A whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing

Literature and Seeing
(When Deleuze reads literature, it is always to emphasise what is made visible by this 'one sees', even as it does so by way of the 'one speaks' of the written. This is what he writes very beautifully, in his book on Foucault, of Faulkner:
statements trace fantastic curves which pass through discursive objects and mobile subject-positions (the one name for several persons, two names for the one person) and which are inscribed within a language-being, in a reunion of all the language unique to Faulkner. But the descriptions conjure up a host of scenes which create reflections, flashes, shimmerings, visibilities varying according to the time and the season, which distribute the descriptions in a light-being, a reunion of all the light to which Faulkner holds the secret (Faulkner, literature's greatest 'luminist').
This reading sets Deleuze, I think, against Blanchot, an important figure in the Foucault book. For Blanchot, speaking, writing, have a primacy with respect to the visible. As Deleuze puts it, '... while Blanchot insisted on the primacy of speaking as a determining element, Foucault, contrary to what we might think at first glance, upholds the specificity of seeing, the irreducibility of the visible as a determinable element'. This seems to me exactly right, and can be understood in terms of the importance of Levinas to Blanchot, and to a whole tradition in Rosenszweig and others that places emphasis on speaking and listening (on call and response) rather than seeing.) spurious.typepad.com