Levinas’ ‘il y a’ names an oppressive background being we escape through structure

Evidence

Levinas there describes sensations that can come with insomnia or with physical nausea, especially the oppressive feeling that something is dragging you down and holding you prisoner — a heavy, solid, undifferentiated ‘being’ that weighs on you. Levinas calls this sense of heavy, blobbish being the ‘il y a’, or the ‘there is’. Later he would compare it to the rumbling, booming noise you hear when you put a shell to your ear, or when you are lying in an empty room as a child, unable to sleep. It feels ‘as if the emptiness were full, as if the silence were a noise’. It is a nightmare sensation of total plenitude, leaving no space for thoughts — no inward cavern. In Existence and Existents, in 1947, Levinas described it as a state where beings appear to us ‘as though they no longer composed a world’, that is, devoid of their Heideggerian network of purposes and involvements. Our natural response to all this is to want to escape, and we find such escape in anything that restores our sense of structure and form. This could be art, music, or contact with another person. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 349

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘il y a’ — a core Levinasian concept — through the nightmare sensation of total plenitude.
• XREF: Parallels the nausea/Sartrean ‘de trop’ passages in earlier chapters; both response to heavy Being. — connects to: Levinas described the ‘there is’ as emptiness that feels full — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1359

Broader Connections

• Levinas described the ‘there is’ as emptiness that feels full #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1359