Existence and existents.

We are, thus, introducing into the impersonal event of the there is (Il y a) not the notion of consciousness, but of wakefulness, in which consciousness participates, affirming itself as a consciousness because it participates in it. Consciousness if a part of wakefulness, which means that it has already torn into it. It contains a shelter from that being with which, depersonalized, we make contact in insomnia, that being which is not to be lost nor duped nor forgotten, which is, if we may hazard the expression, completely sobered up.

Wakefulness is anonymous. It is not that there is my vigilance in the night; in insomnia it is the night itself that watches. It watches. In this anonymous nightwatch where I am completely exposed to being all the thoguths which occupy my insomnia are suspended on nothing. They have no support. I am, one might say, the object rather than the subject of anonymous thought. TO be sure, I have at least the experience of being an object, I still become aware of this anonymous vigilance; but I am aware of it in a movement in which the I is already detached from the anonymity, in which the limit situation of impersonal vigilance is reflected in the ebbing of a consciousness which abandons it. It is necessary to bring out this experience of depersonalization before compromising it through a reflection on its conditions. (p.66)

Levinas, Eng, trans. by A. Lingis, Existence and existents, 1978 (1947)