Abstract Contemporary phenomenological discussions on relationship between painting and nothingness have mainly employed Sartrean and Heideggerian notions of nothingness. In this paper, I propose another perspective by discussing the possibility of pictorially depicting Levinas’s notion of the nothingness of being, which he develops in his early works in terms of the il y a (“there is”). For Levinas, the il y a intimates itself in moments like insomnia, where the world as a horizon of possibilities slips away and all there is left is an experience of present absence, an enchainment to the night, which renders the insomniac utterly impotent and exposed. The possibility of eliciting an experience of the il y a through artistic means has been extensively discussed in literary theory, but so far there has been hardly any discussion regarding the pictorial depiction of the il y a. In this paper, I suggest that the atmospheric interior paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) exemplify par excellence a painterly rendering of the experience of Levinasian nothingness. Through an analysis of Hammershøi’s compositional techniques, I show how figurative means can bring about an anonymous, non-figurative presence which eludes reification.

中文翻译：

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如何不涂任何东西？VilhelmHammershøi室内画中的列维纳斯·伊尔雅绘画插图

摘要当代关于绘画与虚无之间关系的现象学讨论主要采用了萨特和海德格尔的虚无概念。在本文中，我通过讨论以图形方式描绘列维纳斯关于虚无的概念的可能性来提出另一种观点，列维纳斯在他的早期作品中以“ il ya”（“存在”）的形式发展了这一概念。对于列维纳斯来说，il ya在失眠之时自我介绍，在那里，作为可能性地平线的世界溜走了，剩下的就是当下的缺席经历，到深夜的束缚，这使失眠症完全无能为力并且暴露无遗。在文学理论中，已经广泛讨论了通过艺术手段来获得“ il ya”体验的可能性，但是到目前为止，关于il y的绘画描绘几乎没有任何讨论。在本文中，我建议丹麦画家VilhelmHammershøi（1864年至1916年）的大气内部绘画体现了列维纳斯虚无经验的绘画效果。通过对Hammershøi的构图技术的分析，我展示了比喻手段如何带来匿名化，无比喻性的存在，而这又无法进行具体化。