiet. The window to the garden is open. She sits on the bed, her hands resting in her lap, her eyes awake.

I sit down beside her. Again and again her gaze moves toward a dark cabinet on the other side of the room, as if something is there that I have not yet seen. I do not know what she wants. I cannot ask her. I cannot come to know her the way I come to know someone through conversation.

I sit for a moment. Then I stand up.

Photo: Tony Luciani (this is not the woman with whom I had this encounter)

I follow her gaze, walk to the cabinet, and touch the wood. She follows and places her hand on it, moving her fingers in a steady rhythm. Later, I show her colors in an art book. Each time she sees white, she points to it. I ask in the house whether someone can help her paint the cabinet white, together with a volunteer.

A few weeks later I receive a photograph. She stands beside the cabinet, which has now been painted white. In her gaze, there is something like recognition.

Only afterward do I begin to understand something of what happened there. I was beside her before I decided to be there. Something in me had already answered before I consciously chose. Here I was called.

In the work of Emmanuel Levinas, certain expressions return again and again, and gradually they gain more weight. Me voici, here I am. It is a short, almost everyday sentence, but it carries a large part of the movement this series is trying to understand.

Who am I when the Other truly comes before me?

This part concerns the most radical answer Levinas formulates to that question. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence from 1974, his second major work, he goes further than the idea that ethics precedes knowledge. He describes how the self in its deepest structure is already involved with the Other, before it chooses, understands, or applies a moral rule.

Two concepts are central to this: me voici and substitution. This is difficult material, even for those who know Levinas well. That is why I follow here not only his reasoning, but also my own hesitation.

In Totality and Infinity from 1961, Levinas describes a self that stands in the world, possesses itself, is at home, enjoys, dwells, thinks and acts. That self is interrupted by the face of the Other. It is challenged, called into question, unsettled. Yet it remains a self that already exists before it is addressed.

In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, that starting point shifts. Levinas says more radically there that the self is not first itself and then becomes responsible. The address of the Other already belongs to the formation of the self. My uniqueness appears in the fact that no one else can answer in exactly my place. (1)

Jacques Rolland captures that shift precisely: in Otherwise than Being, the identity of the subject is disturbed and shaped from outside. Alterity is not a later encounter; it already works within the emergence of subjectivity. (2)

Something shifts here. Who I am becomes visible in my answer to someone who has already addressed me.

Me voici seems simple at first glance. Here I am. Three words. A sentence everyone knows. In Levinas this sentence takes on a weight that our ordinary language can barely carry.

In the French Bible translation, me voici is the answer of Abraham, Moses and Isaiah when they are called. In Hebrew it sounds like hineni. For Levinas this short sentence becomes important precisely because it shows that a human being is not only someone who announces himself, but also someone who responds.

Roger Burggraeve helped me by pointing to something small in the grammar, which opens up a great deal. In hineni one hears not only: here I am. One also hears: I am here because I am called.

That makes a difference. In our ordinary “here I am” it can seem as if I begin myself. I present myself. I enter. I place myself in the space.

In hineni the beginning comes earlier. There is first a voice, a question, a call. Only then does the answer sound: here I am.

In this way the self appears as an answer. Not as someone who places himself in the foreground, but as someone who becomes available for whoever calls him. That is the movement Levinas is trying to think.

In Dutch and English that almost slips away by itself. “Hier ben ik.” “Here I am.” I announce myself. I place myself here. In me voici and hineni a different movement sounds. My presence turns out to be already involved with someone who called me.

I had to read that several times before I began to sense what was happening. Me voici says: I am here because I have been addressed. This place takes on meaning through whoever called me.

Burggraeve formulates it even more sharply: I am indebted to the Other for my responsibility without being guilty. (4)

That is where I keep pausing for a moment. Indebted without being guilty. In ordinary morality we often connect responsibility with guilt, choice or action. I am responsible because I have done something or have failed to act. Levinas thinks earlier. I am responsible because I am here, before I have done anything.

Here too lies the tension with freedom. Levinas does not mean by this that a person automatically acts well as soon as he is addressed. The face does not compel the way a power compels. It addresses me without compulsion. That is why I can look away, close myself off, remain silent in a way that leaves the Other alone. That possibility remains.

My refusal does not undo the address, however. I cannot return to a state in which I have not been addressed. That is where Levinas is sharp. Freedom does not begin in an empty field of possibilities, but in a world in which the Other has already addressed me, asked something of me, interrupted me. I am free in my answer, but not free from the fact that something was asked of me.

That is why me voici is not a self-evident yes. It is an answer that gains meaning because I could also have looked away. It is an answer that can be given because refusal remains possible. It is precisely that possibility which makes the answer human. In the room of the woman with the white cabinet, I could have stayed seated, could have thought I did not understand, could have waited until someone else did something. Yet I moved. Small, hesitant, without heroism. I followed her gaze. Perhaps responsibility sometimes begins this way.

Levinas also connects me voici with availability. In a footnote to Otherwise than Being, Levinas draws a connection between me voici and envoie-moi: send me. “Here I am” thereby also takes on the meaning of availability. Here I am means: I am available. (5)

That can easily sound larger than I intend it here. Over time I have begun to hear it more simply. Availability begins in ordinary gestures. Raising one’s eyes toward someone. Greeting someone. Staying seated. Following a gaze that moves toward a cabinet. Levinas himself speaks in his conversations with François Poirié of such small gestures as places where the ethical movement becomes visible. (6)

And yet something elusive remains in the idea that I am already available to the Other before I have words for it. That elusiveness belongs to it. (6)

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas goes further than me voici. He introduces the concept of substitution: not as taking the Other’s place, but as being placed in responsibility for the Other before I have chosen this responsibility. He also speaks of the Other in myself. (7)

Substitution is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts in his work. The word comes from the Latin substituere, to place in the position of another. In ordinary usage it can carry something neutral: a player is substituted, a part is replaced. In Levinas, something different happens. He does not mean that I literally replace the Other. He is trying to find words for a responsibility that lies deeper than role, choice or compassion.

Here Levinas becomes more difficult, because he is searching for words for something that does not easily fit within our ordinary language about responsibility.

What I am gradually coming to understand, step by step, is this. Sometimes I am already set in motion by someone before it becomes clear to me what is actually happening. The Other then touches who I am, before I know how to help, understand or respond.

Around substitution Levinas uses words that carry each other: l’un-pour-l’autre, the one for the other. L’autre dans le Même, the Other in the Same. And also otage, hostage. That last word remains hard. It chafes every time I read it. Levinas uses it to show how deeply responsibility reaches in his view. The Other does not appear only when I decide to become involved. The appeal is already there.

Levinas does not use the word hostage in a soft or merely metaphorical sense. In an interview with Michaël de Saint-Cheron, he says that he knows the word from the period of Nazi persecution: to be made hostage meant being punished for someone else. That makes the word almost unbearable. Yet Levinas also asks whether, beyond this dramatic and terrible fate, there may be a supreme dignity in the condition of the hostage: the knowledge that one runs the risk of being killed for another. (8)

Substitution is therefore not empathy, not taking over the Other’s life, and not excusing the Other’s guilt. It is the unsettling thought that I can find myself placed in responsibility for the Other, even where I did not choose that responsibility myself. This responsibility also reaches toward the responsibility of the Other, even toward the guilt of the Other, without making me guilty in the same sense and without removing the Other’s own responsibility. That is why the word remains so difficult. It names an ethical exposure that ordinary moral language can hardly hold.

Perhaps this is the simplest thing I can say about it for now: I am already addressed before I fully understand myself as someone who chooses, acts or decides. In that addressability, something of who I am also comes into being.

From here his tone becomes sharper. The self in his work is “passivity more passive than all passivity.” The Other claims me, summons me, takes me hostage. To be a subject means literally: to be subjected. (9)

Those are uncomfortable words. They should remain uncomfortable. Levinas uses them to break open something in our ordinary moral thinking, in which responsibility often begins with choice, consent or reciprocity.

The first reference comes from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, where the elder Zosima says that every person is responsible “for everyone and everything, and I more than the others.” (10)

The second is a fragment by Pascal that Levinas uses as the motto for Otherwise than Being: “That is my place in the sun. That is how the usurpation of the whole world began.” (11)

Both references touch on the same idea: my existence is never entirely innocent or self-evident. I always live in a place that I share with others.

The immediate objection is obvious. Who can bear this? Who could live this way?

Burggraeve has given an important answer to this, one that also finds support in Levinas himself. In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas says: “My task is not to construct an ethics. I am only trying to find its meaning.” (11)

Substitution is therefore not a moral program and not a heroic assignment. It describes a deeper structure. I already exist in responsibility before I understand myself as a free and choosing subject. I can suppress, evade or betray that responsibility, but it does not belong to me only once I voluntarily accept it.

Burggraeve connects this with small goodness, a concept that Levinas came to appreciate later, partly through Vasily Grossman. It concerns small, often inconspicuous acts of humanity that persist amid vulnerability, power and violence. (13)

That is what became visible in that room. No one had asked me to sit beside her. I had not been appointed as her caregiver. And yet I was there, because her gaze asked something of me. The answering had already begun before I chose.

The uniqueness of the one who is called

What this thinking does to the self is surprising. One might think that so much emphasis on the Other diminishes or even erases the self. Levinas thinks it more sharply than that.

It is precisely in the address that I become this one.

My uniqueness arises from the fact that this Other here and now makes a claim on me. No one else can answer in exactly my place. In that sense I am chosen, without religious self-exaltation. I am designated to answer, here, in this place, to this Other. (14)

That is what me voici ultimately means. Here I am, called, designated, irreplaceable. My responsibility is mine because it falls to me. No one can fulfill it in my place.

The woman with the white cabinet taught me that without speaking a word. I did not know her. No one had asked me to sit beside her. I followed her gaze, and in that following I became the one who stood before her. Here I was, in that moment, with her. Irreplaceable.

Perhaps this is the simplest formulation I can offer for now: through a small and everyday answer, I become this one, here, for this one Other who asks something of me.

Today is part ten. When I began this series, I thought the central question was what happens when the Other truly becomes the center of our thinking. That question initially shaped how I read Levinas: through the face, asymmetry and the idea that responsibility precedes freedom and choice.

Gradually, however, something began to shift. Not only in my understanding of Levinas, but also in my question itself.

I began to see how strongly our thinking tends to order the world from within itself. How easily the other appears within my categories, my interpretations, my need for coherence. Levinas introduced a fundamental restlessness into that. The face does not simply fit within what I already understand. It interrupts my self-evidence.

At the same time I began to suspect that even my original formulation still departed too much from a thinking that presupposes a center. As if the question were mainly about who occupies that center.

Perhaps the shift lies deeper. Perhaps what is at stake is that my self-evident way of perceiving, understanding and ordering is itself unsettled.

That movement became increasingly visible to me in the writing about asymmetry, about le Dire and le Dit, about silence and restraint. I began to see more sharply that language is necessary and at the same time always fixes something. That understanding is indispensable, but never coincides with the one who addresses me.

And with that, a different question slowly presented itself.

What happens before my interpretation? How does something actually appear before I fix it in understanding, language or judgment? What does attention mean when it suspends its need for immediate certainty?

Perhaps that is precisely why Levinas brings me back to questions he himself did not fully trust: the phenomenological questions about appearing, intentionality and experience.

That is not a departure from Levinas. Rather a further deepening of the restlessness his thinking has opened.

I had announced that this series would consist of twenty-four parts. Those parts will come. But now that ten parts have been written, I notice that I need to move more slowly. To read further, to think and to understand connections better, without the pressure of constant production.

I am therefore deliberately taking more time to go deeper into the thinkers who remain present beneath Levinas: Husserl, Heidegger, Marcel, Gadamer, Buber and Rosenzweig. Not to leave Levinas behind, but to better understand the tension from which his thinking arose.

The question of human measure also becomes more important in this. The radicality of responsibility opens something essential, but in practice it can also become crushing when it loses its connection to limitation and the possibility of repair. People do not live outside fatigue, failure, withdrawal and self-protection. That is precisely why I am looking for a language in which responsibility is taken seriously without losing the human being.

Perhaps that is ultimately also what this journey has already become: a search that is not for a conclusive answer, but an attempt to remain attentive to what does not immediately reduce to what I already think I know.

This part has occupied me not only philosophically.

In recent years I have listened regularly to Leonard Cohen, especially to his song You Want It Darker from 2016. It is the title track of the album that appeared shortly before his death. In the refrain the same word keeps returning: Hineni, hineni. I’m ready, my Lord.

I had heard the song many times, but last November that one word suddenly stayed with me. I did not know it. I did not understand it. Yet it set something in motion that I could not yet name. I bought a necklace with the symbol of hineni, and I have worn it ever since.

Only later, while working on this series, did I discover that hineni is a central word in Levinas. That it is the Hebrew form of me voici: here I am. What I wore around my neck turned out to be the word that Levinas places at the heart of his thinking. Cohen brought me to a word. Levinas later showed me what that word carries.

Perhaps that is precisely what hineni does. It comes to you before you understand it. In a voice. In a song. In the gaze of someone who can no longer speak. And sometimes you realize only afterward that you have already answered.

(1) Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1974. Nederlandse vertaling: Anders dan zijn of het wezen voorbij, Baarn: Ambo, 1991.

(2) Jacques Rolland, nawoord bij Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps, Parijs: Grasset, 1993.

(3) Roger Burggraeve, persoonlijke communicatie, Leuven, 2025.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Levinas, Anders dan zijn of het wezen voorbij.

(6) François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas. Qui êtes-vous?, Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987.

(7) Levinas, Anders dan zijn of het wezen voorbij.

(8) Michaël de Saint-Cheron, Entretiens avec Emmanuel Levinas 1992–1994, Paris: Le Livre de Poche / Librairie Générale Française, 2006, p. 31.

(9) Levinas, Anders dan zijn of het wezen voorbij, vooral het hoofdstuk “La substitution”.

(10) F.M. Dostojewski, De gebroeders Karamazov, deel II, boek 6, hoofdstuk 2.

(11) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, fragment 295 volgens Brunschvicg, fragment 112 volgens Lafuma.

(12) Emmanuel Levinas, Ethiek en oneindigheid. Gesprekken met Philippe Nemo, Kampen: Kok Agora, 1991, p. 95.

(13) Roger Burggraeve, Geen toekomst zonder kleine goedheid. Naar genereus samenleven in verantwoordelijkheid vanuit Emmanuel Levinas, De Vrije Uitgevers, 2020.

(14) Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas. Qui êtes-vous?, pp. 115-116.