Time, Death, and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger 9781503618824

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Time, Death, and the Feminine

TIME, DEATH, AND THE FEMININE Levinas with Heidegger Tina Chanter

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2001

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chanter, Tina Time, death, and the feminine : Levinas with Heidegger / Tina Chanter. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 0-8047-3932-3 (alk. paper) isbn 0-8047-4311-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 2. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 3. Time—History—20th century. 4. Death—History—20th century. 5. Femininity (Philosophy)—History—20th century. I. Title. b2430.l484 c475 2001 194—dc21

00-054777

This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Original printing 2001 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 Typeset in 10/12.5 Minion

For Paul

Acknowledgments

I would like to register my gratitude for permission to reprint the following material. A longer version of Chapter 3 appears as “Heidegger’s Understanding of Aristotle,” in Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and John Sallis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 131–57. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appears in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 20.2–21.1 (1998): 65–79 (a special issue on Levinas). Chapter 5 appeared as “Giving Time and Death: Levinas, Heidegger and the Trauma of the Gift,” in Levinas: The Face of the Other, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Symposium of the Simon Silverman Center for Phenomenology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), pp. 37–56. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as “Levinas and Impossible Possibility: Thinking Ethics with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah,” Research in Phenomenology 27 (1998): 91–109. Chapter 7 appeared as “Traumatic Response: Levinas’s Legacy,” Philosophy Today 41, Supplement (1997): 19– 27. Chapter 8 appeared as “The Betrayal of Philosophy: Emmanuel Levinas’s Otherwise than Being,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 3.6 (1997): 65–79.

Contents

Preface

xi

Abbreviations

xvii

Introduction

1

The Heidegger Affair, 4 Heidegger’s Reorientation of the Tradition, 8 Descartes’s Obstinate Legacy for Feminist and Race Theory, 10 Historical Consciousness and Social Change, 16 The Need to Rethink Time and History, 23 The Metaphysical Paradox of Time and Being, 25 An Overview of Levinas’s Critique of Heidegger on Time, 27

1. Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time

37

Two Freedoms, Two Moralities . . . Two Registers of Language, 43 Interruption, 46 Dwelling with the Feminine in Totality and Infinity, 58 Philosophy as Critique, 60 Accomplishment, Constitution, Conditioning, 61 The Temporality of Representation: After the Event, 68

2. Heidegger and Feminism: Bodies, Others, Temporality

75

Bodies and Materiality, 77 Others in the World of Dasein, 95 Temporality and History, 108

3. Heidegger’s Critique of Metaphysical Presence

123

4. The Temporality of Saying: Politics Beyond the Ontological Difference

140

The Trajectory of Levinas’s Analysis of Temporality, 143 The Saying and the Said, 145 Not Yet Time: The Paradox of the Instant, 147 Heidegger on Death, Time, and Others, 157 Politics, 162

x

Contents

5. Giving Time and Death: Levinas, Heidegger, and the Trauma of the Gift

170

6. Impossible Possibility: Thinking Ethics After Levinas with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah

189

Rosenzweig on Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, 193 Death and the Totality of History, 197 Death as Fundamental, 199 Thinking After Levinas, 206

7. A Mourning of Philosophy: Levinas’s Legacy as Traumatic Response

209

8. The Betrayal of Philosophy

224

Levinas’s Language, 224 The Alternating Movement of Philosophy, 227 Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Absorption, 228 Interruption, 229 An Abuse of Language, 230 An Event That Cannot Be Named, 232 Subversion of Essence, 233 Everything Shows Itself, 234 Contradiction, 235 The Third Party, 236

Conclusion: The Lapse of Time and of the Feminine

241

Irreducible Diachrony, 242 Material Conditionality, 244 The Politics of the Feminine, 245

Notes

263

Preface

What are the conditions of reading Levinas, and what would it mean to be a good reader of Levinas? How does one write about one who has written so much and so well about responsibility, and about the call of books for other books? What does it mean to philosophize after Levinas, for whom Heidegger transformed philosophy? How must one read Heidegger, in order to read Levinas? What would it mean to read Levinas as a reader of Heidegger, and at the same time as a Jewish survivor? How should Levinas’s claim to distinguish ontology from ethics and ethics from politics be read? And how should we read the language of sexual difference, which infuses the texts of Levinas at every level, and which marks the feminine as primordial, only to refuse to thematize it as ethical? In what sense is the feminine a condition for Levinas’s thinking, and in what sense is the infinite a condition? How is the conditional to be thought, and how does it withdraw from the thought that tries to think it? Can condition be thought other than as transcendental? In what ways and how far does Levinas contest the claims of transcendental philosophy, and how successful could such a contestation be? In what follows I am struggling to negotiate a delicate path between textual exegesis and schematic research, in the belief that both the attempt to remain within the parameters of an interpretive strategy that strives to remain faithful to a textually defined tradition, and the attempt to pose a wholly topical inquiry that situates itself entirely outside a textual tradition, suffer from certain constraints. To be content to situate oneself within the confines of Levinas’s or Heidegger’s corpus is to risk excluding a range of critical questions that I think responsible thinking calls for, while to limit oneself to a thematically driven enterprise is to

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risk abstracting from the nuances that only careful reading and exposition can accommodate. To try to move between these two registers is to risk offending devotees of both tendencies, but it is a risk I am willing to take, in the belief that both Heidegger and Levinas have important, although not unproblematic, insights to offer, and in the hope of forestalling the excesses of slavish devotion to the text or of the arrogant presumption that nothing is to be gained from returning to the work of Levinas and Heidegger. If I can go some way toward convincing both constituencies that they cannot afford to remain comfortably situated within the assumptions that they are typically willing to make, perhaps I can succeed in disrupting the complacency of those who accept the boundaries of hermeneutical exegesis without being willing to take on the critical questions and social and political concerns that such boundaries often systematically exclude, and in challenging the equanimity of those who often sacrifice careful reading in the name of issue-oriented research, political agendas, or unbridled skepticism about whether philosophers such as Levinas and Heidegger have anything intelligible or meaningful to say about the world. It is probably disingenuous in any case to imagine that exegesis can remain internal to the dynamics of a text, humbly following in the master’s footsteps, or to position oneself at such a distance from the texts one has read that the debt one acknowledges is insignificant. It is perhaps better to make available from the start the prejudices and predispositions one brings to one’s work so that they can be judged accordingly. I will admit to a dual frustration: I am wearied by exegetes who seem unwilling to step out of the framework of the texts they seek to explicate even for a moment, afraid to risk any gesture on their own behalf other than adulation for the author they claim to explicate. Sometimes the difficulty of the texts they would illuminate is compounded, rather than clarified, by the hollow repetition of their gestures. I am equally tired of purported accounts of philosophical positions that are so generalized as to bear little relation to the philosophers alleged to hold them, as if they were penned by those who no longer feel the need for long and painstaking hours of reading. And yet, while I am concerned about the danger of trivializing sophisticated thinkers, I admire the drive for clarity. In trying to avoid these stumbling blocks, I have no doubt that I

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have stumbled anyway, or found new pitfalls in trying to negotiate around others. In taking on the philosophical inquiries of Levinas and Heidegger into time and death in a context that strives to give them their due, but which also takes seriously the need to think through their relationship to feminist theory, I am not bringing together two mutually exclusive domains. The metaphorics of sexual difference overtly orchestrates Levinas’s critical response to Heidegger, but it also operates in ways that elude Levinas, whose self-commentary on other aspects of his own writing is so prevalent and so arresting. The way in which the feminine functions in Levinas’s texts, often in an explicitly subordinate or supporting role to the dominant themes, would appear to exceed or refuse to be contained by the very structures that might seem to keep it in check. If the face of the other who calls me to infinite responsibility interrupts the metaphysics of presence in a dramatic and exceptional way, the withdrawal of the feminine from the categories of ontology effects its own interruption, and requires to be thought in relation to the more obvious exception to being that the ethics of the face-to-face exacts. It does not seem to me to be adequate to treat the feminine, as the vast majority of Levinas’s commentators have done, as subsidiary to the real import of Levinas’s philosophy, by dismissing it as easily resolvable in a footnote or in an aside, or merely neglecting the theme altogether. Whether one approaches Levinas’s work as defined by an ethics of alterity, as a critical engagement and confrontation with Heidegger’s ontology, or as I shall approach it—as a profound meditation on time that takes shape as a response to Heidegger’s own reflections on being and time—the question of the feminine must be thought in its structural implications for Levinas’s philosophy.1 Nor does it seem adequate to treat Levinas’s discussion of the feminine, in its various configurations as eros, in the dwelling, and as maternity, as if it constituted a seamless part of his philosophical interrogation, which can be unproblematically recuperated by the main contours of his ethical discourse.2 Both alternatives underestimate the importance of the structural role of the feminine, and both leave aside the question of the politics of reading Levinas. If, as Levinas claims, “I have access to the alterity of the Other from the society I maintain with him, and not by quitting this relation in or-

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der to reflect on its terms,” and if “Sexuality supplies the example of this relation” such that “the other sex is an alterity borne by a being as an essence and not as the reverse of his identity” (TI 121; TeI 94), how do social structures affect, inform, constitute, or condition the relation I maintain with the Other? If sexuality is “accomplished before being reflected on” (TI 121; TeI 94), what is incorporated into the notion of accomplishment? Does Levinas exploit an ambiguity that allows him both to assume the sexual, racial, or political norms that are given in a particular society, so that he can endorse, without appearing to, a patriarchal and Zionist understanding of paternity and fecundity, by presenting himself as a philosopher who undercuts those norms by disengaging ethics from politics, and claiming not to prejudge the identity of individuals? If so, how are these two directions played out, and how are they implicated in Levinas’s reflections on time and history? I argue that in order to understand Levinas’s philosophy of time, it must be read as a response to Heidegger’s critique of the Western metaphysical concept of time. Heidegger maintains that metaphysics, from Aristotle on, has been sustained by a concept of time that is based on a confusion about being and time. He characterizes the tradition as adhering to a naive metaphysics of presence. Without elucidating the precise way in which it understands either time or being, Western metaphysics has inherited from the Greeks a concept of time that privileges the present. The assumed priority of the present is based on a particular conception of being. Heidegger contends that the meaning of being is in need of clarification, and that the tradition has been misled in assuming that being can be understood as present-at-hand: that is, the kind of being that pertains to things, but not to humans. Heidegger argues that time should be understood as experienced by Dasein. Since our finitude is integral to our being-human, Heidegger argues that it is the future that should have priority in thinking time, and not the present. By interpreting the future in a more original way than the Western philosophical tradition has done, Heidegger wants to distance himself from the naive metaphysics of presence that he thinks pervades that tradition. Levinas argues that Heidegger does not manage to overcome the traditional privilege of the present in his reinterpretation of time. He suggests that Heidegger’s emphasis of Dasein’s finitude does not escape the priority of the present, but remains caught up in it, since

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Heidegger’s understanding of death is not radical enough. For Levinas, death is absolutely other. He claims that Heidegger’s notion of beingtoward-death amounts to a recuperation of the metaphysics of presence. Heidegger thinks that Dasein is individuated by death, and stresses the anticipation of death, by understanding our mortality as a structuring part of life. Death, for Heidegger, becomes the ground of possibility. For Levinas, death’s alterity is intractable. Not only is death (like the feminine) mysterious and essentially unknowable; it is also primarily the death of the other that is significant for Levinas, rather than my own death. Given the primacy that Heidegger wants to grant temporality, and the fact that his understanding of history is grounded in his account of temporality, it would seem that he must embrace a relativist historicism. But things are not so simple. Similarly, given that Levinas appeals to a “beyond history,” it would seem that he wants to appeal to precisely the timeless or eternal values that Heidegger appears, at first glance, to reject—but once again, things are not so straightforward. Levinas understands the time of philosophy as diachrony, and this must be thought through in relation to his claims to go beyond the thesis of the primacy of history. He emphasizes the transcendence of the face of the Other, but just as time cannot be thought outside the social relation, so the face cannot be thought outside the political. Levinas offers an account of the instant as irreducible to time. He claims that Heidegger overlooks the specific dynamic of the instant. Heidegger’s account of time stresses the unity of the ecstases (the past, present, and future), rather than their divergence, and tends to dislodge the priority of the present in favor of the future. Levinas sees this as a totalizing gesture, one that he seeks to disrupt. He sees time as diachronous, and as inevitably bound up with the other. While Heidegger stresses that no one can die in my place, Levinas emphasizes the importance of dying for the other, of sacrifice, of substitution. In keeping with his objection to Heidegger’s subordination of ethics to ontology, Levinas sees the Other as imposing a responsibility on the I in a way that interrupts the enjoyment and complacency of a subject that sees itself as the organizing center of its own world. For Levinas, my obligation to the Other is infinite, and my responsibility is born in an immemorial past—a past that cannot be adequately represented in the language of

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presence, a past that defies any attempt to reduce it to a present or a memory over which I maintain supremacy. I hope to clarify Levinas’s philosophy of time, not only in order establish the importance of this aspect of Levinas’s philosophy as a central but neglected aspect of his ethics of alterity, but also to show its relevance for wider issues in contemporary philosophy. Debates about politics and postmodernism, and feminist and race theory, for example, are often organized around impasses created by an incapacity to think about history in a nuanced way. I review these impasses and suggest ways in which the problems that Heidegger and Levinas bring to light in rethinking time can be used to address them, while also pointing out the limitations inherent in their philosophies with regard to feminist politics.

Abbreviations

Jacques Derrida A

Aporias

Adieu

Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas

AM

“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” trans. R. Berezdevin, in Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11–48

GT

Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money (Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]; Donner le temps: 1. La fausse monnaie [Paris: Galilée, 1991]) “Ousia and Gramme¯: A Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 31–67

OG

VM

“Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 79–153

Jürgen Habermas WW

“Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 431–56

Martin Heidegger BP

Basic Problems of Phenomenology

BT

Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)

GP

Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie

HCT

History of the Concept of Time

MF

The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic

xviii

Abbreviations

PLT

Poetry, Language, Thought

SZ

Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979)

TB

“Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 1–24

1975

See TI

1981

See OB

AE

Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence, 2d ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978)

AN

“L’Ancien et le nouveau,” in L’Ancien et le nouveau, ed. J. Doré et al. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1982), pp. 23–37

BV

Beyond the Verse

Emmanuel Levinas

CPP

Collected Philosophical Papers

DE

De l’existence à l’extistant

DEHH En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1982) DEL

“Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 47–70.

DMT

Dieu, la mort et le temps

DP

“Dieu et la philosophie”

DQV

De Dieu qui vient à l’idèe

DR

“Diachrony and Representation”

DRE

“Diachronie et représentation,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 55.4 (1985): 85–98

E

De l’évasion

EE

Existence and Existents

EI

Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985) [Original French publication: Ethique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Arthème Fayard et Radio France, 1982)]

GWC

Of God Who Comes to Mind

HH

Humanisme de l’autre homme

HS

Hors sujet

MH

“Martin Heidegger and Ontology”

MO

“Martin Heidegger et Ontologie”

Abbreviations MP

xix

“Mourir pour . . . ,” in Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), pp. 219–30

MT

La mort et le temps (Paris: l’Herne, 1991)

OB

Otherwise than Being or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981)

ON

“The Old and the New” (1980), in Time and the Other, and Other Essays, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 121– 38

OS

Outside the Subject

QR

“Quelques réflexions sur le philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” Esprit 2.26 (1934): 199–208

RP

“Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. S. Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 62–71

TA

Le temps et l’autre

TeI

Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961)

TI

Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975)

TO

Time and the Other, and Other Essays, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987)

Time, Death, and the Feminine

Notes to Preface 1

Jacques Derrida has recognized this in “Violence and

Metaphysics.” In Writing and Difference. Trans. A. Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978, pp. 79-153. “At This Moment In This Very Work Here I am.” Trans. R. Berezdevin. In Re-reading Levinas. Ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 11-48. Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. 2

Representative of this tendency is Alain Finkielkraut. The

Wisdom of Love. Trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Introduction

D

e s p i t e t h e f a c t that Levinas’s notion of time is central to his philosophy, it is singularly neglected even by self-proclaimed Levinasians. There are two major reasons for its neglect. First, if we are looking for a clearly laid-out theory of temporality that can be abstracted from the rest of Levinas’s philosophy and presented as a more or less independent theory, we will not find one. Unlike Husserl’s lectures on internal time-consciousness, or Heidegger’s Being and Time, there is no single text in which Levinas expounds his ideas on time in a systematic fashion.1 Rather, Levinas’s views on time are scattered throughout his corpus. This should not be taken as an indication that Levinas has little to say about time, or that what he says is too unsystematic or insubstantial to merit philosophical attention. On the contrary, I maintain that Levinas’s reflections on time play an organizing role in his own philosophy, and that, without a full appreciation of his philosophy of time, we also lack the means to properly understand notions that are generally recognized as central to his work, such as the saying and the said. Furthermore, I suggest that Levinas’s thoughts on time will remain inaccessible unless they are understood as having emerged out of what was, at least initially, his wholesale immersion in Heidegger’s critique of the traditional metaphysical view of time in Being and Time. Not only do Levinas’s views on time merit serious attention in their own right, but they also constitute, in my view, a far-reaching critique of Heidegger’s understanding of temporality. This brings me to the second reason for the relative neglect of Levinas’s ideas on time and their significance. Readers of Levinas, and even Heideggerians, often lack the requisite mastery of Heidegger’s complex theory of temporality to be able to recognize that Levinas’s philosophy of time also constitutes an

2

Introduction

astute and careful critique of Heidegger. Despite the fact that Heidegger unambiguously asserts that the relation between being and time is the fundamental question of philosophy—“Being and time, this is the basic problem!” (MF 147)—it is only recently that Heidegger commentators have begun to provide nuanced readings of this question.2 The failure of even some Heideggerians to engage the details of Heidegger’s complex critique of traditional ideas of time in the Western tradition, and the theory of ecstatico-horizonal temporality he proposes in its place, is informed by one of two tendencies. The temptation is either to focus on Part 1 of Being and Time, rather than Part 2, where Heidegger reworks the analyses he provided in Part 1 in explicitly temporal terms, or to assume (wrongly, in my view) that temporality is no longer a major concern in the later Heidegger. I think it can be shown that Heidegger’s concern with temporality was an abiding one, and that far from abandoning it, much of his later work can be seen as attempts to confront the inadequacies of his earlier treatment of the question of time.3 Along with reformulating the project of fundamental ontology, Heidegger is forced to rethink some of his earlier insights into temporality, but this does not signify the end of his attempt to negotiate the problems of time. It signifies, rather, the need to continue to do so. Levinas brings into relief some of the shortcomings of Heidegger’s early view of temporality in a way that is congruent with his questioning of some of the fundamental philosophical commitments informing Heidegger’s position. Heidegger sees his corrective task as the bringing to light of a paradox that sustains the tradition, but to which the tradition cannot admit. Metaphysics has obscured from itself the fact that it has used time to think being, and being to think time, without acknowledging that the very interpretations of both time and being that are in operation feed off one another in subterranean ways. In order to sort out the confusion, Heidegger reopens the question of the meaning of being, and sees the meaning of time as intrinsic to his questioning of Being. His positive contribution is to provide a new interpretation of Being, and to show how this project is impossible without also providing a new interpretation of time—one that takes seriously the new interpretation of Being. Whether Heidegger can avoid the circularity that he identifies in metaphysics, or whether he merely repeats it at another level, by being caught within the logic of the same, is a question that Levinas

Introduction

3

brings to the fore.4 More precisely, Levinas asks whether Heidegger has not unwittingly remained within the very metaphysics of presence that he sought to go beyond. One of my tasks in what follows is to clarify what is meant by the phrase “metaphysics of presence”—an idea that is referred to much more than it is understood—and to show that a proper understanding of this issue is implicated in theories concerned with implementing political and social change. I want, in other words, to establish some lines of connection between the question of time that is so fundamental for both Heidegger and Levinas, and some wider issues that are being debated not only in strictly philosophical circles, but also in the nonacademic press of the left.5 I want to establish some common ground between what might seem to some an abstruse issue—how Heidegger and Levinas think time—and the debate over postmodernism and politics that is taking place among those who are politically engaged, because I think the question of time provides resources for clarifying some basic problems about history. A lack of clarity about how to think historical processes often informs a dialogue that can misfire, if it takes place at all, between those who profess their allegiance, in some shape or form, to postmodern ideas, and those who profess their allegiance, to whatever degree, to an idea of rationality that is assumed to be under attack by postmodernists. One example of such a (non)dialogue—an exchange in which the participants seem to be constantly talking across each other—is the way that some liberals or democrats assume that anyone who does not hold rationality as an unimpeachable ideal cannot really be serious about advocating or supporting a democratic society, while others believe that democracy is only impeded by the baggage that comes with outmoded rationalist assumptions it inherits from Enlightenment thinking. Such exchanges are often expressed in terms of the difference between those who espouse a radical politics and express an impatience with postmodern ideas as obfuscating the real issues, and those who find at least some aspects of postmodernism (with all the qualifications that such a label now calls for) useful for critically pursuing a leftist politics.6 Why might a book on Levinas, Heidegger, and time be a good place to address such questions, particularly from the point of view of feminism? Not only because Levinas’s notion of the feminine plays a major

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Introduction

role in his critique of Heidegger, not only because the notion of time that we tend to take for granted—and which Levinas and Heidegger encourage us to bring into question—underlies the impasse that attempts to think about history have run into, but also because Heidegger’s political allegiance to Nazism, and Levinas’s pacific response to that allegiance, provides us with a startling example of two major philosophical figures whose relationship labors under the weight of a war that has forced many of us to confront crucial questions with a renewed urgency. These questions include the nature of violence, the inhumanity of humanity, the limits of rational discourse, the capacity of nations to authorize and legitimate the extermination of peoples on the basis of their very identity, and the need for ethical and political reflection that the mass genocide of the twentieth century provokes. The experience out of which Levinas’s question emerges is not only a philosophical one, but also the historical, personal, political, and ethical experience of living through the Holocaust as a Jew. His question is: How can philosophy have allowed this to happen? What is philosophy, given the events of the twentieth century? If philosophy has nothing to say about such events, then what is its role? These questions take on all the more urgency and poignancy in the light of the fact that Levinas, prior to 1933, was a Heideggerian, and Heidegger, as it turned out, was a Nazi.

The Heidegger Affair The publication of Victor Farías’s Heidegger and Nazism in 1987 provoked a burgeoning literature on a topic that had long been at the center of Levinas’s philosophical meditations.7 Pierre Bourdieu, in a more nuanced consideration of the issue, suggests that “we must abandon the opposition between a political reading and a philosophical reading, and undertake a simultaneously political and philosophical dual reading of writings which are defined by their fundamental ambiguity, that is, by reference to two social spaces, which correspond to two mental spaces.”8 Jean-François Lyotard likewise refuses to reduce attempts to think about Heidegger’s Nazism to an easy choice between his politics and his philosophy: “One should not seek to neutralize the in-

Introduction

5

trinsic irregularity of this [Heidegger] affair by regulating it through the alternative: if a great thinker, then not a Nazi; if a Nazi, then not a great thinker—the implication being: either negligible Nazism or negligible thought.”9 Lyotard’s gesture of refusal is reiterated by Maurice Blanchot, who describes Heidegger’s Being and Time as “An event of the first magnitude,” “a great moment in the history of thought.” Being and Time, says Blanchot, produced in him a “veritable intellectual shock,” one that he calls “impossible to diminish,” but he also emphasizes “that Heidegger’s irreparable fault lies in his silence concerning the Final Solution.”10 Jürgen Habermas, who is not Heidegger’s most sympathetic reader, affirms that “With Being and Time, Heidegger proved himself, almost overnight, to be a thinker of the first rank.”11 Habermas regards Being and Time as a “pathbreaking achievement” (WW 438), and writes that Heidegger’s “new beginning still presents probably the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel” (WW 432). Habermas again (WW 435): Questionable political conduct on the part of a thinker certainly throws a shadow on his work. But the Heideggerian oeuvre, especially the thought in Being and Time, has attained a position of such eminence among the philosophical ideas of our century that it is simply foolish to think that the substance of the work could be discredited, more than five decades later, by political assessments of Heidegger’s fascist commitments.

Gadamer adds his voice: “It is not easy to get by Heidegger. . . . Whoever thinks we can here and now dispense with Heidegger has not begun to fathom how difficult it was and remains for anyone not to dispense with him, as opposed to making a fool of oneself with supercilious gestures.”12 Levinas echoes Gadamer when he asks about Being and Time:13 Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was the interlocutor and equal of the greatest—those very few—founders of European philosophy? that here was someone, this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer?

I cite these passages in which philosophers, not only those who have been greatly influenced by Heidegger’s thought, but also those less engaged with it, record their admiration for him as a thinker of the first rank, to mark the impossibility of circumventing, avoiding, or refuting

6

Introduction

Heidegger’s philosophical contribution by any simple route or in any definitive way—a thought that is central to Levinas’s philosophy. The high esteem Levinas has for Heidegger is based principally on Being and Time, rather than the later works. As he puts it in an interview,14 My admiration for Heidegger is above all an admiration for Sein und Zeit. I always try to relive the ambiance of those readings when 1933 was still unthinkable. . . . I think the later work of Heidegger, which does not produce in me a comparable impression [compared with Sein und Zeit], remains valuable through Sein und Zeit. Not, you well know, that it is insignificant, but it is much less convincing. I do not say this owing to Heidegger’s political engagements, taken several years after Sein und Zeit, even though I have never forgotten those engagements, and though Heidegger has never been exculpated in my eyes from his participation in National-Socialism.

If Levinas resists the idea that his regard for Being and Time and his reluctance to read Heidegger’s later work is governed by his reaction to Heidegger’s support of National Socialism, there is no doubt that his own philosophy reflects the gravity of the suffering, fear, and pain that he experienced as a Jew. Levinas dedicates Otherwise than Being “To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism.” Even Heidegger’s harshest and most relentless critics have to admit that, in the words of Richard Wolin, “Few thinkers can claim as auspicious a philosophical debut as could Heidegger with Being and Time.”15 Wolin concedes this much, but holds Heidegger up as an example of what happens when we indulge in the “metaphysical hubris” that he associates with what he regards as “a disdain of traditional methods of philosophical argumentation” and “a philosophically conditioned neglect of empirical findings.”16 The implied answer to the question that Wolin thinks must “inevitably” arise—Did Heidegger’s rejection of traditional philosophical methods “adversely affect the philosopher’s capacity for political discernment?”17—is that if Heidegger had stuck to traditional philosophy, perhaps his political judgment would have been less impaired, perhaps he would not have succumbed to “political misdeeds” so “egregious.”18

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In question, for Levinas, is neither Heidegger’s greatness, nor his inability to adhere to empirical evidence and observe the methods of argumentation employed by traditional philosophers. Rather than lamenting the fact that Heidegger’s thought is insufficiently rigorous, and suggesting that it is this failure to live up to the high standards of traditional philosophy that underlies his Nazi involvement, Levinas reverses the logic of implication. Willing to take the risk of “reversing certain notions which seem most evident to common sense and to the wisdom of nations,” he asks whether it is the very standards held dear by the tradition of philosophy itself that are at fault.19 He asks whether the standards of traditional philosophy are as indisputable as they take themselves to be. Since, in Levinas’s view, the “essential contribution” of Heidegger’s thought was his “new way of reading the history of philosophy,” the problem is not the extent to which he repudiated that history, but the extent to which he remained captive to it. It is Levinas’s conviction that “the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism . . . stems from the essential possibility of elemental Evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had not sufficiently insured itself.”20 In question, then, is what it means to designate the possibility of the Nazi Holocaust as somehow inscribed in the very essence of Western thinking. For Lacoue-Labarthe, too, “In the apocalypse at Auschwitz, it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed.”21 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy speak of “the logic of fascism.” To speak of a “logic of fascism” is to say that “a certain logic is fascist, and that this logic is not wholly foreign to the general logic of rationality inherent in the metaphysics of the subject.”22 Levinas performs the same kind of operation on Heidegger’s philosophy as Heidegger does when he reads Nietzsche as still beholden to metaphysics in his attempt to overcome it. In arguing that the metaphysical tradition has covered over the necessity for raising the question of the meaning of Being, Heidegger sees as his task the clarification of this question. According to Levinas, Heidegger’s renewal of the question of Being, while it succeeds in bringing ontological clarity to metaphysics, does not succeed in dislodging a still more pervasive problem. More fundamental than the oblivion to which Western philosophy has al-

8

Introduction

lowed the question of Being to fall prey, is its persistent privileging of ontology over ethics, or the same over the other. In effect, Levinas accepts Heidegger’s reading of the history of philosophy as one that is constituted by a series of failed attempts to raise the question of Being. He accepts that, in this sense, Western metaphysics is a repetition of the same question, a question to which Heidegger has brought conceptual clarity; but he asks whether, after all, this is the preeminent philosophical question.

Heidegger’s Reorientation of the Tradition Heidegger calls for a reawakening of the question of Being. According to Heidegger, philosophers of the metaphysical tradition failed to articulate the specific way in which humans exist, or to raise the question of their mode of being, as distinct from the nature of other objects in the world. An example of this that has taken on a certain privilege, in part because Derrida and others have taken it up in their criticism of the absolute status of binary oppositions, is the Cartesian view of the world. Descartes’s fundamental distinction between two different types of substance, res extensa and res cogitans, has led to a series of dualisms (for example, materiality/intellect, emotion/reason, passivity/activity), whose autonomy is brought into question by the discourse that has come to be known as poststructuralism. Heidegger contends that Descartes’s mistake was to assume not only that human thought and extended substance could be understood as independent of one another, but that they also partake of the same basic nature: that they are both things in the world that share the same ontological structure. Heidegger’s notion of Dasein represents a breakthrough in that it provides a way of interpreting human beings in terms of a particular character of their existence, one that is peculiar to humans, and which marks them out as ontologically distinct from other objects, such as merely physical things. Rather than conceiving of humans as subjects who are set over against a world of objects, whose task it is to come to know the world objectively, rather than construing humans on the model of animal rationale—that is, essentially as animals, but as animals that have the additional capacity for rational thought—Heidegger pre-

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fers to use the term Dasein to emphasize that we are there in the world. The distinguishing characteristic that Heidegger thinks marks Dasein is its peculiar mode of existence. Dasein exists in such a way as to have its being as an issue for it, or to have an understanding of Being, even if this understanding is “vague and average.” In Heidegger’s terms, such a way of being is preontological, and, as such, subject to ontological clarification.23 To put this another way, Dasein’s being is in question. To be human is not to have a determinate existence, but rather precisely to be open to possibilities, including the potentiality of determining how to be—how to live, what to do. Heidegger reserves the term Existenz (“existence”) for Dasein’s mode of being, making a distinction between Dasein’s way of being and the mode of being of other objects. In Heidegger’s terms, objects can exist in two different modes (and in this sense, not even objects have a determinate existence). Their modes depend upon their relationship to Dasein. They can either be present-at-hand (vorhanden) or ready-to-hand (zuhanden). A piece of equipment in the service of some operation serves a function. As such, it is not particularly noticeable—it is simply being used for the purpose for which it was created. It has its place in a context in which it serves the purpose for which it was designed—in Heidegger’s terms, it is ready-tohand. That same tool, if it is lying unused in a corner, or if it is broken, has a mode of existence of the present-at-hand. In the latter case, the tool has become a mere object, and ontologically it is no different from a stone. No longer serving an unobtrusive function within a world, endowed with meaning by those who take up tools in their work, the tools that lie unused, or fail us (the pen runs out of ink, or the pencil lead snaps), now become available for thematizing as objects or material things, bearing physical properties. This present-at-hand mode of existence informs Descartes’s conception of the material world as extended substance. When an object thus comes to the fore, it signifies a breakdown of our usual unthematized relationship to the object in its equipmental function, and a disruption in the circuit of whatever “circumspective concern” in which Dasein is engaged in a world, or an environment of projects for which equipment serves a useful purpose. Western metaphysics is mistaken, in Heidegger’s view, for interpreting objects first and foremost as present-at-hand, when this mode of existence is derivative of, and secondary to, their character as ready-to-hand—that

10

Introduction

is, their serving a useful function as equipment in a given context of significance. Metaphysics is also mistaken in applying this interpretation of objects to Dasein itself, when it is Dasein that confers on objects their significance in the first place. According to Heidegger, the same mistake is extended to Western philosophical interpretations of time, which, following Aristotle, have treated time “as it shows itself in circumspective concern (umsichtigen Besorgen)” (BT 473; SZ 421).

Descartes’s Obstinate Legacy for Feminist and Race Theory Despite Heidegger’s critique of the ontology that Descartes shares with the rest of the Western metaphysical tradition, the Cartesian legacy has remained intact in ways that are not always immediately obvious. The impact of Descartes’s distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, and the associated dualisms spawned by his mind/body dualism, is far-reaching. Discernible not only in Kant and modern philosophy, which Heidegger thinks adheres to a fundamentally Cartesian metaphysics (see BT 45; SZ 24), dualism also characterizes central debates in the social sciences, such as that over whether humans are susceptible to the same science as other objects in the world. The idea that things in the world and human beings are fundamentally ontologically similar—that they have basically the same kind of being—has been taken to suggest that the same kind of knowledge is appropriate for both types of things. Hence, there is an epistemological bias toward a scientific model, whereby science is deemed to be an adequate type of knowledge for the study of human beings, just as it is considered a legitimate method of inquiry for questions concerning the reality of natural objects. The Cartesian legacy extends to contemporary discussions over essentialism, which have played themselves out in various ways in the context of the concepts of sex and gender, and race and ethnicity. Central to such debates is a reworking of the classic nature/nurture distinction. Recent work in feminist theory and race theory has exposed the need for a thorough confrontation with the concept of history that is often invoked by those who argue against the view that gender or race is grounded in some unchanging, ahistorical, determinist category (such

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11

as innate characteristics, or a feminine or racial essence). The suggestion that race or gender is in some sense socially constructed, culturally mediated, or historically constituted, has served to combat racist or sexist assumptions that traditionally have been used to constrain the behavior and potential of certain groups of individuals. Presupposing some timeless or eternal essence has advanced and substantiated the privileges and claims of other groups. The idea that gender, race, and sexuality are, in some sense, created or produced has been a productive one, helping to secure major political gains in civil rights for minorities and women. But if social-constructionist views have facilitated key changes, they have also led to obfuscation and aporia. Bodies, for example, and their relationship to gender, have been obscured. Afraid of admitting biological determinism by the back door, and preferring to concentrate on cultural roles in order to explain women’s oppression, feminist theorists have veered away from any sustained consideration of the role bodies might have in that oppression. Similarly, there has been a recent call to view race as a construct, and a corresponding suspicion of any gesture that nods in the direction of acknowledging that even if the body does not ground race in an uncomplicated or determining way, physical aspects of racial identity still have an overwhelming significance as markers of race. Race is inscribed in bodily and visible ways, and bodies are made to symbolize race by bearing its marks in complex and ambiguous ways that demand interpretation. We ignore racial and sexual difference only at the cost of giving up our attempts to decode how the body comes to represent racialized and sexualized meanings. If we eliminate bodies from our analyses, in the interests of maintaining that race or gender difference is, or should be, unimportant, and that therefore its physical manifestations should be overlooked, then we deprive ourselves of interrogating a privileged and organizing site for our concepts of race and gender. At the same time, we implicitly appeal to a projected future ideal of sameness, a future in which everyone is treated the same, irrespective of race, gender, sexual preference, or ethnicity. In order to achieve such a future, we seriously oversimplify the significance that bodies have for representations, and that images and appearances have for understanding regimes of race and gender. For better or worse, ours is a severely visual culture. Hence bel hooks, in a book whose title draws attention to the necessity of em-

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Introduction

phasizing, rather than downplaying or bracketing, the importance of physical appearance, argues that “Moving away from the notion that an emphasis on sameness is the key to racial harmony, aware feminist activists have insisted that anti-racist struggle is best advanced by theory that speaks about the importance of acknowledging the way positive recognition and acceptance of difference is a necessary starting point as we work to eradicate white supremacy.” She suggests that “Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.”24 Recent feminist theory and race theory have gone some way toward redressing the obfuscation of bodies, realizing that to simply set aside, ignore, or bracket bodies, biology, and materiality, in order to focus on the constructed or symbolic meanings of self identity, is to recast the Cartesian privilege of mind over body. Here, gender is construed as a psychological or mental interpretation of physical or material realities, or as an active or voluntary choice of traits that were previously seen as prescribed by our bodily nature. But if the emphasis of gender over sex alleviated the problem of determinism, by conceiving of gender as malleable and changeable, rather than as resulting from our inherent and unchanging natures, it created new problems. It papered over, rather than thinking through, the relationship between sex and gender. In much the same way, in his anxiety to overcome Cartesian metaphysics, Heidegger failed to pose the question of bodily significance. To Levinas’s credit, he undertakes to correct Heidegger’s neglect of bodies, and he does so by returning to Descartes, not in order to reinvigorate his metaphysical dualism, but to complicate it. To focus on gender at the expense of sex, or to construe race as an acculturated concept rather than seeing color, or some other physical attribute, as a sign of race, does nothing to alleviate the fact that the female sex and black bodies are still the loci of discrimination. What is needed, then, is not a willful avoidance of bodies, but a thorough and nuanced account of them and their relationship to symbolic aspects of identity. Even if Levinas has not thought through the complexities of race and gender in relation to bodies, his account of materiality, sensibility, and enjoyment, and their relation to representation, constitution, and language can contribute to this project.

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If bodies have been the site of obfuscation of race and gender theorists who, in their well-intentioned quest for equality, argue for the essential similarity of races and genders, this attempt to privilege an ideal sameness that is, or should be, culturally produced entails another set of problems. I have in mind Kwame Anthony Appiah’s view that race does not exist. In an essay entitled “The Illusions of Race” appearing in In My Father’s House, Appiah undertakes a critique of Du Bois’s essay “The Conservation of Races.”25 The contours of Appiah’s critique are organized around two poles. At one extreme there is the assumption that any concept of race must ultimately appeal, even if implicitly, to a biological or scientific definition. At the other extreme is the assumption that, if it is not defined biologically or scientifically, then race does not exist. Informing Appiah’s culturalist position is an antiessentialism reminiscent of the suspicion evoked by French feminists in recent debates among feminist theorists. Coming to the defense of both Du Bois and French feminists are those race theorists and feminist theorists who want to retain a concept of race or a concept of sexual difference that is not susceptible to a biologically or physically determinist interpretation. For Appiah, race is an illusion. He says, “The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world that can do all we ask race to do for us. . . . [race] refers to nothing in the world at all. Talk of ‘race’ is particularly distressing for those of us who take culture seriously. For, where race works . . . it works as an attempt at metonym for culture, and it does so only at the price of biologizing what is culture, ideology.”26 Robert Gooding-Williams echoes Appiah’s position when he asks, in an article that is largely a defense of Appiah against Lucius Outlaw’s attack, “why not scuttle the language of race altogether?”27 Outlaw, on the other hand, wants to maintain the language of race, not as an essentialist concept, but as one that has as its referent a social, rather than a biological, reality. He says, “Though biological and other sciences have shown that the complexes of characteristics thought to determine raciality do not constitute an unvarying essence that is determinable and constitutive of ‘natural kinds,’ this does not mean that, thereby, there is no real referent for the term ‘race,’ nor that the term is without positive social significance, even though it has been employed in rationalizations against racial ‘others.’”28 Outlaw is responding to Appiah’s point that there is no significant genetic variation between Africans, Europeans, and Asians. As Appiah

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says, “Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations.”29 Despite this—a fact that few would contest—Outlaw specifies the importance of retaining a concept of race in terms of preserving racial and ethnic group identities: “What is a major concern for many, myself included, is the formulation of a cogent and viable concept of race that will be of service to the noninvidious conservation of racial and ethnic groups—a formulation, and the politics that it facilitates, that also avoids the quagmire of chauvinism.”30 Summing up his position on the continuing need to articulate a meaningful concept of race, Outlaw says, “As many persons in America continue to struggle to consolidate the realization of justice with harmony in areas of our collective life in which raciality and ethnicity are at issue in important and appropriate ways, I remain unconvinced that we must give up on the notion of race, the difficulties of definition and ugly legacies of racism not withstanding. The challenge is to find ways to conserve a revised understanding of race that is both socially useful and consistent with a revised notion of democratic justice that is appropriately balanced between recognizing and valuing racial and ethnic cultural groupings and preserving the best achievements of modern Enlightenments and the political revolution of Liberalism.”31 Tommy L. Lott also supports Du Bois’ attempt to conserve the notion of race, arguing that Du Bois appeals to “a revisionist analysis of the concept of race that eschews a biological essentialist account of race identity.”32 The basic disagreement over the concept of race represented by Appiah and Gooding-Williams on the one hand, and Outlaw and Lott on the other hand, can be stated thus: Appiah and Gooding-Williams believe that any concept of race must of necessity ultimately appeal to biology, and that therefore the concept should be abandoned completely. Outlaw and Lott want to preserve a nonessentialist concept of race. There has been a consistent failure to think through the complexity of exactly how femininity, or racial identity, has been shaped or formed through what are often loosely and inadequately referred to as “cultural,” “social,” or “historical” forces. The vague assumption that processes of construction are somehow responsible for social identity has sometimes merely substituted one monolithic causal model for another, so that society, for example (rather than nature, or biology, or the body), is con-

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ceived as an originating force. Such causal models cannot account for the agency that individuals or transgressive social groups must have, in order to successfully subvert or challenge social dictates. Such models are also often plagued with overly simple and naive views of their allegedly founding concepts. If social norms produce gender and race, how are we to conceive of their normative dimensions, and how are we to think of the processes by which stereotypes of gender and race can be challenged and reshaped? Is “society” construed as if it were made up of a collectivity whose needs and desires could become equally transparent to all its individual members? Are these desires to be construed as potentially amenable to one another, and do the individuals, who are characterized by apparently readily identifiable and knowable desires, have equal ability, willingness, and opportunity to articulate these desires, or to participate in democratic and representative procedures that would safeguard their posited needs and desires? Are race and gender constituted independently of one another, and independently of class and sexuality, or precisely inextricable with them? Wherever questions are raised about social roles, or about how to achieve balance and harmony between individuals living in a collectivity, it is not long before the issue of how to reach rational consensus comes to mind, and whether—even if an adequate means for its achievement could be found—this is the main goal toward which we should be striving. By what criteria is rationality to be judged, or is the very standard of rationality found wanting as a means of ensuring fairness and justice? How is the subject that underlies conceptions of what a just state should look like constituted, and is the model of subjectivity to which theories of justice appeal an adequate model? Must we insist that reason does and should motivate the subject’s action, or can we admit that subjects engage in acts for a multiplicity of sometimes conflicting feelings and desires that are often not available for wholesale rational dissection? Do power, fear, envy, greed, lust, jealousy, and insecurity constitute motivating factors more often than we would like to admit, and if they do, how might subjectivity be conceived to take account of this? Are desires repressed, and are subjects in denial in ways that render the insistent emphasis on rationality as the impetus for actions, if not meaningless, at least beside the point in many cases? Must we adhere to a model of the subject as strictly rational, in the face of evidence that suggests that many

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Introduction

of us do not act rationally, much of the time? What if rationality itself does not constitute the self-evident, autonomous ideal that many of us take it to be, but rather rests upon a realm of desires which it must exclude and deny in order to maintain itself? If unacknowledged desires and emotions (such as force and power) in fact help to shape the authority of reason, then must we grant that the distinction between the rational and the irrational is not so clear-cut as it might seem at first sight, and that what reason takes itself to be is in fact dependent upon its excluded other, which functions as its supplement? Are we to naively and idealistically conceive of subjects as potentially self-transparent agents in control of their desires, or are we to concede that subjects are often embroiled in desires that are more or less opaque to them, and over which they have varying degrees of control? If we do concede that we are not wholly rational subjects, and that it is not even clear that it would be a better world if we were all perfectly rational agents, what do we do about ethical and political problems, how do we think about racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia? Where do we even begin to try to sort out these problems? One useful place to start, I suggest, is to think about temporality and history. What assumptions about time do our usual models of social change employ, and how do these assumptions need to be revised in the light of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s reflections on time and history?

Historical Consciousness and Social Change One of the problems that feminist and race theorists confront is the need to take account of the historical nature of their own discourses. The civil-rights and suffragist movements procured equal rights within some limits, and constitute the indispensable background on the basis of which current progress continues to build. The strategies that secured these rights were a crucial and hugely significant first step, but they were not enough. They replicated some of the problems that characterized the oppressive regimes to which they responded. Feminist theorists need to find a way of acknowledging their debt to first-wave feminism without being trapped within its parameters, which may have been appropriate for the conditions that elicited them, but which now impose constraints

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upon feminism. African-American theorists of race are struggling with the question of how to remain true to the achievements of civil-rights activists, on whose shoulders younger African-Americans stand, but sometimes without acknowledging their central tenets. There are those who advocate a race-neutral and gender-neutral society, and who see themselves as playing down the significance of race and gender as part of working toward that ideal. Advocates of social change face a dilemma. How is it possible to legitimate the experiences of those who have been marginalized without either reinscribing their marginal status, or settling for the acceptance of a few token representatives of marginalized groups within prevailing power regimes? In other words, how can we change the social and symbolic roles that are predicated on a logic of exclusion, without perpetuating that logic? Rather than producing a fundamental challenge to structures that systematically privilege the rights of certain groups over others, change tends to occur in ways that are accommodated by a system that continues to survive and flourish through unacknowledged processes of exclusion. Thus, the illusion of significant change is achieved because a few token representatives are permitted to join the ranks of the moneyed middle classes at the expense of those that they leave behind in poverty. When some members of an oppressed group are allowed to stand for the group as a whole, a few are granted access to opportunities that enable them to rise above the conditions that oppress them. But their inclusion in, for example, a higher income bracket occurs only on the basis of the continuing exclusion of other members of the oppressed group, while the appearance of their inclusion is maintained, creating the false impression that racism and sexism are no longer serious problems. This eases the social conscience. Meanwhile, an underclass becomes increasingly entrenched in conditions that become more difficult to alter, given the ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. Within feminist theory and race theory this problem has been expressed most obviously under the heading of a politics of identity. The inadequacy of staking a claim for the inclusion and consideration of traditionally oppressed groups, defined on the basis of sex or skin color or ethnicity, can be articulated by reference to the logic of exclusion, and its tendency to reassert itself in different forms. There is a need to avoid ap-

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Introduction

pealing to the experience of certain groups by ignoring crucial differences between the members of those groups, and presenting the experiences of some members as unproblematically representative of all members. What establishes the validity of such experiences, and what guarantees their authority? In what ways are appeals to experience liable to underwrite and perpetuate the very logic of exclusion they are designed to unsettle, and how can such appeals avoid naively reinforcing precisely the stereotypes they are intended to undercut? There is a danger when feminists succeed in gaining a foothold for women in areas from which in the past they have been systematically excluded (access to education, professions, or honors that have habitually been reserved for men). The danger is that their success occurs only at the price of displacing the mechanism of exclusion onto others, who come to bear the burden that women as a group once carried. Typically, white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied women have been allowed to represent the group that feminism has benefited, with the result that the logic of exclusion remains in place, and operates in a fundamentally similar way. It merely finds new ways of expressing itself, and continues to oppress certain groups while disguising its discriminatory practices by celebrating the victories of a feminism that turns out to benefit only a minority of women, defining those women in racialized ways that remain for the most part invisible. Certain individuals are thus abjected in order that other individuals can rise above abjection. Women who have been moderately successful in economic and symbolic terms can also come to identify themselves with the values of the group to which they have managed to gain sometimes limited entry. Had it not been for the hard-won political victories of earlier feminists, women and girls would not have the luxury of taking for granted the opportunities available to them for higher education, entry into a myriad of professions, and acceptance in the workplace. To take on lifestyles available only to those with superior earning power, while insisting and perhaps believing that success has been achieved despite, and not because of, feminism, is disingenuous. It requires an ignorance of or a willful blindness to the historical conditions that made it possible for some women to claim that their success is due solely to individual merit. The point is not that no individual merit is involved, but rather that

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such individualist claims become a possibility only because certain basic political rights have been ascertained. The same ideals and strategies that were effective in securing basic rights for women are not necessarily appropriate for contemporary feminism. The situation has changed, and the changed conditions that early feminism helped to achieve call for a reassessment of what should constitute the current struggles of feminism, and how we should address the problems that remain. What is needed, then, is an acknowledgment of feminism’s past as a crucial part of the historical consciousness inherited by feminism’s present, as well as a refusal to allow the future of feminism to be bound by feminism’s past, through forcing it to adhere to strategies and policies that may turn out to be more constraining than helpful. What is needed, in other words, is a self-consciousness about where feminism is—the present of feminism—that neither entirely repudiates the legacy of its own past, as a developing social movement, nor dictates that its future can be determined only by that past. Feminism is no longer what it was, and to insist that it remain the same perhaps has more to do with a nostalgia for things past than the realities of the present or a concern for the future. Heidegger’s notion of the inauthentic past can help to shed light on the need to avoid taking over our past unthinkingly, thereby repeating the very error against which feminism reacts in combating gender stereotypes. Even if Heidegger’s own appeal to an authentic relation to the past, and his notion of repetition, is embroiled in political implications that need to be weighed carefully, his model of authentic retrieval and projection offers a useful way to rethink the problem of history. Levinas, for his part, in refocusing attention on the present in relation to materiality and corporeity, offers a corrective to Heidegger’s totalizing narrative, and provides a sophisticated way of thinking through sensibility and its interrelation to the intellect. Let me focus for a moment on the need to problematize the status and validity of the experiences to which discourses of social oppression have recourse.33 Feminists and race theorists have demanded equality, justice, and fairness by insisting that their stories be heard. Such demands appeal to identities that are delineated by markers of race and gender—marked, that is, by the very features that have served as a basis for discrimination against them. Opponents of feminism and of anti-

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Introduction

racists are liable to object that feminists or race activists are themselves being sexist or racist by insisting upon the significance of gender or race, when in fact, to be consistent, they should ignore the differences between races or sexes. To treat people equally, the objection runs, is not to emphasize their differences, but to treat them equally as individuals—to treat them as the same. The work that is done by the word “as” does not get unpacked very often. The histories of slavery and oppression that have contributed to the unequal treatment of races and sexes get covered over. An ideal of equality and sameness is appealed to which ignores the fact that present inequality is a result of past injustice, that women and minorities have not been granted equal opportunities, even formally, until fairly recently. The fact that equality is far from being achieved substantively is overlooked, as is the problem that Frantz Fanon analyzes under the heading of internalized racism. Achieving equality has as much to do with establishing a tradition of excellence, and frameworks within which women and minorities can excel. The importance of role models should not be underestimated. The presence of women who belong to minority groups in visible leadership roles opens up possibilities for the future that did not exist in the past. Recent legislation repealing affirmative-action policies in exchange for policies which are meant to take account of individuals as a whole takes no account of the fact that group identifications have a lasting legacy on individuals that is not going disappear overnight. Gender-blind and race-blind policies are in fact not blind, except to their own prejudicial beliefs that it is possible to ensure equality simply by claiming that all people should be treated equally. The belief that there is a level playing field, or that in fact one individual has as much freedom of opportunity as another, is manifestly false, and by no means follows from the fact that equality remains an ideal for which we should strive, and one that we might hope to achieve in the future. To treat the history of slavery as irrelevant to concerns of present social justice is to attempt to divorce the past from the present, to ignore its legacy. To suppose that the future equality for which we hope can be brought on by ignoring present inequalities is to imagine a future that does not yet exist by ignoring its difference from actually present circumstances. The view that slavery is in the past, and that this past has nothing to with us, amounts to a denial that the past matters or that it

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has continuing effects. Such denials are often couched in terms that preclude personal responsibility for slavery, and that express impatience with those who keep harping on about past evils, when it would be better to focus on the present. If it seems obvious that slavery is over, and things are much better now, it is far from obvious that its cumulate effects are over, or that things are so much better that we can afford to stop thinking about it. It might be easy for those of us who are not discriminated against on the basis of our race to forget the past, but it is not easy for those who are reminded on a daily basis, and never allowed to forget, that their color matters. One way of expressing the problem that needs to be thought through is the way that feminism and antiracism has become susceptible to appropriation by nonfeminist and racist interests. Large corporate companies present themselves as if they were to be congratulated on providing favorable conditions for working women, for example, thereby effectively claiming the successes of feminism for themselves, and defusing the need for feminism. Racists promote their views by extolling the virtues of a color-blind society, by willfully conflating the pretense that race is not a significant axis of discrimination in the present with a projected desirable future in which race is no longer an excuse for discrimination. To the extent that feminism or antiracism—like any social movement that is aimed at eliminating oppression—works toward its own demise, what is necessary is to work toward a future in which gender and race are no longer pertinent factors; but to act as if this future is already in place is to work against achieving such a future. To use the successes of feminism and antiracism as proof that discrimination is an issue of the past, that it no longer plays any role, is simply disingenuous. To regard feminism and antiracism and their targets as things of the past, as if they were inert objects that have no effects on the present or future, is to treat their histories’ development as if it were, in Heidegger’s terms, merely present-at-hand. There is a need to acknowledge our debt to feminism and antiracism to ensure the continuing importance and relevance of these movements so that their beneficiaries are not restricted to those who have already managed to overcome gender and race barriers. Unless feminism and antiracism address the concerns also of those who continue to populate the social and economic underclass, they can claim success only for those who have made it. Such success is severely compromised by the widespread social

22

Introduction

oppression that remains unaddressed, and which guarantees the progress of the privileged few at the cost of excluding others. The past, present, and future need to be thought of as separate, but not as discrete, categories. They feed and play off one another, such that the present inherits the benefit of past struggles; but they also exhibit independent characteristics that might best be thought of in epochal terms. Certain events (such as the vote) remain determinative for the progress and existence of feminism and antiracism, founding an era, and creating possibilities for new stages to emerge. Furthermore, although certain moments within the history of a movement for equality may capture and express its vitality, these should not necessarily carry over to all aspects, or all times. Certain demands are culturally, politically, or geographically specific, and need to be defined, explained, understood, and justified (or criticized) in local terms. We need an understanding of processes of social change that accommodates both a sense of continuity with the past and the possibility of and need for discontinuity. Social movements inherit a legacy, even as they look toward the future. Certain events instigate or emerge from discrete moments, interrupting, punctuating, and helping to shape the time of history that flows on. Perhaps Heidegger’s notion of ecstatic temporality, and Levinas’s insistence on uniqueness and novelty that the instant can confer, even as its newness gets canceled out in the passage of time, can provide different ways for thinking about models of social change. I follow up this suggestion in Chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 1 explores Levinas’s relation to feminism by focusing on the way in which his notion of the feminine has to be thought in terms of Levinas’s recasting of Heidegger’s ontological difference. I follow out the complexities of Levinas’s discussion of the feminine in the context of dwelling and habitation, paying particular attention to the notions of representation and enjoyment. I suggest that the conditionality of the feminine has to be thought in a way that is irreducible to the constituting movement of intentionality, according to the temporality of the anterior posterior, or the “after the fact.” Chapter 2 is largely devoted to Heidegger, although it also discusses Levinas’s critique of Heidegger. It is organized around the thematic concerns of bodies, others, and temporality in an attempt to explore both the legacies of Heidegger and Levinas for feminism, and the limitations of those legacies.

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The Need to Rethink Time and History One of the difficulties that has plagued the historicist view of culturally produced identities is the vagueness with which the processes at work in such production have been conceived. Foucault and Deleuze, among others, have helped to provide a more sophisticated conceptual language in which to pose questions about whether social forces function in ways that are more dynamic, fluid, and erratic, and less regular and hegemonic than causal, one-way models assume. Should power be conceived not so much in terms of oppressive regimes that operate on unsuspecting and resourceless subjects, but rather as systems in which energies can be circulated and channeled in different directions, by different groups, in the service of conflicting, parasitic, or complementary agendas? It is no accident that theorists such as Foucault and Deleuze assume a philosophical background in which Heidegger plays a major role. It is also no accident that their influences extend far beyond Heidegger, to incorporate views which often challenge Heidegger’s views. It is becoming increasingly evident that the notion of social construction, and the view of historical change that informs it, is in need of conceptual clarification, if we are to move beyond the impasses that have appeared in many areas of cultural studies, feminist theory, and race theory, and indeed in any political debate, insofar as the possibility of change is central to its concerns. Inherent in the notion of historical change are preconceptions about time. Heidegger’s contribution to rethinking these temporal preconceptions, and their relationship to ontology, has influenced, both directly and indirectly, many thinkers whose work has helped to reorient questions about social change. He suggests that what some philosophers treat as our most basic presuppositions about how we know the world, and what that knowledge is grounded upon, are in fact based upon temporal assumptions. That is, the epistemological approach, and its metaphysical underpinnings, rests upon distinctions that make sense only because of certain, often unacknowledged, preconceptions about time. When we posit basic philosophical distinctions, such as a priori versus a posteriori, we tend to assume that there is a difference between truth as timeless, eternal, supratemporal, or unchanging on the one hand, and temporal, contingent, changeable facts that are subject to

24

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flux, on the other hand. Whether or not we invoke an invisible Platonic realm of forms or eternal ideas as grounding a visible changing world of things, we retain the Platonic tendency of delineating truth according to a standard that does not change, a standard by which whatever changes can be measured, and, perhaps, to which it can be made to conform. Consider the conviction, for example, that there is, or must be, an ideal, fixed, or stable ground for rationality, truth, or order that is discoverable, and which could serve as a basis for organizing a just society. Or consider the belief that scientific research is based upon certain immutable truths or theories that are not subject to discussion or dispute. These timeless truths provide the framework for empirical research. Differentiating between that which changes and some eternal realm seems to be fundamental to the way we think of ourselves as capable of having knowledge about the world. Heidegger suggests that the way in which we conceptually divide the world into distinct ontological realms, or ways of being, is dependent on an implicit temporal distinction between the eternal or nontemporal and that which is in time. We ascribe basic truths to a foundational, permanent, unchanging realm, as opposed to a world of phenomena in transition, and subject to the vicissitudes of history; we assert that there is a realm of scientifically knowable and provable facts, as distinct from a realm of historically contingent facts that are not scientifically verifiable. If Heidegger is right, there is a sense in which the very distinction separating indisputable scientific truths from disputable nonscientific observations is a temporal one—even though it presents itself as if it were absolute. Since the underlying distinction between time and eternity is one which is posited by a particular being that experiences time in a particular way, namely as a mortal being, this experience of time ought to be taken seriously as a way of gauging what significance we attach to what we posit as the eternal, nontemporal, status of certain ideas or truths. One consequence of the lack of ontological clarity that is symptomatic not only of the Cartesian worldview, according to Heidegger, but symptomatic also of Western metaphysics from the Greeks on, is that when philosophers ask about the nature or reality of time they pose the question in the form: What kind of being does time have? In formulating the question in this way, Heidegger suggests that philosophers have al-

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ready circumvented the question of how humans experience time, interpreting time, by default, as if it were present-at-hand. For Heidegger, since the way humans exist is fundamentally dissimilar from the way objects exist, the way in which temporality functions for humans also diverges from the scientific model, which applies to natural objects. One of the key differences is that humans are mortal, or finite, and the fact of their mortality affects how they experience time. In Heidegger’s view, the way in which science analyzes time is not appropriate for the way in which humans understand time. Science is based upon a model of time that prioritizes the now, and assumes that time is a series of identical, uniform, measurable, now-points, stretching to infinity. Humans experience time, according to Heidegger, as finite, and as such, the future plays a primary role in Dasein’s understanding of its own temporality.

The Metaphysical Paradox of Time and Being: Heidegger’s Critique of the Traditional Concept of Time The fundamental problem that Heidegger locates in the traditional Western philosophical conception of time is that it is founded on an unacknowledged paradox. The paradox concerns the relationship between being and time. On Heidegger’s reading, philosophers from Aristotle on, in their attempt to discover the nature of time, have imported into their very mode of questioning a quite specific (and, according to Heidegger, unfounded) assumption about the nature of being, existence, or reality. Not only have philosophers assumed a particular, illegitimate, interpretation of being, according to Heidegger, but, in their understanding of being, they have also drawn upon a specific interpretation of time, again, in an unreflective way. While overtly affirming that the future has a certain priority in our understanding of time, they have also paradoxically tended to assume that the aspect of time which is most real is the present, the now (rather than the past or the future). Subtending this specific interpretation of time that inadvertently privileges the present is an idea of being that also draws upon a specifically temporal, but inexplicit, interpretation. What is, or existence, or being, is here understood in an indeterminate way, and its very vagueness allows it to draw on contradictory models of time. Hence, Heidegger insists on renewing

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the question of the meaning of Being. The Greek concept ousia, like the temporal connotations that are built into it (but not thought through by the Greeks themselves, according to Heidegger), is a touchstone for the problem of what being means. Ousia means being in the most general sense, but it also means being-present, or constant presence. So, when the Greeks talk about the existence of things, or the being of beings, on the one hand, there is an assumption that the now, or present moment, is most real. On the other hand, there is the opposing assumption that permanence, endurance, or that which lasts (as opposed to that which is in flux or transition, that which passes away in becoming, rather than being), has the most reality. Since the now, by its very nature, passes, or is transitory, these two assumptions cannot both hold—unless there is an unacknowledged recourse to an idea of eternity, understood as an eternal now. Thus, in their attempt to solve the question of time, philosophers, according to Heidegger, have been burdened by tacit assumptions about being that need to be interrogated. They have entertained a notion of being that is dependent on a specific understanding of time, without acknowledging the temporal connotations of the concept of being that is in play—and then they have applied their assumed notion of being to the question (already replete with contradictory presuppositions about the nature of time), What is time? The metaphysical relationship of being and time is therefore pervaded with a certain circularity. Heidegger seeks to demystify the tradition, and to expose its confusion. On the one hand, being is understood by reference to certain (and sometimes conflicting) temporal qualities, such as endurance, or immediacy, but what it means to endure, or to be immediately present, is in turn dependent on a particular conception of being or existence already laden with an unthought privilege of the present. On the other hand, in asking about the nature, existence, or being of time, philosophers have assumed a certain interpretation of being, restricting in advance the type of being time could have to the kind of being objects have. Time then, the tradition has assumed, is a being, but the very notion of “a being” is already permeated by temporal assumptions in need of interrogation and clarification. The common, traditional, or natural concept of time is embodied in its clearest conceptual form by Aristotle.34 Heidegger asserts that “Every

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subsequent account of time, including Bergson’s, has been essentially determined” by Aristotle’s treatment of time (BT 49; SZ 26).35 While there is some ambiguity about exactly how far Heidegger wants to align Aristotle’s concept of time with the ordinary understanding of it, there are three main features that Aristotle’s concept shares with the traditional way of seeing time, namely the priority of the future, the irreversibility of time, and its infinity. Of these three features, it is the infinity of time with which Heidegger will break most decisively, insisting that temporality is primordially finite, not infinite. According to Heidegger, the Greeks—not only Aristotle, but also Parmenides and Plato— “take time itself as one entity among others, and try to grasp it in the structure of its Being, though that way of understanding Being which they have taken as their horizon is one which is itself naively and inexplicitly oriented towards time” (BT 48; SZ 26). That is, entities “are conceived as presence (ousia),” but “without any acquaintance with the fundamental ontological function of time” (BT 48; SZ 26) that operates in order to allow this interpretation. “Thus,” says Heidegger, “for the ordinary understanding of time, time shows itself as a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-at-hand’, simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of ‘nows’, as the ‘course of time’” (BT 474; SZ 422). This constant presence at hand, in which nows pass away and come along, poses problems: either it is simply contradictory—how can time pass away and come along at the same time?—or it requires an already existent (in whatever sense existence can have here) access to time as something that is already there. This is precisely the contradiction that inheres in the traditional concept of time, and Heidegger wants to clarify the circularity that he thinks pertains in the relation between being and time that informs the tradition.

An Overview of Levinas’s Critique of Heidegger on Time In 1947 Levinas unambiguously situates Heidegger, along with Bergson, in the tradition he rejects—a tradition that, whether it sees time as objective or subjective, always conceives of time in a solitary

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subject.36 “Traditional philosophy, and Bergson and Heidegger too, remained with the conception of a time either taken to be purely exterior to the subject, a time-object, or taken to be entirely contained in the subject. But the subject in question was always a solitary subject. The ego all alone, the monad, already had a time” (EE 94; DE 160). Ten years later, in “Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,” Levinas writes that Heidegger’s Dasein “retains the structure of the same.”37 Levinas still casts Heideggerian philosophy as ultimately affirming “a tradition in which the same dominates the other” (CPP 53; DEHH 171), but the temporal terms in which he expressed this critique in 1947 have given way to a more explicitly political attack. No longer content to allow the political overtones of his objections to Heidegger to remain muted by a philosophical critique, he now sees Heideggerian philosophy as “the outcome of a long tradition of pride, heroism, domination and cruelty” (CPP 52; DEHH 170). He suggests that National Socialism rests on “peasant enrootedness and a feudal adoration of subjugated men for the master and lords who command them” (ibid.), and claims that “Heidegger does not only sum up a whole evolution of Western philosophy. He exalts it by showing in the most pathetic way its anti-religious essence become a religion in reverse” (CPP 53; DEHH 171). By 1961, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas’s tone has become no more conciliatory, his criticisms no less harsh, but he prefers to express them in more overtly philosophical terms and less obviously political terms. Far from suggesting that these two registers can be definitively separated, I mean only to draw attention to a difference of emphasis. In Totality and Infinity, the book that was to establish Levinas as a major philosopher in his own right, Levinas asserts his difference from Heidegger in uncompromising terms, but he does so by claiming the priority of ethics over ontology. He describes himself as “radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to ontology (which, moreover, he determines as though the relation with the interlocutor and the Master could be reduced to it) rather than seeing in justice and injustice a primordial access to the Other beyond all ontology.”38 The concern to elevate the interlocutor beyond ontological definition recalls Levinas’s 1947 observation that “In the end the problem of time is subordinate to the task of bringing out the specific terms with which dialogue has to be conceived” (EE 94; DE 161).

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Turning to Otherwise than Being (1974), we find Levinas continuing to specify the difference between his position and Heidegger’s, but rather than the stark statement of radical opposition characteristic of Totality and Infinity, in this mature work Levinas formulates the distance separating himself from Heidegger less aggressively, employing, for example, a series of questions (staging a dialogue, or inhabiting the role of interlocutor):39 In their essence are not . . . ecstatic moments already degraded into reflections of our own looks, into mirages of our needs, echoes of our prayers? Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, nothing is new under the sun. . . . Is not essence the very impossibility of anything else, of any revolution that would not be a revolving upon oneself? Everything that claims to come from elsewhere, even the marvels of which essence itself is capable, even the surprising possibilities of renewal by technology . . . all this does not deaden the heartrending bustling of the there is, recommencing behind every negation. . . . Only the meaning of the other is irrecusable. . . . A voice comes from the other shore. A voice interrupts the saying of the already said.

In a lecture course of 1975–76 entitled “La mort et le temps”40 Levinas provides a much more detailed examination of Heidegger’s views on temporality than we find in any of the works he had prepared for publication. The guiding suggestion of the lectures is that time must not be understood on the basis of death, as Heidegger’s analyses of Dasein’s finite temporality indicates—Levinas says, for Heidegger, “It is through death that there is time and there is Dasein” (MT 59). Rather, for Levinas, death must be understood on the basis of time—the time of patience. In the opening lecture Levinas signals “the direction of this course—death as the patience of time” (MT 8).41 Levinas wants not to think time on the basis of Dasein’s finitude, which involves the projection of the future as determined by being-there, but to find the signification that death has for time. (See MT 55–56.) Levinas proposes, in short, “To think death starting from time—and not, as in Heidegger—time starting from death” (MT 122).42 In the 1980’s, with the publication of “The Old and the New” (1980) and “Diachrony and Representation” (1982),43 Levinas revisits the analysis that he had provided in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, where he had read Heidegger’s ontology as subordinating the other to the demands of comprehension, true to a rhetoric that privileges vi-

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sion (see TI 67–68 [TeI 39] and OB 80 [AE 101]), and he recasts this critique in explicitly temporal terms. He draws together his objections to the priority of knowledge and the associated ideals that govern the model of intentionality—the ideals of intelligibility, finality, and synchrony—under the heading of the “egology of presence” (DR 99; DRE 86).44 By rendering the world knowable, reducing alterity to immanence, and representing it as the “property of the ego” (DR 99; DRE 86), the present is accorded a privilege in relation to the past and the future (ibid.). Against this privilege of the present or the now, which amounts to the privilege of the graspable (main-tenance), Levinas points to the “nonpresence of the interlocutor,” which indicates “a temporality other than one that allows itself to be assembled into the presence of the said and the written, a temporality that is concrete . . . but at once congeals into the abstraction of the synchronous in the synthesis of the ‘I think’ that grasps it thematically” (DR 103; DRE 89). This “original and concrete temporality” (DR 104; DRE 89) is a “preconceptual” (ON 130; AN 30) and “primordial” time (ON 138; AN 37), a time that resists the formalizing unity of the “I think,” a time that cannot be represented as an idea belonging to an ego.45 There are “certain moments” (ON 128; AN 29) of Heideggerian temporality that Levinas retrieves—the moments of deformalization (DR 119; DRE 98), and the moments in which Geworfenheit (thrownness) (ON 132; AN 33) governs Jemeinigkeit (mineness) (DR 115; DRE 96).46 Levinas thinks that Heidegger’s philosophy accords ultimate priority to Jemeinigkeit, and that this priority amounts to a privileging of the epistemological subject that Heidegger tried to undercut with his notion of Dasein. In Chapter 4 I show how Levinas reads this tendency of Heidegger’s discourse to retain at its center a subject as the master of its world recapitulating the very metaphysics of presence he wanted to bring into question. Chapter 3 traces Heidegger’s attempt to reorient the traditional concept of time away from its adherence to the now as the basic phenomenon of time, and toward the ecstatico-horizonal conception of temporality that Heidegger claims is more original than the everyday concept of time. This original, ecstatic temporality replaces the naive metaphysics of presence, which Heidegger argues characterizes traditional approaches to time, with an appeal to the importance of Dasein’s finitude

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as informing our experience of time. In so doing, Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality privileges not the now (or present), but the future. However, the priority of the future that Heidegger asserts is not simple. It is a priority that functions in virtue of the unity of the ecstases, privileging the unity that pertains to past, present, and future, rather than elevating one ecstasis over another. As Françoise Dastur says, “the primacy of the future is relative; it only characterizes the sense of originary temporalization, and that is the reason why such primacy can be transferred to another ekstasis, depending upon the mode of existence of Dasein.”47 To understand what is at stake in Heidegger’s criticism of the traditional allegiance to a metaphysics of presence, it is necessary to see what is obscured, according to Heidegger, by this metaphysical view. As has already been outlined in a preliminary fashion, Heidegger suggests that the Greek conception of being as ousia conceals a hidden priority of presence, and that this bias is blindly retained throughout the tradition. So, although Aristotle conceives of time by prioritizing the future, this priority is compromised by his illicit privileging of presence, a privilege that plays itself out in the very formulation of his question, What is the nature of time? This question, Heidegger maintains, amounts to asking about the being of time, having already decided that only one kind of being could constitute a legitimate answer—namely a being that is present-at-hand. Heidegger suggests that although Aristotle correctly discerned that the future has a certain priority, he interpreted the future on the basis of a notion of being that was already beholden to presence. For Aristotle, and for the rest of the tradition, the future is thus understood as a not-yet-now—that is, as derivative of the present or now that it once was. Heidegger’s task, then, is to provide an understanding of the future that is not surreptitiously based upon the present—to provide a more original interpretation of the future. This is accomplished in his notion of being-toward-death, whereby the end of life is thought of not as incidental to life itself, but as structurally integral to it. As finite beings, we are always already on our way to death. By bringing to light the unacknowledged dependence that the traditional view of time has on the now, and by reinterpreting the future so that it is not merely a degenerate now, Heidegger seeks to provide a legitimately future-oriented analysis of time, one that does not fall prey to a notion of being already permeated by the priority of the now-present.

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Levinas argues that Heidegger uncovers a naive metaphysics of presence, only to repeat the gesture of naïveté. Heidegger embraces the alterity of death that the future holds with his notion of anticipatory resoluteness that reinstates the priority of presence, understood now in terms of Dasein’s ability to project itself into the future, and cancel the alterity of death. This amounts to a privileging of the same over the other. Chapter 4 reveals an apparent tension in Levinas’s view of time. I suggest that the tension can be relieved, if not resolved, by seeing it as a product of Levinas’s attempt to take seriously Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence, and to improve on Heidegger’s own attempt to overcome the naive privileging of presence. The tension can be specified as a shift that seems to take place in Levinas’s understanding of time. In the early work he is at pains to emphasize the tradition’s neglect of the instant, and its specific dynamism, as distinct from the dialectic of time. In his later work, Levinas is less interested in the specific dynamic of the instant—an interest that would appear to challenge Heidegger’s insistence on the importance of the future, rather than the present—and he is more invested in emphasizing the alterity of the future and of the past. The future is understood as ineluctably bound up with the Other, and the past is understood as a past that was never present, a past that is construed not as my past—not as a past in which I incurred debts to the Other, for example—but rather as one that precedes my subjectivity. In 1947, in reaction to what he sees as a lack of concretion in Heidegger’s Dasein, Levinas offers an account of the instant that emphasizes its substantiality. Hypostasis is the name Levinas gives to the event by which the subject (or existent) takes up subjectivity (or existence). With the notion of hypostasis, Levinas reworks Heidegger’s ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings. In this early period of his work, Levinas describes the present as prior to time, and the I as separate from the Other. Both descriptions will be revised in his later work, where the I, and the present associated with it, will no longer be seen as independent of the command of the Other, a command that comes from a past which was never present, and which can therefore never be adequately represented or dispensed. The problem that Levinas identifies in Heidegger undergoes revision from the early to the late work. In both cases Levinas is concerned to preserve alterity, but his response to this problem is reformulated. His

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early insistence on preserving the specificity of the instant as a material encumbrance on the I, and therefore as distinct from the burden of history or the impending future, gives way to a new version of the same problem. At issue now is not preserving the instant’s specific dynamic from the encroachment of the future, or from being crushed by the weight of the past. In the later work, Levinas is responding no longer to the problem of the subject’s lack of materiality (which suggests that Dasein’s substantiality is dissipated in Heidegger’s ecstatic notion of temporality), but rather to the problem of the false alterity that Heidegger’s conception of death seems to offer. Whereas previously the danger that seemed to present itself was the obliteration of the specific character of the instant—as if it were susceptible to abstraction in ecstasis—now the problem is construed as Dasein’s inability to encounter alterity without converting it to the same. If at first the movement of ecstasis seemed to threaten to engulf the I, by negating the specific materiality and significance of hypostasis, it now seems to fall short of delivering on its promise of alterity. Dasein confronts its finitude, only to gain control even over death. Death remains tied to a structure of projection that originates from Dasein’s self-understanding. Dasein retains the structure of a mastering subject who encounters finitude, only to turn it into the ground of its freedom. In short, if the early Levinas criticizes Heidegger for allowing the present instant, and subjectivity, to dissipate into the other, or time, through the movement of ecstasis, the later Levinas criticizes him for reducing the other to the self, negating the alterity of the future by incorporating death into Dasein’s understanding of its ownmost-potentialityfor-being, and thereby totalizing the different ecstases in a way that not only eradicates the specificity of the instant, but also reestablishes the primacy of subjectivity over otherness. Whether the subject is overwhelmed by ecstasis, or whether ecstasis turns out to be at bottom a projection of Dasein, the model of assimilation remains determinative. Either the subject is dissolved in the ecstatic structure of temporality, or the ecstasy that temporality appeared to present is in fact just one more way of the subject’s imposing its will, or shaping its world, imposing its mastery on otherness, making alterity conform to itself, reducing the other to the same. Either the subject succumbs to alterity, or alterity is submerged by the subject. In both cases, the logic of the same prevails,

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and in the latter case, Heidegger seems to be repeating the epistemological trope of Western metaphysics by reproducing in another form the knowing subject, or the relation of the ego to the world. In Chapter 5 I locate three vantage points of Levinas’s engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy of time from which to view its development, one early essay, one from the middle years, and one late. Spanning the trajectory of Levinas’s lifework from early to late, these strategic markers provide a sense of the changing tone and character of Levinas’s negotiations not only with Heidegger’s oeuvre, but also with his politics. In 1932 Levinas published an entirely laudatory and largely exegetical essay, “Martin Heidegger and Ontology.” This essay is among Levinas’s earliest publications, and it has not received much attention, despite the fact that a close reading of it reveals a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of Heidegger’s conception of temporality, one that goes beyond the level of comprehension represented by many contemporary readers of Heidegger. In 1949 Levinas revised the essay. The revisions indicate some of the reservations that Levinas had begun to articulate about the implications of Heidegger’s position, reservations which would receive fuller deployment in the major works Totality and Infinity (1961) and Otherwise than Being (1974). In 1987 there appeared another essay that has not been widely discussed: “Mourir pour . . .” was presented at a conference honoring the late Heidegger and represents one of Levinas’s last published statements on him. I trace Levinas’s reaction to Heidegger from his early unadulterated enthusiasm, which is severely tempered in the sobering experiences of the 1930’s and 1940’s, to Levinas’s final years, in which he was once again able to extend to Heidegger’s corpus a generosity that deserted him in the middle years of his lifelong attempt to come to terms with his own early Heideggerianism. The title of the 1987 essay—“Dying for . . .”—is a quotation from Heidegger’s Being and Time. With this title, Levinas marks both the limitations of the Heideggerian understanding of death, and the possibilities of extending it beyond Heidegger’s own intentions. The ellipses of the title pose a question: Dying for whom? Dying for what? Though the limitations of Heidegger’s own mode of questioning had rendered the question illegitimate, Levinas’s experiences forced him to insist upon it. The title both arrests Heidegger’s thinking, stops it in its tracks, and inscribes its ambiguity, by pointing to where his text opens

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onto a beyond, opens onto the other, even if the formal constraints of being-toward-death outlaw any considerations other than Dasein’s own existential structure. In Chapter 6 I show how Levinas establishes a correspondence between Heidegger’s understanding of the three ecstases and the organizing categories of Franz Rosenzweig’s thought, namely creation, revelation, and redemption. According to Levinas, creation opens and sustains the past, revelation is temporalized as the present, and redemption lays open the future. Heidegger understands the future as being free for death. But what can it mean to be free for death in a situation that deprives the individual of the right to die freely? Such a situation informs Levinas’s attempt to rethink death not primarily as one’s own death, but as the death of the Other. In a world where Jews, gays, blacks, gypsies, and the disabled are not allowed to die their own deaths because of who they are, Heidegger’s distinction between dying as an animal and dying as a human can no longer be taken for granted. Heidegger’s major contribution to rethinking temporality is to reorient our understanding of time away from the scientific model that privileges the now, and toward Dasein’s experience as a finite being. Thus Heidegger construes death as the “possibility of impossibility,” and reinterprets the future not as a present that is not-yet-now—not, in other words, on the basis of an idea of the future that adheres to the model of the present-at-hand—but rather as a not-yet that belongs to Dasein’s very way of being. In a 1975–76 lecture course examined in Chapter 7, Levinas questions Heidegger’s notion of belonging, and recasts his earlier reversal of Heidegger’s notion of death. Instead of conceiving of death as the “impossibility of possibility”—a reversal of the Heideggerian notion of death as the possibility of impossibility, which already accents the enigma of death—Levinas now contends that we must think death as the “time of patience.” Heidegger’s notion of beingtoward-death had required us to rethink temporality by starting with Dasein’s finitude; but for Levinas, death must be understood on the basis of time. It is not through death that there is time, but through the time of patience, endurance, or passivity that there is death. I suggest that it is Levinas’s notion of trauma that puts into question the Heideggerian priority of Dasein’s death, and the structure of belonging that facilitates it. Trauma is never present; it is not an experience, nor a ground that fa-

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Introduction

cilitates the possibilities of Dasein. By taking seriously the idea of the Shoah as philosophy’s trauma, Levinas points to the limitation of a Heideggerian notion of death. For Levinas, it is not death that individuates me, but the other. Levinas insists on the radical alterity of death, and finds inadequate Heidegger’s attempt to think the nothingness of death, as it is still governed by the opposition of being and nothingness. For Levinas, death is an excess that cannot be thought under the rubric of being and nothingness.48 There is a profound complicity between what is said in Levinas’s Otherwise than Being and how it comes to be represented. In Chapter 8, returning to the theme of Chapter 4, “The Temporality of Saying,” I examine Levinas’s distinction between the “saying” and the “said” as the double movement which Levinas maintains characterizes philosophy itself. The time of philosophy, Levinas maintains, is diachronous. In an infinite oscillation between betrayal and reduction, the language of philosophy interrupts itself in an abuse of language. By taking seriously this ambivalent diachrony of language, my aim is to shed light on the relation between politics and ethics for Levinas, or why, for him, alienation, inequality, and responsibility do not simply amount to slavery, oppression, and domination. I conclude by returning to the notion of the feminine, and suggesting that this notion functions for Levinas in ways that both parallel and facilitate Levinas’s thinking of diachrony. I discuss the metaphor of maternity and its relation to sensibility and ethics, and I point out the various strategic and political uses that Levinas makes of the feminine.

chapter one

Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time to be a body is to have time (TI 117)

H

e i d e g g e r ’ s ontological difference has a central and lasting significance for Levinas. By tracing Levinas’s insistent return to and recasting of the ontological difference not as a distinction but as separation, and as amphibology, it is possible to see that there is an important sense in which Levinas never completely overcomes the Heideggerian problematic. It also becomes possible to see that the themes of sexual difference, corporeity, and the meaning of the instant (which in his early work is investigated in terms of solitude) play a structuring role not only in his early work, but also in his later work. Even those readers who have provided interpretations of Levinas which take up some of the earlier themes in order to follow through how they are recast in the later work have neglected, in my view, to explain the importance of the feminine and corporeity in Levinas’s work, or to expand sufficiently on the relation between time and the instant. In a 1977 preface to the second edition of De l’existence à l’existant, Levinas remarks upon the passage between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being in terms of his attempt to rethink the ontological difference. One cannot simply reverse, he suggests, Heidegger’s famous ontological difference by giving priority to beings over Being, as Totality and Infinity might be said to do.1 Rather—and this is what Levinas identifies as the effort of Otherwise than Being—one has to go beyond this initial reversal, and allow the infinite to signify from “beyond the ontological difference.”2 In a footnote, Levinas refers to the work of JeanLuc Marion, and Marion responds to Levinas in an essay that first ap-

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peared in 1986. Marion comments, “If even Levinas must, after the fact, underline such an essential periodization, this is without a doubt because it does not appear evident right away.”3 He adds that this might be due not only to the “ignorance or confusion” of Levinas’s readers, but also “to the difficulty of the thing itself—a difficulty for Emmanuel Levinas himself, in his self-interpretation.”4 Having underlined this difficulty, Marion goes on to argue that Levinas’s notion of “amphibology is substituted for that of difference because ‘beyond or on the hither side’ of Being and beings (AE 55, 63; OB 43, 49), an absolutely new term, as yet unnamed, insinuates itself. From the outset, the ontological difference no longer offers a goal, but only a point of departure, a given to be over-interpreted and destroyed.”5 Marion continues: “One result is decisively established: ethics is instituted by a new difference, a difference of the second degree, between, on the one hand, the entire ontological difference and, on the other hand, the Saying. Therefore, the beyond of the ontological difference absolutely cannot, here, be confused any longer with a reversal of the terms inside the ontological difference to the benefit of beings.”6 But to regard “the ontological difference” as “only a point of departure, a given” to be “destroyed” is, I suggest, to overlook the perpetual need that Levinas’s philosophy exhibits to refer back to the ontological difference, if only to give it new meaning. It is also to risk obliterating the significance of all the work that Levinas does in infusing the corporeal and the temporal with a significance that Heidegger could not achieve, because his appeal to “ontological finality” (EE 42; DE 64) did not allow for any consideration of materiality apart from its significance in the overall structure of Dasein’s care for existence. If Heidegger “thereby failed to recognize the essentially secular nature of being in the world and the sincerity of intentions” (EE 42; DE 65), does not Marion neglect the bodily aspect of existence that facilitates the very idea of sincerity to which he wants to appeal, and does he not thereby short-circuit the very difficulty, to which he had earlier alerted us, of situating the ontological difference within Levinas’s corpus? Marion says that “sincerity phenomenologically destroys the terms of the ontological difference: ‘A fission of the ultimate substantiality of the ego, sincerity is reducible to nothing ontic, to nothing ontological and leads as it were beyond or on the hither side of everything positive, every position’ (AE 183; OB 144). Exactly as, for Heidegger, anxiety leads into the ontological

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difference, for Levinas, sincerity is excepted from it and liberates from it.”7 Does sincerity absolutely destroy the ontological difference, and is it completely liberated from it? What about the “ultimate substantiality of the ego” to which Levinas refers us in the very quote that Marion provides, “an ultimate substantiality . . . even in the very vulnerability of sensibility” (OB 142; AE 181), as Levinas puts it at the beginning of the section from which Marion quotes? What about the “constraint to give with full hands, and thus a constraint to corporeality” (OB 142; OB 181)? It does not seem to me that these references to substantiality, and position, to hands and corporeality, are merely gratuitous. The issue that Marion raises speaks to a central problem that has occupied other prominent readers of Levinas—that is, the question of how to think ethics in relation to ontology.8 One of the major theses of the present work is that the relation of priority between the two cannot adequately be addressed without taking up the relationship between ontological difference and temporality. It will also be suggested that a thorough investigation of this relationship reveals precisely the import of corporeality in Levinas’s philosophy, another aspect which commentators have been slow to elaborate.9 And finally, it is necessary, I maintain, to follow out the theme of sexual difference, which structures Levinas’s recasting of ontological difference and time from his early to his late work, but whose implications for his critique of Heidegger have also been largely neglected. Thematically, Levinas might be said to be interested in ontology, in solitude, in bodily materiality and the instant in his early work, but his interest is already motivated by a concern for ethics, for the other, and by time itself.10 In just the same way, his references to substantiality and corporeality in his later work should not be dismissed or read over as trivial or superfluous to the real import of the work, as if its ethical call could be divorced from its material resonance. Thus, it is in order to preserve the alterity of the other that Levinas sees the need to attend to “the ontological root of solitude” (TO 41; TA 19). “I hope,” he says, “to glimpse wherein this solitude can be exceeded” (TO 41; TA 19). Similarly, the reason Levinas devotes his attention to the “anonymous and irremissible existing” (TO 81; TA 72) of the il y a, the there is, and to hypostasis, is to show that the “reality of time” consists in the fact that it is “absolutely other and new” (TO 80; TA 71). The newness or alterity of

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time governs his analysis even when it would seem that the phenomena he presents contest, or at least do not easily accommodate, time as the very “relationship with the other” (TO 82; TA 73). So, Levinas’s interest in the themes of materiality and solitude is dictated by his effort to move beyond conceiving of the future either in Heideggerian or in Bergsonian terms, as “anticipation, projection, and élan” (TO 80; TA 71), where he thinks the present retains “a power over the future” (TO 80; TA 72). For Levinas the future is mysterious, ungraspable, and unknowable. To say that even Levinas’s effort to uncover the movement of hypostasis, in relation to solitude and materiality, is motivated by his attempt to rethink time as alterity is not to imply that the solitary ego is immediately reducible to the otherness of time, or that Levinas’s analysis of the irremissible tie of the ego to itself that describes the materiality of solitude has no significance in and of itself. On the contrary, it is precisely that the movement of hypostasis is irreducible to the I’s relationship to the other, or to time, that Levinas wants to insist upon. To see this more clearly, it is worth recalling that Levinas conceives of his philosophy as an attempt to break with the notion of Eleatic being that he thinks not only dominates Parmenides and Plato, but even extends to Heidegger’s attempt to renew the efforts of Greek philosophy to think Being. (See TO 93; TA 88.)11 Levinas’s analyses of “sexuality, paternity and death” facilitate the break with Eleatic being because they “introduce a duality into existence, a duality that concerns the very existing of each subject” (TO 92; TA 88). Paternity will answer to Levinas’s attempt to conceive of a “pluralist existence” (TO 54; TA 34). He says, “I do not have my child; I am in some way my child. But the words ‘I am’ here have a significance different from an Eleatic or Platonic significance” (TO 91; TA 86). Levinas thereby elaborates anew the ontological difference, by showing that the task of existing to which the existent (or, in Heidegger’s terminology, Dasein) is in some sense condemned—in the sense that the self finds that existence is unavoidable and inescapable—is in another sense capable of encountering another dimension, an alterity that cannot be reduced to the identity of the I, or even to the knowledge that belongs to the I. “The return of the ego to itself that begins with hypostasis is thus not without remission, thanks to the perspective of the future opened by eros. Instead of obtaining this remission through the impossible dissolution of hypostasis, one accomplishes it through the son. It is thus not according

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to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that freedom comes about and time is accomplished” (TO 91; TA 86). In attending to the function of hypostasis, and in attending to solitude and materiality, and enjoyment, Levinas reworks not only the ontological difference, but several other fundamental themes from Being and Time, such as the meaning of existence, world, everyday life, the forthe-sake-of, the role of the present, being-with-others, death as freedom, and forgetfulness. Thus, for example, “everyday life is already a way of being free from the initial materiality through which a subject is accomplished” (TO 63; TA 46), and “far from constituting a fall, . . . forms the very accomplishment of solitude. . . . [It] is a preoccupation with salvation” (TO 58; TA 39).12 There is, in Levinas’s reorientation of Heidegger’s analysis, an insistent sexualization of two divergent aspects or tendencies of existence. On the one hand there is the virility of mastery, and on the other hand there is the passivity that Levinas will associate with the feminine. This differentiation is not to be thought of as a straightforward opposition between the active mastery of the subject and its passive submission, but rather as a duality that consists in the task of existing itself, or the necessity of having to be oneself. For what is at stake is precisely a rethinking of the ontological difference, which would preclude assuming a dichotomy between activity and passivity that already presupposes what is at issue in Levinas’s return to the ontological difference: namely that the subject is already constituted in relation to a world of objects. In thinking through the ambiguous situation whereby a subject takes on its existence, Levinas no more assumes that the world is already constituted than he does that the subject is already imbued with the traditional characteristics of subjectivity, such as consciousness, freedom, and the capacity to know the world. The I is “neither a thing, nor a spiritual center” but “has to be grasped in its amphibological mutation from an event into an ‘entity,’ and not in its objectivity” (EE 79–80; DE 136). Bound up in Levinas’s departure from Heidegger’s rendering of death as ultimately the ground of Dasein’s virile, solitary, and masterful freedom is a reassessment of the metaphorics of sight that accompanies it, and which is suggested by the word “lucidity.” Levinas says, “Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering” (TO 70; TA 57–58), and he marks the contrast by identifying Heidegger’s comprehension of death

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as masculine, while rendering his own as feminine. Thus, “Being toward death, in Heidegger’s authentic existence, is a supreme lucidity and hence a supreme virility” (TO 70; TA 57), while for Levinas “the unknown of death signifies that the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light” (TO 70; TA 57).13 Levinas thereby associates the unknowability of death with “the feminine” as “a mode of being that consists in slipping away from the light,” or as “a flight before light,” as “hiding” and as “modesty” (TO 87; TA 79). Levinas explicitly counterposes the mastery that resides in “the virility of grasping the possible, the power to be able” [“pouvoir de pouvoir”: TO 82; TA 73], with death as “the limit of the subject’s virility, the virility made possible by the hypostasis at the heart of anonymous being, and manifest in the phenomenon of the present, in the light” (TO 74; TA 62). The very terms that Levinas adopts to designate the mystery and unknowability of death insist not just that the “passivity” through which death announces itself is resistant to the language of experience and light (see TO 70; TA 57), but that the vocabulary of light—and the concepts of vision, mastery, grasping, possessing, and knowing with which it is inevitably associated—are wholly inapplicable to the approach of death, in the face of which “we are no longer able to be able [nous ne ‘pouvons plus pouvoir’]” (TO 74; TA 62). Further, Levinas wants to rehabilitate a notion of the present that does not simply fall prey to the idea of mastery that caused Heidegger to question the privilege of the present. Above all, it is the ambiguity of the present that Levinas is at pains to emphasize. “It is essential,” says Levinas, “to grasp the present at the limit of existing and the existent, where, in function of existing, it already turns into an existent” (TO 52; TA 32). Here we are returned, once more, to the ontological difference. By “positing the present as the mastery of the existent over existing, and in seeking in it the passage from existing to the existent” (TO 54; TA 34), Levinas wants to retain the complexity of the presencing of the present both as “pure event that must be expressed by a verb”— analogous to the verbal sense of being—and as a being “already a something, already an existent” (TO 52; TA 32)—analogous to Dasein, the being that exists. The ambiguity of the present is due to the fact that it is “a way of accomplishing the ‘starting out from itself’ that is always evanescence. . . . Evanescence would thus be the essential form of beginning,” and yet it “result[s] in something” (TO 53; TA 32–33), it

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turns into an existent, and can be formed into time (see TO 53; TA 33).14 There is, then, the aspect of mastery that Levinas associates with the present, and which he consistently marks as virile, and there is the limit or loss of mastery that Levinas associates with suffering, death, and love, and which he consistently marks as feminine. Thus there emerges a contest between the virile mastery of a self capable of preserving itself, and an effeminate self, one that finds itself unmanned, “unable to be able,” deprived of all it powers, wounded in love (see TO 89; TA 82), incapable of exerting its power of reason over the alterity that confronts it, be it in death or in eros. Before commenting further on this sexualized language, which (as will be clear by now) I take to have a significance beyond rhetorical embellishment, let me lay out in more detail what I have already hinted at, namely the fact that Levinas does not assume that the subject is invested with freedom from the start. Let me briefly restate the trajectory I am following. I am, (1) pointing out how a sexualized language infuses Levinas’s entire thought, his notions of self, freedom, and ethics, (2) how paternity is the privileged model of the relation to the other, and (3) how the sexualization of Levinas’s discourse leads to complex questions about the conditionality of his philosophy that commentators have ignored to date for the most part. The father is the “category” that allows time and freedom to be introduced, but hypostasis is that which is somehow “before time” or allows time to appear. I will suggest that the feminine plays a structural role similar to the “before time” of hypostasis, but in a way that remains unthought by Levinas, and by his commentators. To thematize the “before” of the feminine both throws into relief the structural dynamic of the temporality of conditioning that allows Levinas to say what he is saying, and performs and enacts the aporetic relations that are inadequately framed as oppositions in Levinas’s texts (ethics/ontology, infinity/totality, saying/said).

Two Freedoms, Two Moralities . . . Two Registers of Language I suggest that, just as Levinas sees the importance of examining solitude outside of community, not in order to refute the obvious empirical

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situation that we all necessarily live in a world where there are others, but in order to draw out more fully than Heidegger was able to do the ontological implications of solitude, similarly his insistence on considering the dialectic of the instant outside or before that of time is not simply a refusal of the indisputable fact that in one sense the instant cannot be divorced from time. Clearly and inevitably, each instant coalesces with a continuous time, or subsides into the infinite fabric of existing, but then time is already hypostatized. (See TO 53; TA 33–34.) In this sense, it is impossible to conceive of the instant as outside time, or to construe the hypostasis as a present that is not yet time. What sense, then, can be made of Levinas’s claim to resist the tendency to find in the instant something other than the dialectic of time, and to attribute to it a separate dialectic? Levinas means to catch sight of the event that makes possible the linking up of moments into the stream of time (see TO 52; TA 32), to go behind experience, as it were (TO 54; TA 34), to ask about the present not when it is already the time of an existent, and as such can be mastered, possessed, represented, experienced, and thematized, as belonging to someone, but as it occurs prior to any such possession. This marks a fundamental difference between Levinas and Heidegger. For Heidegger, time can be understood only by starting out from Dasein’s worldly experience of temporality. The difficulty of formulating the meaning of the instant as separable from its meaning as it is experienced in time is not lost on Levinas. Because of the apparent impossibility of circumventing the language of experience he is forced to use temporal language to explore an allegedly nontemporal significance (before, prior, not yet, first, beyond, previous, already, outside). Indeed he acknowledges that he must have recourse to the language of experience and subjectivity, even as he maintains that the present, or instant, does not presuppose a subject who experiences the world. Thus, in order to describe the order of hypostasis, Levinas must employ the very language that does not properly pertain to it. Desire is not knowledge, yet Levinas says, “Desire knows perfectly well what it wants” (EE 43; DE 65), and the metaphor works. Similarly, Levinas will speak of a freedom that is not a freedom in the sense with which we are familiar, a morality that is not a morality in terms of what we usually mean by the term, a possession that is not a possession (see EE 27; DE 35–36), and an “I” that is not yet an I. Even the term “hypostasis” does not have its traditional resonance. It is

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that which allows time, or freedom, or ethics to first appear that Levinas is trying to think, and in this sense, once again, his thought coincides with that of Heidegger, who, in understanding Being as Ereignis, which in turn he renders as “Appropriation or event of Appropriation,” cautions that we should “bear in mind . . . that ‘event’ is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible” (TB 19). Marking both the distance (insofar as Heidegger’s philosophy remains limited to a thinking of Being) and the proximity (insofar as it attempts to think Being as an event that makes any occurrence possible) between his own thinking and Heidegger’s, Levinas claims that “everything that will be said of this Ereignis in Zeit und Sein is already indicated in §9 Sein und Zeit. Being is that which becomes my-own, and it is for this that a man is necessary to being. It is through man that being is ‘properly’ ” (GWC 92; DQV 146–47). At issue here is the “wonder which Plato put at the origin of philosophy” (EE 22; DE 28), and it is no accident that Levinas associates this wonder or astonishment with the “questioning of Being” (EE 22–23; DE 28): It is the very intelligibility of light that is astonishing; light is doubled up with a night. The astonishment does not arise out of comparison with some order more natural than nature, but simply before intelligibility itself. Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness. It is then a way of taking up Being. . . . The question is itself a manifestation of the relationship with Being. Being is essentially alien and strikes against us. We undergo its suffocating embrace like the night, but it does not respond to us. There is a pain in Being. If philosophy is the questioning of Being, it is already a taking on of Being. And if it is more than this question, this is because it permits going beyond the question, and not because it answers it. What more there can be than the questioning of Being is not some truth—but the good.

This passage announces several themes that Levinas will develop. There is the “doubling back” on itself of a being already situated in a world of knowledge, already engaged in relationships that are characterized by light, but capable of articulation in terms that do not follow the contours of “this natural correlation between us and the world” (EE 22; DE 27). There is the alienation, or the “pain in Being,” that Levinas also refers to as an evil that lies in the “very positivity” of Being (EE 20;

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DE 20), and which resides not in the lack or defect that Levinas thinks is implied in Heidegger’s understanding of finitude, but rather in a certain excess or plenitude (EE 27; DE 36). And there is the reference to Plato’s Good beyond Being, which is not only an attempt to point to that which makes it possible for beings to appear as such, but also a way of stipulating that ethics is always already in play, even in the most mundane occurrence of a relationship that arises within the context of the world.

Interruption We are always already in the world. In this sense, the world, and everything in it, is given. But Levinas wants to think what it means for it to be given, to go behind the world as phenomenon. He characterizes the “primary relationship which binds us to Being” as an “anonymous state of being” (EE 21; DE 26). This state, what he calls the “there is,” is not so much a state that can be said to exist before the world, but rather a relationship (but “a relationship only by analogy”) that appears (and, we could add, it appears only by analogy) “where the continual play of our relations with the world is interrupted” (EE 21; DE 26). Putting this in terms of the temporal flow of duration, Levinas says, “In the midst of the anonymous flow of existence, there is stoppage and a positing” (EE 34; DE 48), or “During the duration of the work, the effort takes on the instant, breaking and tying back together again the thread of time” (EE 33; DE 48). With the notion of interruption as stoppage, as a break, Levinas seeks to supplement Heidegger’s interpretation of temporality as ecstasy, an interpretation which, he thinks, can take account of the present only insofar as the future inherits its meaning. Levinas says, “In the midst of the advance over oneself and over the present, in the ecstasy of the leap which anticipates and bypasses the present, fatigue marks a delay with respect to oneself and with respect to the present” (EE 31; DE 44). Focusing on the “dynamism of the thrust” of the instant itself—which, he says, “is not constituted by the anticipation of the future” (EE 31; DE 45)—Levinas resists interpreting the present simply in terms of its legacy for the future, even as he recognizes that its relationship to the future cannot be completely ignored. Thus, when he examines indolence as a “recoil before action” (EE 27; DE 37), a “hesitation before existence, . . . a

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refusal” (EE 28; DE 37), he finds that “what is essential in indolence is its place prior to a beginning of an action, its way of being turned to a future. It is not a thought about the future, followed by a holding back from action. It is, in its concrete fullness, a holding back from the future. The tragedy of being it reveals is then the more prof[o]und. It is a being fatigued by the future” (EE 29; DE 39). Indolence, then, both as a way of being “turned to a future” and as a “holding back from the future” both assumes its place in time, by submitting to the impossibility of stopping time, and yet maintains its character as refusal, in still holding back from the inevitable demise of the instant. In precisely this duality, Levinas sees an adherence to existence that is also a cleaving (see EE 22; DE 27), just as “weariness concerns existence itself,” and yet “in weariness existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an unrevokable contract” (EE 24; DE 31). Because weariness is “a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself” (EE 24; DE 31), Levinas sees in it “the hesitation of a refusal” (EE 25; DE 32). “Weariness by all its being effects this refusal to exist; it is only in the refusal to exist” (EE 25; DE 32). Weariness is not a judgment (EE 25; DE 32) and does not arise from “a lack of deliberation, for it is not deliberating over the end. It occurs after the intention has been formulated” (EE 25; DE 33). “Effort is not a cognition; it is an event” (EE 31; DE 44). Fatigue and indolence are “prior to reflection.” They are “positions taken with regard to existence” before they “are ‘mental contents’ ” (EE 24; DE 30). In the midst of our worldly intentions, interrupting our formulation of goals and ends, Levinas discerns the “inclination to ‘drop everything’ ” (EE 31; DE 44). In the duality of the instant, in which effort “lunges forward out of fatigue and falls back upon it” (EE 31; DE 44), he locates both the freedom to give up (“If we find our suitcase too heavy, we can put it down, enlist the help of a porter who is stronger than ourselves” [EE 30; DE 43]) and the condemnation to finish what we have begun, to be who we are, the weight of “the burden of existence itself” [EE 29; DE 38]. As a “condemnation to being,” fatigue alerts us to what Levinas calls “a peculiar form of forsaken[n]ess.”15 This is, says Levinas, “not the solitude of a being forsaken by the world with which it is no longer in step, but of a being that is as it were no longer in step with itself, is out of joint with itself, in a dislocation of the I from itself, a being that is not joining up with itself in the in-

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stant, in which it is nonetheless committed for good” (EE 35; DE 50). Can the word “good” here be gratuitous? If not, this dislocated I, out of step with itself, worn out with the effort of trying to be itself, might anticipate the sense in which Levinas will speak of the restlessness of substitution.16 In trying to think the instant outside time, then, Levinas reaps the consequences of Heidegger’s injunction to raise anew the question of Being. He attempts, that is, to think time without assuming that he knows in advance the kind of being that time has, without acting as if the only possible access to time were through beings that are already constituted as such, as if the only way of approaching time were as a being, or an existent. The problem with such an assumption, as Heidegger revealed, is that it imports temporal assumptions into its interpretation of being without acknowledgment, so that it has already decided in favor of a dominant interpretation of time, namely as present-at-hand, but obliquely, and therefore without making this decision available to inquiry. In the midst of an account of the feminine, Levinas makes what he calls a “fundamental comment” concerning freedom: “I do not initially posit the Other as freedom, a characteristic in which the failure of communication is inscribed in advance. For with a freedom there can be no other relationship than that of submission or enslavement. In both cases, one of the two freedoms is annihilated. The relationship between master and slave can be grasped at the level of struggle, but then it becomes reciprocal” (TO 87; TA 80).17 To “posi[t] the Other as freedom” would be to think “the Other in terms of light” (TO 88; TA 81), and Levinas, as we have seen, wants to think the relationship with alterity as “the failure of the movement that tends to grasp or to possess a freedom,” (TO 88; TA 81), and as distinct from possession and from knowledge.18 Yet, while Levinas distances himself from positing the Other as freedom, there is a sense in which he affirms the freedom of an existent not as a free will, but as a freedom of beginning. In describing hypostasis, or the event by which an existent or being arises, Levinas says, “the appearance of an existent is the very constitution of a mastery, of a freedom in an existing that by itself would remain fundamentally anonymous. In order for there to be an existent in this anonymous existing, it is necessary that a departure from self and a return to self—that is, the

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very work of identity—become possible” (TO 52; TA 31).19 This departure and return indicates a complication that specifies the particular sense that Levinas wants to give to freedom here. Levinas distinguishes between two senses of freedom.20 The existent, he says, “is a first freedom—not yet the freedom of free will, but the freedom of beginning. It is by starting out from something new that there is existence. Freedom is included in every subject, in the very fact that there is a subject, that there is a being. It is the freedom of the existent in its very grip on existing” (TO 54; TA 34). This first sense of freedom is associated with virility. “As present and ‘I,’ hypostasis is freedom. The existent is master of existing. It exerts on its existence the virile power of the subject. It has something in its power” (TO 54; TA 34). Solitude is necessary for this virile mastery, for the “freedom of beginning” (TO 55; TO 35). But this first freedom has a price: “the definitiveness of the I riveted to itself” (TO 57; TA 38, translation altered), which Levinas identifies as a “great paradox: a free being is already no longer free, because it is responsible for itself” (TO 55; TA 36).21 If this freedom is already a responsibility, in what sense does it remain free?22 Levinas says, “Though it is a freedom with regard to the past and future, the present is an enchainment in relation to itself. The material character of the present does not result from the fact that the past weighs upon it or that it is anxious about its future. It results from the present as present” (TO 55–56; TA 36). By insisting on both the materiality of the self and its freedom, both its being weighed down and its ability to be master, Levinas makes it possible to understand the activities of everyday life that Heidegger consigns to inauthenticity as an overcoming, to some extent, of “the material structure of the subject” (TO 62; TA 45), one that involves the subject in enjoyment. As a “way of being free from [its] initial materiality,” everyday life does indeed involve “a forgetfulness of self” (TO 63– 64; TA 46), but not the self-forgetfulness of Heidegger’s Dasein, who takes over as its own the opinions of the “they,” and in doing so takes itself for a being that is present-at-hand, and forgets to inquire after its own specific mode of being. Rather, this forgetfulness is one that consists of the subject’s ability to live hypostasis at a level that is beyond a pure and simple return to itself: that is, beyond the necessity of having to be, or the impossibility of being able to escape its materiality—beyond, that is, the “tragedy of solitude” (TO 57; TA 38). In Totality and Infinity

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Levinas will elaborate the sense of this beyond in the immediacy of enjoyment. Levinas says, “Though in the pure and simple identity of hypostasis, the subject is mired in itself, in the world, instead of a return to itself, there is a ‘relationship with everything that is necessary for being’ ” (TO 63; TA 46). In contrast, eros “is a relationship with alterity, with mystery—that is to say, with the future, with what (in a world where there is everything) is never there, with what cannot be there when everything is there—not with a being that is not there, but with the very dimension of alterity” (TO 88; TA 81–82). If eros, which is figured as feminine in Levinas’s discourse, opens the perspective of alterity as the future, that alterity can be accomplished in only “one way: through paternity” (TO 91; TA 85). Does this mean that the alterity of the feminine is only a provisional alterity? Levinas articulates two different modes by which an event is accomplished when he distinguishes between the event of hypostasis, “by which an existent arises” (TO 88; TA 81), associated with virility, freedom, power, and mastery, and the “event of alterity” (TO 87; TA 80), associated with the feminine, mystery, withdrawal, and modesty. “The existent,” says Levinas, in a statement that is crucial for understanding what is happening in the sexualization of his discourse, “is accomplished in the ‘subjective’ and in ‘consciousness’; alterity is accomplished in the feminine. This term is on the same level as, but in meaning opposed to, consciousness. The feminine is not accomplished as a being [étant] in a transcendence toward light, but in modesty” (TO 88; TA 81). By claiming that the feminine is “not accomplished as a being,” Levinas appears to be privileging the feminine in a certain way, by situating it in a dimension, or allowing it to designate a domain, that cannot be qualified as ontological. The feminine would thereby seem to indicate an escape from being: its otherness would not be governed by the powers of mastery that define the self, nor by the freedom of self-initiative, nor by consciousness, but would come from elsewhere. The feminine is the absolutely other. In this way, the feminine would seem to interrupt the language of ontology, would seem to provide access to a new way of thinking ontological difference, by not immediately identifying itself with the turning of existence into existents, by resisting the illumination of the world. It would seem to stand for a mode of being’s withdrawal. Levinas’s appeal to the feminine has therefore been heralded as radi-

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cal. The “exceptional position of the feminine in the economy of being” (TO 86; TA 78) is celebrated, because it facilitates a break with being. Without wishing to entirely discredit or contain whatever radicality might be claimed for Levinas’s notion of the feminine, I do not want to immediately grant its revolutionary status. Instead I want to proceed more slowly, by asking about how the feminine functions for Levinas in relation to terms such as fecundity, paternity, and the son. It is clear that Levinas does not want his use of the term “feminine” to function in a way that is reducible to a member of the female sex. His intentions in this regard are overtly stated: “Need one add that there is no question here of defying ridicule by maintaining the empirical truth or countertruth that every home in fact presupposes a woman? . . . [T]he empirical absence of the human being of the ‘feminine sex’ in a dwelling nowise affects the dimension of femininity which remains open there, as the very welcome of the dwelling” (TI 158; TeI 131). Ontologically, too, it seems clear that we would simply be mistaken to equate what Levinas means by “the feminine” with women as such. If the “feminine is not accomplished as a being,” whatever meaning is to be granted to it cannot be assimilated with the empirical woman. It is rather a way or mode of being, a tendency, a regime. Levinas’s intentions, and the ontological function of the feminine, might preclude feminist objections to his use of the term, were it not for the fact that intentions and ontology, as Levinas himself maintains, do not count for everything. And so we find Levinas resorting to language that, despite his disclaimer, does indeed assume the empirical woman (see TI 155; TeI 128–29), and we find him affirming that “welcome in itself” is “the feminine being” (TI 157; TeI 131). Even if we take this to mean a being (male or female) that is feminized, the question remains as to how this being which is not quite a being is to be thought, and even more pertinently, who is to think it. Even if we keep in mind that it is the ontological equivocation of the feminine, or its very ambiguity (or, perhaps, amphibology) as a being that is unknowable, or a being that is accomplished not in light but in modesty, still it must be asked how the feminine is figured. We will see that the notion of accomplishment provides the decisive clue.23 The fact that it is impossible to simply equate what Levinas means by the term “feminine” with individual subjects does not mean that all the problems raised by his use of this term, and his systematic differentia-

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tion of it from other sexualized terms, are resolved. To assert that the feminine is intended metaphorically, far from solving all the questions arising from his use of the term, merely reintroduces them at another level.24 As Sikka concisely asserts, “metaphors matter.”25 Neither is it satisfactory, in my view, to simply suspend the political questions that impose themselves as secondary to the ontological function that terms such as “the feminine” play in his philosophy, as if politics and ontology could be so easily distinguished, or as if the politics of ontology did not inform its very vocabulary. Is there a way to read the feminine in Levinas’s texts that avoids short-circuiting the resources it provides for breaking out of the closure of ontology, for disrupting its said, and at the same time refuses to naively bracket the implications Levinas’s discourse has for feminism? Having begun to address this question with reference to Levinas’s early work, I want to continue to perform this balancing act, initially by attending to the role of the feminine in Totality and Infinity. In the concluding chapter I will return to this theme by revisiting some of Levinas’s later texts, including Otherwise than Being. As we have seen, Levinas thinks that Heidegger’s attempt to overcome the metaphysics of presence achieves only limited success. By appealing to an ecstatic understanding of temporality, Heidegger emphasizes the interrelation between the disparate ecstases, so that it is Dasein’s temporality as a whole that is understood in the moment of vision. Heidegger’s interpretation of being-toward-death thus focuses attention on the future rather than the present, but the future that is anticipated in the moment of vision is one which gathers together the past and future into a new, authentic present, as Dasein is summoned back to itself in resoluteness.26 Dasein’s resolute anticipation of its own finitude serves as a ground for its freedom. For Levinas, this model privileges the mastery, lucidity, and transparency of a self that remains essentially in control of its own destiny. Levinas is critical of what he regards as the supreme virility of Heidegger’s Dasein, and offers instead an account of subjectivity that remains open to the other, an account that privileges alterity over sameness, responsibility over freedom, infinity over totality. Rather than becoming a ground for the spontaneous or free action of a resolute Dasein, death retains an essential mystery for Levinas, remaining ungraspable, unknowable, and refractory to light. The future retains a

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genuine novelty of alterity that sets it apart from any present that can be mastered, or from Dasein’s authentic realization of its own truth through the anticipation of finitude in anxiety. Levinas says, “This future is neither the Aristotelian germ (less than being, a lesser being) nor the Heideggerian possibility which constitutes being itself, but transforms the relation with the future into a power of the subject. Both my own and non-mine, a possibility of myself but also a possibility of the other, of the Beloved, my future does not enter into the logical essence of the possible. The relation with such a future, irreducible to the power over possibles, we shall call fecundity” (TI 267; TeI 245). Through fecundity, across generations, the privilege of the constant, self-identical, and masterful I breaks up, as the child offers the possibility of a new beginning that escapes every project I might have for him. Levinas seems to offer a philosophy that is other-oriented, generous, and which prioritizes the ethical relation as one that is not chosen, but through which I am elected: he seems to break the hold of the subject of mastery, knowledge, and control.27 His philosophy thus appears to share in common several affinities with feminism. The problem is that, on closer inspection, Levinas’s version of alterity is permeated with a conceptual metaphorics that revolves around paternity, filiality, and fraternity by reinscribing the most traditional and patriarchal of Judaically inspired assumptions about the privilege of the father and his relation to the son, and the subordination of the feminine to the properly ethical and infinite relation. Rather than providing a potential ally for feminists, he seems to endorse a position that is deeply problematic for women. The transcendence of the ethical relation as Levinas presents it occurs on the basis of and at the expense of the feminine, which serves as the ground and condition of ethics, but which is itself excluded from the ethical. How then, if at all, can Levinas have anything of value to offer feminism? How can we rigorously follow all the nuances and complexity with which Levinas invests the feminine without foreclosing the issue of its political implications? Even if his own conception of the ethical relation is interwoven with heavily patriarchal assumptions, there might be a way of reworking this relation that liberates it from its patriarchal baggage. While it might seem that his notion of the feminine and of materiality of the corporeal offer the most obvious sites in Levinas’s philosophy for a productive

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rethinking along feminist lines, I will suggest that in fact it is to his notion of time that feminists can more readily turn. My claim is not that Levinas’s notion of time is inherently feminist, nor that his notions of the feminine and the body are irrelevant to feminist appropriations of Levinas, but rather that in order to see what is at stake in Levinas’s conception of bodies, we need to also understand his conception of time, and further that Levinas’s understanding of time can be developed in a way that helps to avoid the problems that soon emerge in feminist appropriations which confine themselves to the apparently more obvious resources in his philosophy. Ewa Ziarek argues that “The most productive engagement between Levinas’s ethics and feminism can occur in the context of the ethical interpretation of embodiment.”28 I agree, as Ziarek goes on to say, that “Even though this possibility is never realized in Levinas’s own work, and even though his own conception of eros and femininity remains entangled in both patriarchal and metaphysical traditions,” Levinas’s exploration of bodily materiality “enables the elaboration of the ethical significance of flesh, and, by extension, opens a possibility of an ethics of eros.”29 As Ziarek also acknowledges, Levinas “suspends the ‘virile and heroic’ conception of masculinity in the Western philosophical tradition, by exposing the masculine subject to the constriction of embodiment, passivity of aging, vulnerability and passion,” but fails to address “[w]hat the feminine side might look like in the light of Levinas’s ethics liberated from the restrictions of patriarchal thought.”30 I suggest that a careful engagement of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s temporality will allow us to see how Levinas’s discourse of the feminine functions as a critique of Heidegger, and thus serves as a corrective to what Levinas sees as Heidegger’s markedly virile and heroic Dasein.31 We can thereby begin to articulate what the feminine might look like, liberated from patriarchy. In the absence of a thorough engagement with Levinas’s notion of time, it is hard to avoid confirming Simone de Beauvoir’s complaint that Levinas ends up reducing the feminine to alterity in a way that replays a very traditional trope of Western metaphysics, enclosing corporeity within immanence and excluding it from transcendence.32 It is after all paternity that breaks the mold of the heroic subject of self-mastery for Levinas. Paternity is offered as a relation that opens onto infinity, and it

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is the figure of the son that completes the meaning of responsibility, through a paternal election that effects a break with the knowing subject, whose choice is spontaneously and freely determined. As Kelly Oliver says, “In relation to his son, who is both himself and not himself, the father discovers his own subjectivity. As he realizes that his son is distinct, a stranger, he discovers that he too is distinct, even a stranger to himself. Paternity challenges what Levinas calls the ‘virile’ subject that always returns to itself, the subject of the ‘I can’ of traditional phenomenology.”33 As Oliver goes on to argue, for Levinas, “paternity opens onto infinity because it is a relationship with an absolute other in which the I survives. The I survives because paternity is also a relationship with the same.” Donna Brody makes the same point when she says that Levinas “writes, controversially, ‘I do not have my child. I am in some way my child’ (TO 91; TA 81). The caress is fecund: ideally it issues in the child. In this way the father, at least, manages to be both himself and other than himself. The mother does not appear to have a relation to transcendence. Levinas talks of the child as a son, not a daughter. A momentous biological essentialism is at work: the principle of identity and difference—necessary as opening onto the subject’s relation to infinity—is reserved to the male sex.”34 Oliver suggests that in one way Levinas’s notion of paternal election offers an alternative to traditional notions of paternity, but in another way it is continuous with them.35 It departs, for example, from the Freudian notion of the father-son relationship, as “a virile struggle for recognition in which the son must kill the father in order to inherit his recognition, designation, and power.”36 For Levinas, as Oliver says, “The father chooses the son after he has had no choice. His love elects this particular child in his uniqueness as the loved one, the one meant to be. In this regard, Levinas suggests that all love for another person must approach paternal love insofar as that love elects the loved one from among all the others.”37 By presenting paternity as a relation of love which respects the other as unique, Levinas overcomes the idea that the son must contest the authority of the father in order for his own identity to be recognized and sanctioned. For Levinas, paternity is no longer based on the law, and filiality is no longer based on the guilt of patricide, but rather the paternal relation is one of generosity and infinite love. Levinas’s idea of paternity nevertheless rejoins the tradition, Oliver suggests, because it “is founded in the masculine identity passed down from

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father to son.”38 This identity excludes the body, which is entrusted to the feminine. Thus, “like the traditional notions of paternity that link father and law” through virile struggles, according to Oliver, “Levinas’s notion of paternal election masks a fear of an abject paternal body. Like the traditional notions of paternity that evacuate the paternal body, Levinas’s notion of paternity presents us with another version of the patriarchal story of an absent father.”39 Oliver again: “In Levinas we see once again the body identified with maternity and the social identified with paternity at the expense of the body.”40 The structure of paternity is indispensable to Levinas’s philosophy. Its importance cannot be underestimated. It is the linchpin that enables him to claim to have broken from Eleatic being.41 It is also the structure through which the alterity of time is accomplished. Paternity “articulates the time of the absolutely other” (TI 269; TeI 246), says Levinas. One could go even further, and claim that paternity is in fact what renders Levinas’s philosophy intelligible. Without it, Levinas’s philosophy might well retreat into the realm of negative theology and succumb to all the problems that Derrida has so forcefully articulated.42 What makes the notion of paternity so crucial for Levinas is that it provides the sameness without which Levinas’s philosophy of radical alterity could find no expression, no ground, and no coherence. The father recognizes himself in the son, and through this recognition discovers himself anew, is brought back to himself, but in a return that transfigures him from a masterful, powerful subject to an impotent, responsive father.43 But if paternity is essential for the coherence of Levinas’s project, the price that is paid for that coherence is the incoherence of the feminine, from which, it could be said, paternity borrows without any repayment or acknowledgment. The scrupulous determination Levinas exhibits elsewhere to observe the deviation between speaking for myself and speaking for others deserts him when it comes to the feminine. The privilege that allows Levinas to assume his masculinity in a way that leaves unquestioned his prerogative to speak as a man also enables him to elide the question of repayment—an elision that seems to be justified by the ethical character of his philosophy, which presents itself as exemplary in its call for sacrifice, and yet retreats from stipulating itself as a call to others. By usurping the generosity of the feminine, appropriating it for paternity, and suggesting that it be a universal model, Levinas never has to confront

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the necessity to which his own philosophy has recourse for its very intelligibility: the necessity by which the saying turns into a said, by which the ethical relation occurs in a political world, by which there is never only one other, but there are always multiple others—in short, the necessity that the infinite obligation to another requires the checks and balances of justice. Were Levinas to think through the relation that the feminine has to the political in his work, he would be forced to acknowledge that the one excludes the other, reciprocally, necessarily, and inevitably. To put the point most prosaically: Levinas exempts himself from the responsibility of ever taking account of the fact that the infinite ethical obligation for which his philosophy calls, serving as a reminder, rather than a ethical program, is one which a history of oppression has repeatedly demanded of women.44 Women are therefore left with the dilemma that we either take Levinas at his word (see TI 155; TeI 129) when he suggests that the feminine includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relation with the other— in which case we can identify with the ethical relation of the face-to-face as the mainstay of Levinas’s philosophy, which is nevertheless figured as masculine by Levinas himself, and in doing so we erase the very significance of the feminine as alterity. Or we identify with the feminine as mysterious, ineffable other, bringing men to the brink of ethics, before retreating into hiding, as the feminine withdraws from the categories of things in the world, light, knowledge, and philosophy—in which case we repeat the gestures of generosity that have been women’s lot since time immemorial, and we rejoin a tradition that excludes women from the serious public realm of politics, which has always been a masculine affair, and confines us to the private, corporeal, domestic realm, to watch over the children, to take care of men’s needs, to provide solace and love and sustenance, to give a break, interrupt the monotony, create a delightful lapse in being.45 By focusing on the peculiar conditional status that the feminine has, I want to suggest a third alternative to these two positions, which seem to amount either to a return to the philosophy of recognition that Levinas wants to put into question, or to a failure to take seriously how to read Levinas as a feminist. I want to inflect Levinas’s notion of the feminine more rigorously in the direction of the temporal, and to suggest thereby that the feminine remains the privileged unthought in Levinas’s philosophy, aporetically organizing his philosophy in a way that throws

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into question the adequacy of transcendental modes of thinking what conditionality means.

Dwelling with the Feminine in ‘Totality and Infinity’ “Representation is a pure present” (TI 125).

Is the feminine to be regarded as the condition of the properly ethical relation, and if so, how is its conditional status to be thought? Is the feminine to be thought as somehow foundational, as a ground, as the transcendental condition of ethics? Or must it rather be thought in terms of the series of terms that Levinas engages as his analysis moves along, terms such as “accomplishment,” “constitution,” and “condition,” terms which operate in a way that demands that we rethink our usual expectations of philosophical method? To understand the sense in which the preoriginal welcome is feminine, and to understand if and how it conditions the ethical, requires that we attend to the relation between enjoyment and representation, and the complex structure of conditionality that governs that interrelation. In turn, this will require us to follow, or to map out, the temporality of the interiority or ipseity to which Levinas refers as he describes its moments, and to gain an appreciation of how the body figures in this articulation of separation, or the movements of the same. Before turning to the task of elaborating the way in which Levinas calls into question our usual understanding of philosophical method—a challenge in virtue of which whatever conditional status the feminine has must be thought—and before turning to the ways in which Levinas’s notions of temporality and the body inform what is said of the feminine, I want to pause to acknowledge an intervention by Derrida that bears on the question of how to think the feminine in Levinas’s philosophy. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida suggests that whatever else can be said of the feminine, a certain indisputable privilege of the feminine as the welcome before all welcoming is not to be forgotten. He says (Adieu 44–45): whatever we might speak about later, and whatever we might say about it, we would do well to remember, even if silently, that this thought of wel-

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come, there at the opening of ethics, is indeed marked by sexual difference. Such sexual difference will never again be neutralized. The absolute, absolutely originary welcome, indeed, the pre-original welcome, the welcoming par excellence, is feminine: it takes place in a place that cannot be appropriated, in an open “interiority” whose hospitality the master or owner receives before himself then wishing to give it.

In exhorting us to remember that the preoriginal welcome is indelibly marked as feminine and in suggesting that this marking of sexual difference will never be erased, Derrida focuses his attention on the following passage from Totality and Infinity (Derrida’s emphasis):46 The home that founds possession is not a possession in the same sense as the movable goods it can collect and keep. It is possessed because it already and henceforth is hospitable for its owner. This refers us to its essential interiority, and to the inhabitant that inhabits it before every inhabitant, the welcoming one par excellence, welcoming in itself—the feminine being.

Let me make two further observations about how this passage is taken up by Derrida. First, having already gestured toward whatever else could be said of the feminine (a gesture that anticipates and defuses in advance the significance of “whatever we might speak about later”), Derrida does concede, later, that while the feminine claims a certain privilege as the preeminent welcome, it is through paternity that a relation with the infinite is maintained. Referring to the concluding pages of Totality and Infinity Derrida says, “Where the feminine being seemed to be the figure of the ‘welcoming one par excellence,’ the father now becomes the infinite host or the host of the infinite” (Adieu 94). Second, Derrida indicates two disparate readings of this passage. One would “make of this text a sort of feminist manifesto. For this text defines the welcome par excellence, the welcome or welcoming of absolute, absolutely originary, or even pre-originary hospitality, nothing less than the pre-ethical origin of ethics, on the basis of femininity” (Adieu 44). Notwithstanding Derrida’s defusing of the paternal function that Levinas will go on to endorse, which in fact amounts to nothing less than a complete reversal, a thorough overturning, an exchange or substitution of the feminine face for the masculine, Derrida does not want to choose between a feminist reading, and another reading, one that ignores concerns about the “classical androcentrism” (Adieu 44) of Levi-

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nas’s understanding of femininity. Derrida asks, “Need one choose here between two incompatible readings, between an androcentric hyperbole and a feminist one? Is there a place for such a choice in an ethics? And in justice? In law? In politics? Nothing is less certain” (Adieu 44). By refusing to acknowledge any certainty about whether a place can be made for choosing between a reading that would make of Levinas a spokesperson for feminism, and one that would criticize him for his traditionally androcentric views, has Derrida by default thrown his lot in with the privilege he, as a man, is free to assume? Perhaps there is no imperative for him to make such a choice. Or is he rather raising the question of the possibility of safeguarding a place for a feminist critique of Levinas? Perhaps he is pointing out that there can be no safe place for such a reading to situate itself, that no dwelling, no domicile, no home can protect such a critique, because wherever it might reside, wherever it might make a home for itself, inhabiting a domain that it can make its own, such a place is itself never exempt from critique. Any place that feminism marks out for itself is not exempt from calling itself into question. Feminism itself, far from being immune from the tendency to colonize, must be called to account for itself. I will return to this issue.

Philosophy as Critique “To philosophize,” says Levinas, “is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary” (TI 84–85; TeI 57). The prerogative of knowledge as critique or philosophy “consists in being able to put itself in question, in penetrating beneath its own condition . . . , in taking charge of the very condition that supports it and that supports even this very act of taking charge” (TI 85; TeI 57). The movement of philosophy is thus a reversion to the condition that makes it possible, a kind of inverse movement that tries to uncover its own origins, but which discovers as it does so that its freedom is in question. Since it is “in the face of the other and under his authority” that this “critical attitude . . . is produced” as a “calling into question of oneself ” (TI 81; TeI 53), and since knowing is posited “as the tracing back beyond the condition to the other that founds” (TI 88; TeI 60), Levinas departs “from a whole philosophical tradition that sought

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the foundation of the self in the self ” (TI 88; TeI 60). The other is “more primordial than everything that takes place in me” (TI 87; TeI 59). Levinas seeks not to displace knowing as such, only to divest us of our tendency to assume that objectivity offers the ultimate transcendence, and to affirm that justice is “the condition for knowing” (TI 90; TeI: 62). Nor does he challenge the supremacy of reason as such, but rather he denies that it issues from an impersonal ground. In this he remains true to the aspiration of intellectualism.47 Similarly, representation retains a certain privilege for Levinas, whose implicit target is Heidegger when he observes that “The ancient thesis that puts representation at the basis of every practical behavior—taxed with intellectualism—is too hastily discredited” (TI 94; TeI 67).48 Yet this privilege of representation is not absolute, because representation is not without its conditions. (See TI 126; TeI 98–99). We have seen that Levinas takes philosophy to be the task of tracing itself back to its own conditions. Among the conditions for representation is what Levinas calls the “dwelling”—a condition that “cannot be forgotten . . . even if representation is a privileged condition, absorbing its condition. For it absorbs it only after the event, a posteriori” (TI 153; TeI 126–27). We shall have to return to the temporality indicated by this “after the event.” Contemplation and representation “constitute, after the event, the dwelling itself,” although they also “presuppos[e] the event of dwelling” and “recollection in the intimacy of the home” (TI 153; TeI 126–27). Since “woman is the condition for recollection” (TI 155; TeI 129), representation also presupposes woman.

Accomplishment, Constitution, Conditioning In his elaboration of terms such as “sensibility,” “enjoyment,” and “nourishment,” Levinas seeks to articulate another plane or order than that of experience, representation, or thought. While recognizing that this dimension of “living from” the elements takes place only in a world that is already permeated with representation, already constituted by thought, and that we can have access to it only through language, and in this sense alimentation occurs in the midst of the intentional movement of representation, Levinas nonetheless insists that “sensibility” desig-

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nates a dimension of existence to which the very thought that thinks it is inadequate. This excess, this overflowing of representation, this ecstasis of enjoyment that is somehow above and beyond being, according to Levinas, is what Husserlian phenomenology cannot admit in its pretension to render the world completely knowable or intelligible by reducing it to noemata. “The thesis that every intentionality is either a representation or founded on a representation” is one that Levinas describes as an “obsession” for Husserl (see TI 122; TeI 95). Levinas is critical of the privileged role that representation or constitution plays for Husserl, whereby the subject comes to know the object by identifying alterity with the same, or by reducing otherness to itself, such that the object appears as “a product of consciousness” even if it is “distinct from consciousness” (TI 123; TeI 96). Levinas’s critique is based not on a wish to replace Husserl’s intellectualism, nor on a desire to undercut the claims of transcendental philosophy as such, but rather on an attempt to displace “the primacy of the same, which marks the direction of and defines the whole of Western philosophy” (TI 45; TeI 16) and “to contest the ineradicable conviction of every philosophy that objective knowledge is the ultimate relation of transcendence” (TI 89; TeI 62). At the heart of this critique is Levinas’s acknowledgment of the necessity to think through the temporality of representation. Levinas points to what he calls the “illusion” of representation, a power that invests it with its force and yet which is based on “forgetting” (TI 125; TeI 98). “At the very moment of representation the I is not marked by the past, but utilizes it as a represented and objective element. . . . Representation is a pure present. . . . It is void of time, interpreted as eternity” (TI 125; TeI 98). Levinas does not want to repeat the error that representation produces (and indeed relies upon and derives its power from), the illusion that the world can be adequately thought as if it were an unconditioned moment, as if it were self-contained and self-sufficient, as if it did not emerge from a past with a history, and as if it was not about to be superseded by a new moment, a future which could completely alter the destiny of the knowledge that represents itself as instantaneous, as absolute, and as unassailable. “[W]e are far from thinking that one starts with representation as a non-conditioned condition!” he exclaims (TI 126; TeI 98). In order not to repeat the error of a philosophy of representation, which imagines its subject as sovereign and answerable to nothing out-

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side itself, Levinas needs to think through the conditions of representation. The task is complicated not only because there is more than one condition of representation, and because the senses in which these conditions condition representation differ, but also (and partly as a consequence of the fact that there is more than one sense of conditioning at play here) because to think something as a condition is to reduce it to a meaning, and the sense in which representation is rooted in something other than a representation is precisely the sense in which representation finds itself conditioned by a surplus that it did not produce.49 To sort through the labyrinthine relationship between constitution and conditioning in Levinas’s analysis, we can begin by asking what it means to say that “representation is conditioned by life, but that this conditioning could be reversed after the event” (TI 169; TeI 144). Recall that, while not refuting that knowledge is the legitimate aspiration of philosophy (as he is sometimes understood to do), Levinas sees the purpose of such knowledge as the calling into question of the arbitrary freedom of the self as the same. By asking about the peculiar intentionality of enjoyment—an intentionality that reverses the movement of constitution, in which the subject makes the world into an object, conforming it to an idea which seems to have come from itself—Levinas asks after a conditioning that “is produced in the midst of this relation between representing and represented, constituting and constituted” (TI 128; TeI 99). The fact that this conditioning is “produced in the midst of” the process of representation indicates both that it is a conditioning that occurs, rather than being known (and thus mastered and controlled), and that even as conditioning conforms to the intentional, constituting movement of representation in one way—it reduces the otherness of the world to the sameness of me—it departs from it in another way. There is a turning back, a reversion, an inversion, a change of direction. It is not just that I constitute the world in my enjoyment of it; it is also that it constitutes me, or, as Levinas prefers to say (since it is less theoretical, and more at the level of sensibility), it nourishes me. In this sense, it precedes me; it is there already, before I bring my powers to bear on it. Levinas says (TI 129; TeI 102): The world I live in is not simply the counterpart or the contemporary of thought and its constitutive freedom, but a conditioning and an antece-

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Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time dence. The world I constitute nourishes me and bathes me. It is aliment and “medium” [“milieu”]. The intentionality aiming at the exterior changes direction in the course of its very aim by becoming interior to the exteriority it constitutes, somehow comes from the point to which it goes, recognizing itself past in its future, lives from what it thinks.

As we saw, among the conditions for representation Levinas includes the dwelling, which, he says, “cannot be forgotten [ne saurait être oubliée]” (TI 153; TeI 126–27 ). The formulation is worth pausing for. To say that the dwelling cannot, should not, be forgotten is also to acknowledge that it is forgotten, and that (like Heidegger’s question of Being) it needs to be remembered. Indeed we have seen above that the power of representation rests precisely upon the illusion of forgetting where it comes from, and presents its knowledge as if it were purified of any history or any legacy, as simply present. In fact, Levinas says, “the dwelling cannot be forgotten among the conditions for representation, even if representation is a privileged conditioned, absorbing its condition” (TI 153; TeI 126–27), thereby immediately conceding that although dwelling must not be forgotten, the privileged status of representation makes us forget it, by absorbing the very condition that facilitated it, allowed it to emerge, or (if we avoid thinking this phrase in the strictly transcendental mode, which reduces it to a thought) made it possible. We might think then that dwelling makes representation possible in the sense that it provides the concrete conditions which allow recollection, critical reflection, to occur.50 But even this way of putting it proves untenable, since it would seem to reintroduce a straightforward opposition between the concrete, physical, material, or bodily side of life on the one hand, and the theoretical, abstract life of thought and representation. While in some ways Levinas does return to certain aspects of the Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind that underlies this opposition, he does not reproduce the dichotomy with any exactitude. We might say that the work performed by Levinas’s notion of the feminine measures the extent to which he deviates both from Descartes and from Heidegger. Levinas takes his distance from Descartes’s categorical distinction between the physical extension of matter characteristic of bodies on the one hand and the thought that characterizes the mind on the other hand, yet he does not want to follow Heidegger, whose notion of worldhood glosses over the distinction between the physical and the mental.51 He

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departs from Heidegger precisely by retaining some aspects of the Cartesian differentiation of body and mind, even while not wanting to reproduce the distinction with any exactitude, neither adhering to Descartes’s metaphysical commitments in this regard, nor maintaining the distinction as categorical. In this respect, Levinas’s return to Descartes’s understanding of bodies resembles Lacan’s. Levinas retains what he calls “the profound insight Descartes had when he refused to sense data the status of clear and distinct ideas, ascribed them to the body, and relegated them to the useful” (TI 130; TeI 103). According to Levinas, the “profundity of the Cartesian philosophy of the sensible consists . . . in affirming the irrational character of sensation, an idea forever without clarity or distinctness, belonging to the order of the useful and not of the true” (TI 135; TeI 109). Like Kant, who also separates sensibility from understanding, Descartes affirms that sensibility is not “situated on the plane of representation” (TI 136; TeI 109). Levinas calls the order of sensibility that of enjoyment, rather than experience (TI 137; TeI 110). He says “the sensitive being, the body, concretizes this way of being, which consists in finding a condition in what, in other respects, can appear as an object of thought, as simply constituted” (TI 136; TeI 109). To see what is at stake in Levinas’s retrieval of the essentially irrational status Descartes attributed to sensibility, I want to consider the sense in which a reversal of the movement of constitution takes place in the intentionality of “living from . . .” and to explore how “the simultaneity of hunger and food constitutes the paradisal initial condition of enjoyment” (TI 136; TeI 110). For Levinas the body appears not, as it does for Descartes, “as an object among other objects, but as the very regime in which separation holds sway” (TI 163; TeI 137). The body is thus not wholly passive, as the classic interpretation of Descartes has it, nor is its active dimension circumscribed by Heideggerian equipmentality, which “presupposes a primordial hold on things, possession” without recognizing “the being established at the threshold of an interiority the dwelling makes possible” (TI 163; TeI 137). “In the paradisal enjoyment, timeless and carefree, the distinction between activity and passivity is undone in agreeableness [agrément]” (TI 163; TeI 137).52 There is a “primordial equivocation” that exists as the body (TI 164; TeI 138), so that “Life is a body, not only lived body [corps propre], where its self-suffi-

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ciency emerges, but a cross-roads of physical forces, body-effect” (TI 164; TeI 138). Corporeal existence is not simply independent; rather it “affirms its independence in the happy dependence of need” (TI 165; TeI 139). The paradox that Levinas had earlier understood as a freedom that is already responsible for itself is reworked here as the indigence of the body that is nevertheless capable and resourceful, with the ability not only of satisfying its needs, but of being happy in its enjoyment of food, walking, fresh air, or drinking coffee. “The body indigent and naked” changes or reverses the play of constitution (TI 129; TeI 102). Dwelling both makes possession possible and opens onto suffering, risk, and betrayal. At any moment the security of the dwelling can be removed, through illness, misfortune, but also through the Other who contests my enjoyment, my happiness, and my right to possessions. The dwelling allows the being at home with itself a delay and postponement. “To be conscious is precisely to have time” (TI 166; TeI 140), says Levinas. If we wonder how this accords with the statement that to be a body is to have time, we must return to the idea of the body as primary or original equivocation. Levinas also says that “The ambiguity of the body is consciousness” (TI 165; TeI 139). The dwelling provides for representation an ordering of the fluid rhythm of “living from . . .”. Being at home with itself, a subject recollects itself, finds a respite and a break from its daily excursions, finds the time and has the luxury to gather itself up and come back to itself. As Levinas says, “[t]he extraterritoriality of a home conditions the very possession of my body” (TI 162; TeI 136). Representation is conditioned by life, and it absorbs its condition but does not negate it or transmute it into a higher truth, leaving no residue. This is not a Hegelian sublation; there is an excess to the life that one enjoys which is unaccounted for by rationality or representation, which can justify this life or apologize for it, after the fact, but cannot empty it of its content. One can feel satisfied in the contentment of enjoyment, or one can feel ashamed of it, but one cannot alter the fact of it. Dwelling frames and enables the being capable of satisfying its needs and able to be happy in the enjoyment of the life it thereby lives. If dwelling is among the conditions of representation, there is another condition that must be considered. The idea of infinity conditions everything that is said in Totality and Infinity, in that Levinas affirms its “philosophical primacy” (TI 26; TeI xiv). It is as infinite that the Other

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interrupts the presumption of Western philosophy that the self must be founded in the self. Levinas says, “To posit knowing as the very existing of the creature, as the tracing back beyond the condition to the other that founds, is to separate oneself from a whole philosophical tradition that sought the foundation of the self in the self, outside of heteronomous opinions” (TI 88; TeI 60). Contrasting representation and the welcoming of the Other, Levinas says, “The total freedom of the same in representation has a positive condition in the other that is not something represented, but is the Other” (TI 126; TeI 98). This Other commands my attention, yet, like the feminine other in the dwelling, who can (but should not) be forgotten, the infinity and transcendence of the Other can be forgotten. Levinas says, “the possibility of this forgetting is necessary for separation” (TI 181; TeI 156). The feminine can be forgotten because it is discreet (see TI 170; TeI 145) and silent; but how can the idea of infinity be forgotten? Because of atheism (see TI 181; TeI 156), according to Levinas, or the idea that a free being can be created. In order to represent things “in themselves, that is, represent to them to myself, refuse enjoyment and possession, I must know how to give what I possess. . . . But for this I must encounter the indiscreet face of the Other that calls me into question” (TI 171; TeI 145). The Other, says Levinas, “imposes himself . . . as more primordial than everything that takes place in me” (TI 87; TeI 59). The Other claims an ethical priority, and marks the end of my powers of mastery, because his “exceptional presence is inscribed in the ethical impossibility of killing him” (TI 87; TeI 59). Yet there remains the “possibility of injustice and radical egoism, the possibility of accepting the rules of the game, but cheating,” which is in fact the “very condition of man” (TI 173; TeI 148). Contemplation comes “after” the dwelling: that is, “after the suspension of the chaotic and thus independent being of the element, and after the encounter of the Other who calls in question possession itself” (TI 163; TeI 137). The problem I want to focus on here is what sense can be given to this coming “after” or following on from both the dwelling and the Other. In other words, in what sense does the dwelling, and the feminine welcome that gives shape to life as being at home with oneself, condition representation, and in what sense is the infinite Other a condition of representation?

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The Temporality of Representation: After the Event “A movement radically different from thought is manifested when the constitution by thought finds its condition in what it has freely welcomed or refused, when the represented turns into a past that had not traversed the present of representation, as an absolute past not receiving its meaning from memory” (TI 130; TeI 103). This “absolute past” or “unrepresentable antiquity” is the “world which precedes me”(TI 137; TeI 111). A “relation of myself with myself is accomplished when I stand [me tiens]” in this world (TI 137; TeI 111), and “[d]welling is the very mode of maintaining oneself [se tenir]” (TI 37; TeI 7). We have already pointed out that representation rests on the illusion that there is nothing outside itself, that it is answerable only to itself. But for Levinas, “The represented, the present, is a fact, already belonging to the past” (TI 130; TeI 103). Levinas is at pains to point out that representation is not without conditions, among which he includes on the one hand the dwelling, and the feminine or woman who conditions the dwelling, and on the other hand the infinitely Other, whom I must encounter in order to “see things in themselves” and “to know how to give what I possess” (TI 171; TeI 145). The model that most clearly informs Levinas’s understanding of the temporality by which the subject discovers itself after the fact in relation to the Other is Descartes’s idea of infinity. Just as the Cartesian I finds itself to have had in it the idea of God as infinite and perfect, while it is itself finite and imperfect, so Levinas finds that “I must have been in relation with something I do not live from. This event is the relation with the Other who welcomes me in the Home, the discreet presence of the Feminine” (TI 170; TeI 145). Separation is thus produced, but it is not known without my encounter with the infinitely Other, who “paralyzes possession, which he contests by his epiphany in the face. . . . the untraversable infinity of the negation of murder is announced by th[e] dimension of height, where the Other comes to me concretely in the ethical impossibility of commit[t]ing murder” (TI 171; TeI 146). What, then, is the relation between the discreet feminine presence and the indiscreet infinite presence that forbids murder? Levinas never articulates it as

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such, except inasmuch as he makes clear that the dwelling at home with oneself that is the domain of the feminine is one that I must “be able to free myself from” (TI 170; TeI 146) in order to “welcome the Other” (TI 171; TeI 146). The feminine is thereby relegated to the same, while the subject who has benefited from being in relation to it “is ashamed of its naiveté” and “discovers itself as a violence” (TI 171; TeI 146). Is it ashamed of the feminine? Again, this is left unclear by Levinas—who does, however, tell us that the “discretion” of the feminine “includes all the possibilities of the transcendent relationship with the Other” (TI 153; TeI 129), without providing us with many clues as to what this could mean. The gentleness, grace, and radiance of the feminine face that provides the first welcome is meant to cut across formal and dialectical logic, according to Levinas (see TI 150–51; TeI 124–25). But how exactly does it function? The feminine would seem to provide an implicit model for the giving that the I can come to know only through the infinitely Other who does not welcome me, but challenges me from above. Alison Ainley has pointed out that both Kant and Levinas draw on the feminine in similar ways, by seeing it as an initial, implicit, but informal ethical imperative.53 Let us return to the Cartesian model of the idea of infinity, which the reflective I discovers itself to have understood after the fact, to the way in which the infinite is contained in the finite, or the idea of God’s existence as somehow exceeding the I who has the idea. One can see that the infinite is there before the path of contemplation or meditation is undertaken by the I who already has access to the idea of the infinite, even if it has not fully comprehended what this means. In this sense, the idea of God precedes the I that thinks it, and overflows the very thought that tries to contain it. The philosopher traces back the conditions that must have preceded him at every moment. Just as the Cartesian reflective I recuperates everything that can be thought except the meaning of the idea of the infinite, but cannot recuperate the materiality of the physical world, so Levinas’s I is confronted by the encounter of the Other who infinitely escapes my powers, and also lives a life of sensibility which might be constituted and represented after it has been lived, but which retains a sense that is impervious to the thought that thinks it. It is irreducible. Levinas says that the “aptitude to keep [se tenir] to the immediate is not reducible to anything else. . . . Sensibility is not a thought un-

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aware of itself. To sense is precisely to be sincerely content with what is sensed, to enjoy, to refuse the unconscious prolongations, to be thoughtless. . . . to maintain oneself at home with oneself” (TI 138–39; TeI 112).54 Levinas develops a formal comparison between representation and enjoyment in terms of their different relations to temporality. Representation is characterized as total presence. The same determines the other without being determined by it (see TI 124; TeI 97).55 “The same in relating itself to the other refuses what is exterior to its own instant” (TI 125; TeI 98). Thus, “Every anteriority of the given is reducible to the instantaneity of thought and, simultaneous with it, arises in the present. It thereby takes on meaning. To represent is not only to render present ‘anew’; it is to reduce to the present an actual perception which flows on. To represent is not to reduce a past fact to an actual image but to reduce to the instantaneousness of thought everything that seems independent of it; it is in this that representation is constitutive” (TI 127; TeI 100). The constitutive power of representation lies in its reduction of past and future to an intelligible instant, or a “pure present” that is “void of time, interpreted as eternity” (TI 125; TeI 98). By contrast, the “intentionality of enjoyment . . . consists in holding on to the exteriority which the transcendental method involved in representation suspends. To hold on to exteriority is not simply equivalent to affirming the world, but is to posit oneself in it corporeally. The body is the elevation, but also the whole weight of position” (TI 127; TeI 100). Whereas in representation the same determines the other but the other does not determine the same, in enjoyment the “same both determines the other while being determined by it” (TI 128; TeI 101), but not reciprocally. Levinas uses the term “living from . . .” to designate this plane or “the way in which the same is determined by the other,” a way which “is brought about by the body whose essence is to accomplish my position on the earth” (TI 128; TeI 101). Before we can fully grasp what is at stake in this accomplishment, we need to recall that when Levinas stipulates the difference between representation, as determining the other without being determined by it, and enjoyment, where the same is determined by the other even as it determines the other, the comparison Levinas draws is merely formal. That is, the comparison holds only when both representation and enjoyment are considered detached from

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their conditions. (See TI 126; TeI 99.) The formal comparison is complicated in part because one of the conditions of enjoyment is in fact representation, and because representation itself is conditioned by enjoyment, or “representation is conditioned by life” (TI 169; TeI 144). So although the intentionality of enjoyment reverses that of representation, “the body naked and indigent” is also “conditioned by its own representation of the world” (TI 127; TeI 100). Thus, representation reverts into the life that conditions it. (See TI 127 and TeI 100; TI 169 and TeI 143–44.) In turn, representations themselves sustain life, and we live from them. The intentionality of the “world I live in” is thus both a “conditioning and an antecedence” (TI 129; TeI 102), in the sense that “I welcome” sensible objects “without thinking them” (TI 137; TeI 110–11); yet, as we saw, “conditioning is produced in the midst of the relation between representing and represented” (TI 128; TeI 101), and in this sense its conditioning is already caught up in constitution. Thus Levinas can say that the intentionality of “living from . . .” “changes direction in the course of its very aim by becoming interior to the exteriority it constitutes, somehow comes from the point to which it goes, recognizing itself past in its future” (TI 129; TeI 102). The order of sensibility as a mode of enjoyment recollected in the dwelling circumvents the present of representation, and in doing so, it engages with temporality in a way that does not conform to the model of mastery, domination, and conquest. Even if it is inextricably bound up with the constitutive time of representation, which reduces the past and future to a present, the intentionality of enjoyment also undercuts its virile movement, and thus offers a way of thinking time that is open to alterity. Levinas says, “A movement radically different from thought is manifested when the constitution by thought finds its condition in what it has freely welcomed or refused, when the represented turns into a past that had not traversed the present of representation, as an absolute past not receiving its meaning from memory” (TI 130; TeI: 103). To take account of the peculiar conditionality of the feminine, the way in which the feminine both conditions ethics and yet cannot be contained by the thought that thinks its status as a condition, must we say that there are two versions of welcome in Totality and Infinity? Must we say that each is achieved or produced by a movement that Levinas calls accomplishment, or must we distinguish between two modes of ac-

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complishing? One mode of welcoming would occur under the sign of the feminine, while the other would be under the auspices of the masculine. There would be the welcome of contentment, where a “relation of myself with myself is accomplished when I stand [me tiens] in the world which precedes me as an absolute unrepresentable antiquity” (TI 137; TeI 111). This first, feminine, welcome of the dwelling would be associated with materiality, sensibility, and the corporeal. The second, masculine, welcome would be the “welcoming of the other by the same” that is “concretely produced as . . . ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge” (TI 43; TeI 12). Welcoming does not aim at the other as an object: it is not a thought; it is rather a way of the same’s being determined by the other. Although the first, feminine, welcome is replicated by the second, and moreover the second, masculine, ethical, welcome takes place in virtue of the dwelling, the relation between the two is not clearly articulated by Levinas. This is, I suggest, because of the temporality that governs Levinas’s thinking of the feminine. The dwelling, as that which is primarily enjoyed, rather than represented, cannot be thought strictly as a condition, which would reduce it to a thought. Is to think the feminine as a condition thus necessarily to destroy its openness to alterity, or its welcome, to reduce it to thematization, represent it as if it were a pure present, rather than an absolute past? And if it is, how is it that the exteriority of the Other that is accomplished in the face-to-face does not succumb to the same conversion into objectification, since it also “recedes from thematization” (TI 296; TeI 272)? The answer lies in the fact that the Other “expresses himself,” and thus his presence “is not reabsorbed into my vision” (TI 296; TeI 273). Here is where the symmetry between the feminine and the masculine welcome turns into an asymmetry. The one who welcomes in dwelling does not speak, and cannot attend her manifestation; and the distance she facilitates does not constitute a “dimension of height” (TI 127; TeI 273). Must we say that the feminine that conditions the dwelling ultimately facilitates recollection, provides a delay and a postponement, remains unthought and unrepresented? And if the feminine is unthought, is it unthought in the same way that the Other infinitely escapes representation? The Other contests my powers, but the feminine welcomes. The Other calls me into question, but the feminine allows the appro-

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priation of a domain for me. The Other requires that I think the condition of my life, but the feminine dwelling requires no thought; in fact it tends, as we have seen, to be forgotten. Can the feminine be thought only after the Other has made representation possible? But what would this “after” mean here, given that we are always already in the midst of representation, and others? To insist, as Derrida does in Adieu, that the third does not wait for the face, or to emphasize that the feminine is understood by Levinas not as outside language, only as excluded from the “transcendence of language” (A 37), does not solve all the problems raised by the temporality of the feminine. To the extent that Levinas reminds us of the feminine, even if he maintains it as a silent, discreet dimension, he has uncovered a tendency, regime, or way that is usually neglected, overlooked, and ignored by philosophers. The feminine facilitates sensibility as a way of “living from . . .” that runs counter to the mastery of representation, which puts the subject at the center of its world, reduces the object to noemata, reduces everything to the same. It thus offers what could be taken as a critique of the virile, masculine will to conquer. Yet, the “very possession that the welcome of the Home establishes” is what the I must free itself from (TI 170; TeI 145 ). To the extent that in his own philosophy the feminine remains subordinate to the ethical demands of the Other, Levinas seems to reiterate the classical trope of Western metaphysics. Not only does he associate the feminine with the home; he makes the two almost synonymous. He seems to disqualify the feminine from ethics as such, rejoining Hegel’s attribution of the feminine to the private realm of the domestic, while the masculine principle is represented by the truly ethical, and therefore with the third party, the political, the public—with reason, with philosophy, with justice. Let me pose some questions to Levinas: If there always has to be some being—whether this is a way or manner of being, a particular being, or the female sex—to create a dwelling, does this being have to be the same being over time? Is its identity fixed by its function? Or can the role of the feminine be performed by different identities at different times—in which case, what sense can be made of retaining the term “feminine”? Can Levinas’s notion of diachrony help to make sense of such a suggestion? By divorcing the term “feminine” from the empirical woman (insofar as he does so successfully), Levinas seems to point be-

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yond a politics of identity. But in requiring that there be someone to perform the feminine function without clarifying if this function can be shared, Levinas seems to require relations of domination and submission, however these are parceled out between the sexes. Can alternative communities be envisaged without someone to facilitate the dwelling? Is there a place to think the conditions of representation outside the home? Such questions return us to Derrida’s concern when he asks whether there can be a place for such questions in the realm of justice and politics. Derrida is right to suggest that the feminine in Levinas cannot be divorced from questions of national identity as they relate to the meaning accruing to the state of Israel. But perhaps the idea of the dwelling as refuge or exile that performs as a model for thinking Israel as a place for “political invention” (BV 194) marks the feminine as the privileged unthought of Levinas’s philosophy.

chapter two

Heidegger and Feminism Bodies, Others, Temporality

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n t h e s u r f a c e it would seem that a far-reaching feminist critique of Heidegger could be launched. Such a critique would consist in exposing a normative bias that is built into his ontological method in such a way as to cover over its prejudices. Once the normative assumptions of Heidegger’s discourse are uncovered, it would become possible to see not only that Heidegger neglects feminist concerns when treating certain topics, but how his philosophy is formulated in such a way as to render such concerns irrelevant. Heidegger’s ontology has pretensions to a neutrality and universality, this reading would suggest, that it cannot sustain. His philosophy could be said to operate in a way that exhibits a systematic blindness not only to its own gender bias, but also to a range of other normative assumptions it makes. This reading has a certain legitimacy, and I will spend some time at the beginning of this chapter establishing its plausibility, before I go on to complicate it by showing that it rests upon a limited understanding of the full scope of Heidegger’s philosophy, and that it succeeds only by operating within restraints that allow it to ignore the wider implications of Heidegger’s rethinking of time and history. Indeed, an alternative and competing reading of Heidegger could also be produced, one in tension with this first reading. It is within the productive tension between these two readings that Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is situated. My claim is that while Heidegger methodologically rules out in advance, it would seem, any serious consideration of significant differences between individuals

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(whether those differences are specified in terms of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, or some other culturally loaded difference), he also opens up a space for taking such differences seriously. If at times his methodology leads him to posit, almost by default, a culturally specific version of Dasein which he takes to be exemplary, but whose exemplarity is never made available for critical interrogation, at other moments, particularly in his nuanced, but problematic, rethinking of history as historicity, he provides the resources that are necessary for a critical confrontation with otherness. Levinas’s uncovering of the ethical claim that the other has on me points both to the limitations of Heidegger’s discourse and to its resources. While I remain critical of Heidegger’s project for the exclusions it permits in the name of impartiality, it should be clear that I am far from suggesting a wholly negative reading of Heidegger. At the same time as acknowledging that there are crucial lacunae in Heidegger’s ontological approach, I suggest that Heidegger foreshadowed certain gestures that have been taken up and developed in various strains of feminist thought and race theory. Heidegger’s rethinking of history is perhaps the privileged example of this tendency, and it is of particular interest in that it exhibits both the greatest strengths of Heidegger’s philosophy and its spectacular failures. I want also to recognize that even the contours of my critique of Heidegger borrow significantly from his own critical interrogation of what has come to be known as the metaphysics of presence. My strategy in this chapter will be to examine three areas of Heidegger’s philosophy which suggest themselves as the most fruitful sites of inquiry for a critical interrogation of his ontological assumptions, namely the topics of bodies, others, and temporality. I will suggest that the first two topics yield a largely negative picture, but that Heidegger’s radical reworking of Western metaphysical assumptions concerning time, history, and death make good some of the impasses that are reached in an attempt to make his account of Dasein amenable to bodies and others. It is far from accidental, as I will show, that Levinas has both criticized Heidegger’s neglect of each of the areas I have chosen to focus upon and at the same time, particularly in the case of temporality, but also to a lesser extent with regard to the materiality of bodies and the

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question of others, taken Heidegger’s philosophy as his point of departure, even as he attempts to deepen the analysis that Heidegger provides.

Bodies and Materiality We seem to exhibit a persistent, confused avoidance when confronted with bodies. Judeo-Christian thought offers us plenty of models that envisage the soul, in the absence of salvation, as trapped in, mired by, or condemned to the material aspects of existence. The metaphor that represents the eyes as windows of the soul reflects a deep tendency to see ourselves as imprisoned in, or entombed by, our physical materiality. It is hardly surprising that philosophy has imbibed the ways in which bodies continually confound us in our attempt to think about our relation to the world and to formulate adequate responses to it. Neither have feminists been immune from the apparently allergic reaction philosophers have to bodies, notwithstanding feminism’s recently adopted program of self-medication, whereby it has assiduously addressed itself to the previously neglected “problem of embodiment”—with decidedly mixed results. We are still trying to overcome the vestiges of somatophobia, a difficult task already, but one that is compounded by rampant cries of “Essentialism!” every time someone tries to tackle it.1 It is one thing to accede intellectually to the ideological impact that patriarchal denials of bodily significance continue to exert on feminist theory, and quite another to successfully or completely live down their legacy. Ideologies, as we know, remain robust precisely because they are good at finding devious ways of mutating. The history of feminist thought demonstrates a complex relationship to bodies. Beginning with denial, it has evolved into the corrective maneuvers of compensation, but its gestures are still compromised by the resistance of bodies to analysis. The recent attempts of feminist theory to engage bodies reflect an ambiguity that characterizes so much contemporary thought: on the one hand, Heidegger’s influence has been indispensable in formulating many influential feminist inquiries and projects, and in this sense his importance for feminism is a given; but on the other hand, feminist theory must dispense a great deal of energy in setting straight the record of neglect and denial. Feminists must avoid

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succumbing to the continuing temptation of repeating an inherited aversion to bodily significance. As a result, Heidegger’s influence on feminist thought remains, enigmatic and obscure. It has filtered through to feminism by indirect routes—through Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze. Without Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty could not have articulated his acute brand of politically infused and psychoanalytically oriented phenomenological discourse on the body in quite the way he did. Without Heidegger, Beauvoir could not have mobilized Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and welded it together with Sartre’s optimistic commitment to freedom in quite the way she did. Even if, more recently, the reaction of French intellectuals to Heidegger has been more dismissive, if not more acerbic, than that of the existential phenomenologists, it cannot be disputed that Heidegger’s thought constitutes something like a transcendental condition for it. One of the most perplexing enigmas of Heidegger’s work is that on the one hand its metaphysical proclivities imply a radical critique of the disembodied Cartesian subject, but on the other hand there is almost no effort to produce a positive experiential account of the lived body. In Heidegger’s attempt to overcome Descartes’s subject/object or mind/body dualism he specifies that the two terms of the dualism are not ontologically equivalent. By speaking of Dasein rather than of the subject, Heidegger hopes to accomplish two things. First, he wants to definitively sever any ontological continuity between the way Dasein exists, and the way other objects exist, insisting that the being of Dasein is distinct from the being of any other object. Second, he wants to establish that Dasein’s very way of being includes within it an understanding of the world. By the term “world” Heidegger designates the environment “wherein” Dasein exists.2 That is, Dasein’s mode of existence differs from that of all other objects, in that its mode of existence consists partly in an understanding of the issues that make up its concerns, both in its immediate environment and in the public spheres in which it moves and which have significance for it. In other words, unlike other entities’, Dasein’s very way of being is constituted to some extent by its understanding of other entities and their relation to its own being. As there-being, Dasein is always already engaged in the world, and not set over against it, not in ontological opposition to it. According to Heidegger, Descartes fails to investigate the ontological

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status of “I am.” Descartes, says Heidegger, “takes the Being of ‘Dasein’ . . . in the very same way as he takes the Being of the res extensa—namely as substance” (BT 131; SZ 98). The meaning of Descartes’s concept of substantiality remains ontologically unclarified, and is assumed to be incapable of clarification. (See BT 127; SZ 94.) By characterizing the subject as res cogitans, a thinking thing, or a thing that thinks, Descartes treats the subject as if it were ontologically equivalent to a thing, but with the added capacity for thought. In Heidegger’s language, this amounts to treating the being of Dasein as if it were present-at-hand. The question of the specific being of humans remains forgotten. (See BT 75; SZ 49.) As Derrida says, “In starting, like Descartes, from an ego and subject given immediately, one misses the phenomenality of Dasein. . . . Until it has been submitted to an ontological clarification, the idea of the subject continues to be bound up with the positing (Ansatz) of a subjectum or a hypokeimenon, and therefore of some substance or substratum.”3 It is, as we have already seen, precisely the positing of the self in its substantiality that Levinas, against Heidegger, wants to retrieve from Descartes. Descartes’s basic ontological orientation, suggests Heidegger, remains consonant with traditional sources. Both the Aristotelian definition of man as a “rational animal” (where humans are understood as ontologically equivalent to animals, with the extra capacity for reason added on, or somehow attached) and the Christian understanding of man as made in the image of God (where humans are understood as finite beings, created by an infinite being, somehow transcending their finitude through their understanding) are misleading and ontologically mystifying. What we need, according to Heidegger, is not a model where the body and the soul (or nature and spirit) are thought to constitute humans, where the parts stand in an uneasy relation to the whole, but rather an idea of Dasein’s being as a whole. Hence, for Heidegger, “man’s ‘substance’ is not spirit as a synthesis of soul and body; it is rather existence” (BT 153; SZ 117). The self is conceived not as a thing that thinks, but as a way of being. Dasein’s existence thus gets defined not through any core substantial reality, but only in its definite ways of being, and through its possible ways of being. That is, Dasein exists as its possibilities, both at the ontical and ontological levels, both as situated in relation to the definite, concrete possibilities that define its existence

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as an entity, and as situated in relation to its fundamental existential possibilities that constitute the possible ways for it to be. In traditional ontology, Heidegger points out, “Being” is used in such a wide sense that it embraces the “infinite” difference between created beings and the perfect being. For Descartes, created beings are divided into two kinds of substances, res cogitans and res extensa (see BT 125–26; SZ 92). Whether explicitly or implicitly, the idea of being that is assumed here, on Heidegger’s reading, is presence-at-hand (Vorhandensein). Descartes’s mistake is to pass over (along with the rest of the tradition) the phenomenon that Heidegger calls “the world” and the Being of entities that are ready-to-hand. By default, both the being of Dasein and the being of other objects are treated as present-at-hand by the tradition. In order to rectify what he regards as an ontological misinterpretation Heidegger undertakes an analysis of the equipmental relations that structure Dasein’s dealings with the world. The import of this analysis has become familiar to readers of Heidegger through the example of the chain of references involved in the act of hammering in a nail. Heidegger points out that in order to make sense of such an act, we refer not to the objective status of the hammer as an object (as present-at-hand), nor to the isolated act by itself, but rather to a series of meaningful references that explain the significance of this single act in terms of the overall projects Dasein undertakes. The meaning of the simple act of hammering is thereby cashed out in terms of the end to which it is directed, the meaning and purpose of this project, and its relationship to Dasein and to others who are affected by, and who contribute to, Dasein’s projects. One of the outcomes of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s circumspective concern, expressed in its equipmental relations, is that the world of equipment evokes a network of significations, alliances, priorities, and so on, the totality of which make up Dasein’s selfunderstanding. Hence Heidegger insists that equipment refers to a plurality of references, rather than to a single object. Another outcome of Heidegger’s analysis is that Dasein’s self-understanding is structured by its tendency to derive its meaning from its meaningful relations with the world. In other words, Dasein first understands its own being at the level of the ready-to-hand, since it carries over its understanding of the world in which it operates, and applies this understanding to its own being.

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The ambiguity underlying this interpretive possibility of Dasein, far from being accidental, is in fact a structuring feature of Dasein. The distinctive priority that Dasein has over other entities, and the reason Heidegger chooses it as the vehicle for raising the question of being, is its ontico-ontological priority. Dasein is an entity in the world, and its being is an issue for it, or its way of being includes within it an understanding of its way of being. Part of what it means for Dasein to understand itself is for it also to have a working understanding of other beings. When Dasein hammers a nail into the wood, it does so because it answers to a specific need that can be articulated within a context of significant projects, which might include wishes, desires, ends, and so on. What explains the singular act, in other words, is the purpose for which that specific act is undertaken. Dasein might be acting as a carpenter. In hammering a nail, a carpenter takes for granted a range of unarticulated assumptions and an implicit context. Dasein’s act might be explained in a number of ways: Dasein might be said to be acting in accordance with sustaining a career, fulfilling obligations for a particular client, creating a specific object for a specific purpose, and so on. Levinas will criticize Heidegger’s analysis of equipmentality because it does not take enjoyment into account. He says, “As material or gear the objects of everyday use are subordinated to enjoyment—the lighter to the cigarette one smokes, the fork to the food, the cup to the lips. Things refer to my enjoyment. This is an observation as commonplace as could be, which the analyses of Zeughaftigkeit do not succeed in effacing” (TI 133; TeI 106). It is also noteworthy that the direction in which Heidegger’s early ontological analysis tends does not leave much room for aesthetic considerations. The carpenter might, for example, stand back and admire the grain of the wood she is using, or appreciatively notice the smell of the wood chips. It is not until several years after Being and Time that Heidegger will pay serious attention to aesthetic experience.4 I suggest that an unresolved tension emerges from Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s engagement in the world as ready-to-hand. Heidegger maintains that Dasein’s way of existence is conceptually distinct from the way in which any other objects exist. He reserves the term Existenz for this specific way of existing that belongs to Dasein, as distinct from the ways in which other objects can exist, namely either as readyto-hand (zuhanden), where an object is taken up as useful by Dasein, or

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simply as present-at-hand (vorhanden), as when an object falls outside the circuit of usefulness and reverts to being merely an inert object. Although at the conceptual level Heidegger is at pains to rigorously distinguish between Dasein’s specific mode of existence and that of other objects, in fact Dasein fails, not just initially but systematically, to comprehend this difference. Dasein first gains its understanding of itself from the world in which it lives, and since it is therefore seduced by the tendency to interpret itself as if it could be reduced to the level of the readyto-hand, Dasein is structured by its very relation to the world. The difficulty of separating Dasein’s Existenz (the specific mode of existence that Dasein has) from the mode of existing that Heidegger characterizes as ready-to-hand is acknowledged by Heidegger, who acknowledges repeatedly that for the most part Dasein does interpret itself in terms of the ready-to-hand, for that is what is closest to it. At the same time, Heidegger labels such interpretations as everyday, average, fallen, and inauthentic, suggesting that Dasein needs to rise above such interpretations in order to achieve ontological clarity. We must ask, then, whether anything can serve to distinguish Dasein’s proper mode of existence from Dasein’s obfuscation of itself as ready-to-hand, a tendency which easily reverts to Dasein taking itself as present-at-hand.5 To the extent that Heidegger answers this question, his distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic modes of Dasein’s being might be cited. To point to the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is to raise a whole series of further problems that have persistently plagued Heidegger’s interpreters. Before indicating the interpretive dilemmas provoked by a consideration of Heidegger’s differentiation between authenticity and inauthenticity, let me draw to a close my discussion of Heidegger’s critique of Descartes’s ontology by suggesting that the nature of Heidegger’s critique leads him away from any sustained consideration of lived bodily experience. Heidegger’s critique of traditional ontology, with which, as we have seen, he identifies Descartes’s classic dualism, unfolds by means of an interpretation that dislodges the priority of substance, thinghood, or (to use Heidegger’s terminology) the assumption that all entities are present-at-hand. That is, on the traditional view, all entities exhibit the same mode of presence, and that mode of presence is essentially characteristic of a metaphysics that models its conception of reality on substance.

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Thus inert physical matter, or the category of objects as defined by their spatiotemporal location, comes to represent the prevailing idea of what constitutes reality. Descartes took the defining characteristic of objects to be their extension, while the defining characteristic of the substance he called mind was designated as thought. Heidegger objects that in assigning to thinking beings the same kind of being as that of extended substances, Descartes has overlooked the possibility that there might be a way of existing that is peculiar to human beings, and that this unique way of being consists of our having an understanding not only of ourselves, but also of other entities in the world (including other objects and other subjects). This understanding, according to Heidegger, is part of the very fabric of Dasein’s being, and as such it constitutes a relation with objects other than Dasein. The task, then, on Heidegger’s view, is not to establish an initial connection between subjects and objects, nor to bridge the gap between mind and body, but rather to provide an account of the relational way in which Dasein exists in the world. Because Heidegger stresses this relational aspect of Dasein’s existence, one would expect a much fuller exploration of embodied existence. Heidegger emphasizes that Dasein is integrated into the world, rather than separated off from it. I suggest that Heidegger’s account of Dasein remains more consonant with the disembodied transcendental subject that Kant inherited from Descartes than Heidegger admits. The explanation for this, in my view, lies in the dominant role that understanding plays in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, the extent to which he appeals to the necessity of formulating a concept of the understanding, and the lack of any sustained account of bodily experience. Except insofar as bodies signify as a contributing factor to the meaning of Dasein’s projects, and their significance is thereby subsumed by Dasein’s ways of understanding, Heidegger pays very little attention to them. One of the guiding efforts, if not the principal objective, of Being and Time can be identified as the progressive clarifying and deepening of Dasein’s self-understanding. The idea is first introduced under the guise of Dasein’s having its being as an issue for itself. Subsequently, the notion of understanding is reinterpreted under the rubric of possibility, and finally as projection.6 Toward the end of Being and Time Heidegger introduces the idea of formulating a concept (Begriff) of the under-

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standing (Verstehen), an idea that he will develop in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. My point in sketching the outlines of this development is to emphasize that no matter now far Heidegger imagines having departed from the Cartesian notion of the subject as a thinking being, or from the medieval notion of the subject (which Heidegger reads as approximating to the same view) whereby the intellect determines or takes the measure of the thing through adequation, the legacy of a disincarnate intellect remains. Although Heidegger makes a point of refusing the salience of the distinction between praxis and theôria, preferring his governing distinction between the ontic and the ontological, the fact remains that his ontological project remains bound to that of theoretical clarification. Of course, as a philosophical project, it is inevitable that there be a privileging of the theoretical. My point is that in Being and Time there is a progressive move away from the concrete starting point of Dasein’s world, and toward a disembodied understanding of Dasein. Heidegger’s project thus errs on the side of the intellect, or the mind, rather than that of the materiality of the world, reinforcing the Western tendency to prioritize the abstract over the concrete that Heidegger would discredit. It is important to note that the understanding within which Dasein operates, at first, is at a level that is both unreflective and unthematized. Dasein grasps how to operate tools in the world, and how to negotiate the physical conditions of the world, by maneuvering around obstacles without having to stop and measure the space to be negotiated in relation to the proportions of the body. I can move around a room, walk through a doorway, or get into a car, because of an operational understanding I have of the relation between my body and its physical environment. Dasein, in Heidegger’s language, has a preontological understanding of the world. The ontological structures that Heidegger draws out of this preontological experience, and designates existentialia—that is, the fundamental or basic structures of Dasein’s existence—amount to a systematic ordering or synthesis of the multiple ways or possibilities for Dasein’s existence in the world. If it is true not only that Heidegger acknowledges a nontheoretical understanding of the world, but that he privileges such dealings, articulating them under the rubric of circumspective concern, it is no less certain that the theoretical burden of Heidegger’s analysis leads him away from such ontic concerns, and toward

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their ontological clarification. Levinas expresses this point when he says, “The ontic, which at least involves an opaqueness, everywhere yields before the ontological” (OB 80; AE 101). Heidegger, of course, insists upon the necessity of the ontical as that in which ontology is rooted. And yet, his objections notwithstanding, there is an undeniably moral tone, which sometimes approaches a quasi-religious fervor, in his exhortations that Dasein disentangle itself from the curiosity and idle talk of the they. It is hard not to read into the language of fallenness with which Heidegger describes Dasein’s lostness in the they echoes of the theological fall from grace. For Dasein to remove itself from the fallen state of the inauthentic they, mired in ontical concerns, might then be understood as approaching the heady heights of ontological enlightenment. If one problem with Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s multifarious relations with the world is that it always seems to have decided in advance in favor of ontology and against the ontic level of experience, another problem is that it is geared almost exclusively to the world of work. Descriptions of Dasein’s involvement with objects and with others are oriented around the equipmental world, with the result that both the picture of Dasein that emerges and the existentialia that it yields are largely task-oriented. Dasein engages in certain types of activity for the sake of an end that it has in view. A very one-sided view of Dasein is thus provided by Heidegger, one that either ignores what most would regard as important aspects of experience—for example, sexuality, eroticism, enjoyment, pleasure—or, at best, treats them as important only as subordinate to Dasein’s successful negotiation of its equipmental relations and its ultimate ontological task of clarifying the significance of such dealings. To the extent that Heidegger pays attention to the physical ways in which we move around the world, for example, he does so largely in the service of Dasein’s instrumentalism. It is in order to accomplish certain tasks that Dasein’s bodily experience is taken into account.7 The outcome is that the bodily dimensions of experience are admitted to Heidegger’s analysis only in the most rarefied and abstract way. The structures that dominate Division 1 of Being and Time are consistent with the prominent role played by the understanding. They are geared to the accomplishing of work-oriented tasks, and are expressed in relations such as the “in-order-to” and “for-the-sake-of-which,” struc-

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tures whose implicit temporal dimensions—specifically, the priority accorded to future-oriented projects—will be parsed out explicitly in Division 2 of Being and Time.8 I have emphasized that Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein is an understanding that situates Dasein as always related to its world. This relation to world takes shape in Dasein’s involvement in projects, which is a more concrete way of specifying that Dasein’s very way of being is to have its being as an issue for it. Another way of expressing this point is to say that Dasein always exceeds or transcends itself, that its structure is ecstatic, that it cannot be thought in terms of a Cartesian separation between an inner mind and the exterior reality of natural things, but that its very existence consists in its relation to the external or the outside. In this sense, it is open or exposed in its very being. I have also emphasized that by insisting upon the relatedness that structures Dasein as being-inthe-world, Heidegger neglects the bodily aspects of existence in favor of providing an account of the directectedness, significance, and meaning of Dasein’s worldly projects. Levinas thinks that Heidegger’s effort to rework the Cartesian distinction between inner and outer, between mind and body, between cognition or thought and exteriority, results in a failure to remain true to the concretion of the ethical relation with the Other. He also sees the need to provide a positive account of embodiment, one that does not succumb to the Heideggerian tendency to represent embodiment as merely everyday, fallen, and inauthentic. As Taminiaux says, referring to Existence and Existents, “Whereas Heidegger never focuses upon the body in Being and Time, Levinas considers it to be ‘the advent of consciousness’ (71).”9 “Transcendence,” says Levinas, “is not the fundamental ontological adventure; it is founded in the nontranscendence of position” (EE 77; DE 133). Whereas Heidegger understands Dasein’s substantiality as its existence, Levinas stresses the significance of subjectivity as substantiality. He thinks that Heidegger, like other modern philosophers, has sacrificed “for the sake of the spirituality of the subject its very subjectivity, that is, its substantiality” (EE 97; DE 168).10 In the relationship between hypostasis and the il y a (there is), Levinas discerns a thoroughgoing ambiguity, an ambiguity that is inscribed not in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity—not, that is, as the error

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to which Heidegger’s Dasein systematically succumbs in mistaking its mode of existence for that of a thing, in assuming that it can apply to itself the interpretation that is in fact appropriate only for beings that are present-at-hand or ready-to-hand.11 The ambiguity that Levinas explores is registered at the level of corporeality, an ambiguity that is inscribed on the one hand in the skill and dexterity with which the I can evade the point of a sword, escape death, withdraw into the base of corporeality, as in the unconsciousness of sleep, and on the other hand in the fact that the I remains mortal, at risk, and vulnerable to death, which approaches me as Other, in the guise of murder. (See TI 199, TeI 173, and TO 72–73; TA 59–61.) Here lies the significance of hypostasis for Levinas: in the notion of the mastery and virility of a subject that is at one and the same time susceptible to the world, riveted to itself, tragic in the definitiveness of its solitude, in the inescapable fact that I am I, in its confrontation with the anonymous rustle of being in the there is. Confronted with the anonymous fact of the there is, the I identifies itself as an I, takes over its subjectivity, begins anew every instant, as it brushes up against the impersonal forces of being. The duality of this tragic commitment to existence that the I discovers as itself, and the mastery that its very identification as a subject offers it, articulate the ambiguity of corporeity. Levinas says, “we want to recognize material life and its triumph over the anonymity of existing, and the tragic finality to which it is bound by its very freedom” (TO 62; TA 44). In finding meaningful the material aspect of life, Levinas refuses the Heideggerian gesture that condemns it as “a fall into inauthenticity” (TO 61; TA 42). Although Levinas resists the idea that separation appears as fallenness on the grounds that to view it as such privileges unity or totality (see TI 102; TeI 75), he often uses language that suggests a fallen state, as when he says that the “for itself” is “only freedom, that is, arbitrary and unjustified, and in this sense detestable; it is I, egoism” (TI 88; TeI 61). His response to this would no doubt be that to regard such language as fallen is already to assert the privilege of the egoist I rather than the privilege of society, in which I am already judged. Distancing himself from Heidegger’s thematic attention to concern and the structure of the for-the-sake-of-which that informs it, Levinas emphasizes instead the sincerity of the life we inhabit (EE 44; DE 67–68):

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In a clear reference to the labor camps of World War II, Levinas criticizes Heidegger’s conception of the world as a circuit that leads back to Dasein’s concern for its own existence, appealing rather to the object as desirable in and for its own sake (EE 45; DE 68): It is in times of misery and privation that the shadow of an ulterior finality which darkens the world is cast behind the object of desire. When one has to eat, drink and warm oneself in order not to die, when nourishment becomes fuel, as in certain kinds of hard labor, the world also seems to be at an end, turned upside down and absurd, needing to be renewed. Time becomes unhinged.

Refusing to see our engagement with objects in the world as fallen, Levinas points to its “positive ontological function: the possibility of extracting oneself from anonymous being” (EE 45; DE 69). The world, as we will see, loosens the chain that ties the I to existence, so that the Heideggerian “bond with care is relaxed” (EE 45; DE 68). The existent for Levinas is thus not circumscribed by its relations with being, but rather enjoys the pleasures of the world, or has the capacity for happiness.12 And so, “the condemned man still drinks his glass of rum. To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognize the sincerity of hunger and thirst” (EE 45; DE 69). While for Heidegger the world is “an ensemble of tools” (TO 62; TA 45), the final meaning of which comes to rest in Dasein’s own existence, for Levinas the world is first of all “an ensemble of nourishments” (TO 63; TA 45). In opposition to Heidegger’s task-oriented account of Dasein’s world, Levinas finds room for

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enjoyment of the world. “To stroll is to enjoy the fresh air, not for health but for the air” (TO 63; TA 46). Levinas insists that “There is something other than naivety in the flat denial the masses oppose to the elites when they are worried more about bread than about anxiety” (TO 60; TA 42). Aligning Heidegger with the evasions of “capitalist idealism” and the “suspicion that casts its shadow over every idealism which is not rooted in the simplicity and univocity of intentions” (EE 45; DE 69), Levinas finds in Marx a more hopeful ally (EE 45; DE 69): The great force of Marxist philosophy, which takes its point of departure in economic man, lies in its ability to avoid completely the hypocrisy of sermons. It situates itself in the perspective of the sincerity of intentions, the good will of hunger and thirst, and the ideal of struggle and sacrifice it proposes, the culture to which it invites us, is but the prolongation of these intentions. What can be captivating in Marxism is not its alleged materialism, but the essential sincerity this proposal and invitation maintain.

The relationship with the object that Levinas characterizes not in terms of Heidegger’s equipmental world, but first of all as enjoyment, is one which creates a certain distance between the subject and the objects it lives from. In this sense, the world of enjoyment, which is also a world in which I come to know and see objects, represents a “fundamental advance” (TO 62; TA 45) over the enchainment or enrootedness of the self to itself, over the materiality to which the I finds itself bound in hypostasis. There is, then, in the world, a “loosening” of the “bond between the self [soi] and the ego [moi]” (TO 62; TA 44), a bond that in hypostasis cannot be completely evaded or overcome, but which can be relaxed. By discovering behind or before the world the materiality of the subject, and in discovering the world as a place of enjoyment, Levinas suggests that Heidegger is too quick to subsume the meaning of Dasein’s existence into the ecstatic significance of the world, and that in doing so he overlooks the ontological adventure that describes a nontranscendent relation, and which constitutes the folding back of the self on itself (see EE 81; DE 138).13 The “deeper drama” of this ontological adventure plays itself out not “between a subject and objects” (EE 84; DE 143), but in the very necessity of taking up existence that the interminable confrontation

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with the ineluctable fact of the there is demands, a necessity which we catch a glimpse of in phenomena such as insomnia.14 In the strange and unavoidable imperative that we must exist, that we cannot shirk ourselves, we continually rediscover ourselves. In understanding the substantiality of the self in the “act of taking position” (EE 81; DE 138), Levinas construes the I as “chained” or “tied to itself” with “one foot caught in its own existence . . . forever bound to the existence which it has taken up.” “This impossibility for the ego to not be a self constitutes the underlying tragic element in the ego, the fact that it is riveted to its own being” (EE 84; DE 143). The I is chained to itself, yet it can live at a distance from its captivity by the there is: it can enter into the world of light, the world of phenomena, the world of things; it can represent the world to itself and create a home; it can dwell in the world.15 What is definitive is my solitude, or the fact that “I am forever stuck with myself” (EE 84; DE 144). Yet, says Levinas, “the world offers me a time in which I traverse different instants . . . where all is given but where everything is distance” (EE 84; DE). With the introduction of time, and the possibility of distance, the I encounters the other, and with it the freedom to act with sincerity—or not. I have, says Levinas “the power of not taking anything or of acting as though I had not taken anything” (EE 84; DE 144).16 Whereas for Heidegger Dasein’s aspiration for truth seems to steer Dasein away from the concrete, physical, or material world, Levinas describes a subject whose suffering, pain, and vulnerability (both to the risks of life and to the ethical demands of others) on the one hand, and capacity for living a life of enjoyment and sensation on the other hand, depict a total engagement with materiality. In order for the I to become ethical, a certain “disengagement” from its situation is required, which Levinas does not find in Heidegger. Levinas says (TI 170; TeI 144–45): The Heideggerian analyses of the world have accustomed us to think that the “in view of oneself” that characterizes Dasein, care in situation, in the last analysis conditions every human product. In Being and Time the home does not appear apart from the system of implements. But can the “in view of oneself” characteristic of care be brought about without a disengagement from the situation, without a recollection and without extraterritoriality— without being at home with oneself?

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Since the feminine welcome establishes the home, Levinas’s question to Heidegger amounts to a criticism of his neglect of the feminine. The suggestion is that for Dasein to reflect on itself, to grasp its structure more clearly, it must have a place in which recollection can occur. For Levinas this place is a dwelling, over which the feminine presides, and the role it plays is in allowing the I of enjoyment to disengage with the immediacy of its life, so that it is in a position to respond to the call of the Other. We have seen that the ecstatic structure of Heidegger’s Dasein overcomes Descartes’s separation of mind and body in a way that makes it difficult for Heidegger to account for materiality outside its significance for Dasein’s projects. Levinas revisits the Cartesian separation of mind and body, “affirming the irrational character of sensation” (TI 135; TeI 109), and in this way endorsing Descartes’s radical differentiation between thought and sensibility.17 Levinas articulates this as the difference between representation and enjoyment. On the one hand there is the constituting intentionality of representation as the “positing of a pure present” which is “void of time, interpreted as eternity” (TI 125; TeI 98). In the intelligibility of thought or representation, there is a suspension of time and embodiment. Levinas says: “To be sure the I who conducts his thoughts becomes (or more exactly ages) in time, in which his successive thoughts across which he thinks in the present, are spread forth. But this becoming in time does not appear on the plane of representation: representation involves no passivity” (TI 125; TeI 98). On the other hand there is enjoyment, which Levinas understands precisely in terms of the conjunction of body and time. “The dwelling, overcoming the insecurity of life, is a perpetual postponement of the expiration in which life risks foundering. The consciousness of death is the consciousness of the perpetual postponement of death, in the essential ignorance of its date. Enjoyment as the body that labors maintains itself in this primary postponement, that which opens the very dimension of time” (TI 165; TeI 139). By refusing to grant “sense data the status of clear and distinct ideas,” in ascribing them “to the body and relegat[ing] them to the useful,” Descartes retains a “superiority” over Husserl, who, Levinas says, “puts no limit on noematization” (TI 130; TeI 103). But in a passage that presumably refers in turn to Husserl, Descartes, and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas dis-

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tances himself from all three of them. He says (TI 127; TeI 100): The body naked and indigent is not a thing among things which I “constitute” or see in God to be in a relation with a thought, nor is it the instrument of a gestural thought, of which theory would simply be the development. The body naked and indigent is the very reverting, irreducible to a thought, of representation into life, of the subjectivity that represents into life which is sustained by these representations and lives of them; its indigence—its needs—affirm “exteriority” as non-constituted, prior to all affirmation.

By understanding the body as the reverting of representation into life, Levinas acknowledges that bodies are inscribed by meaning and history, that they signify at the level of representation, that they are encoded by society, but refuses the idea that such signification completely circumscribes them or exhausts their effects. That the body exceeds representation can be specified in two ways. First, enjoyment is lived in excess of the totality, or beyond the world as represented, in a way that cannot be captured by the language of representation. “To be I is to exist in such a way as to be already beyond being, in happiness. For the I to be means neither to oppose nor to represent something to itself, nor to use something, nor to aspire to something, but to enjoy something” (TI 120; TeI 92). Or, in a formulation that is directed against Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, Levinas says, “One becomes a subject of being not by assuming being but in enjoying happiness, by the interiorization of enjoyment which is also an exaltation, an ‘above being’ ” (TI 119; TeI 92). Second, while Levinas does not think the body is reducible to a thing, he does think that there is an “ambiguity” (TI 229; TeI 205) or “a simultaneity of absence and presence” (TI 225; TeI 200) whereby “The body in its very activity, in its for itself, inverts into a thing to be treated as a thing” (TI 229; TeI 205). Such an inversion occurs through sickness or through the violence of coercion that is suffered at the physical level, but which is lived beyond that level. It is the coincidence of the body as both biological and as lived that Levinas emphasizes. “This is the paradox and the essence of time itself proceeding unto death, where the will is affected as a thing by the things—by the point of steel or by the chemistry of the tissues (due to a murderer or to the impotency of the doctors)—but gives itself a reprieve and postpones the contact by the against-death of postponement” (TI 229; TeI 205). Thus for Levinas, the body is more than a

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thing, and is lived beyond its existence as physical object, and yet it also has the capacity to suffer from the causality that affects physical objects. At the same time, the body offers the resources by which I can resist the violence that threatens me (see TI 224–25; TeI 200): “The body exceeds the categories of a thing, but does not coincide with the role of ‘lived body’ [‘corps propre’] which I dispose of in my voluntary action and by which I can” (TI 229; TeI 205). To understand this coincidence we need to recall that Levinas wants to distance himself from the “strictly intellectualist thesis” which “subordinates life to representation” and “maintains that in order to will it is first necessary to represent to oneself what one wills; in order to desire, represent one’s goal to oneself; in order to feel, represent to oneself the object of the sentiment; and in order to act, represent to oneself what one will do” (TI 168; TeI 143). Representation “reduces the world to the unconditioned instant of thought” (TI 128; TeI 101). Since Levinas wants to acknowledge that “representation is conditioned by life” (TI 169; TeI 144), he cannot be satisfied with the representationalist view of the body, for which it appears as “a thing among things” (TI 168; TeI 142). Neither is he content to follow Heidegger, for whom representation is subordinated to a model governed by the finality to which the “concatenation of implements and their users” (TI 95; TeI 68) is directed. Rather the body, for Levinas, is “the mode in which a being, neither spatial nor foreign to geometrical or physical extension, exists separately. It is the regime of separation. The somewhere of dwelling is produced as a primordial event relative to which the event of the unfolding of physico-geometrical extension must be understood—and not the reverse” (TI 168; TeI 142–43). Thus the dwelling conditions the very relation to the body. “We dispose of our body inasmuch as we have already suspended the being of the element that bathes us, by inhabiting. The body is my possession according as my being maintains itself in a home at the limit of interiority and exteriority. The extraterritoriality of a home conditions the very possession of my body” (TI 162; TeI 135–36). Since “woman is the condition for recollection, the interiority of the Home, and inhabitation” (TI 155; TeI 128), it is woman who ultimately conditions not only the home but the body as the regime of separation. Or rather, because the “primary hospitable welcome” accomplished by the woman (TI 155; TeI 128) exceeds thought, perhaps we should say not that the woman

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conditions corporeal being at home with oneself, but precisely that she welcomes. The thrust of Heidegger’s discourse—especially in its requirement that if Dasein is to be true to itself, it must engage in an ever more rigorous quest for clarity in its self-understanding—leads Dasein inexorably away from ontic concerns. Otherwise, Dasein is liable to be caught up in what Heidegger can acknowledge only, it seems, as the inauthentic worldly concerns of the they. How, if at all, can Heidegger’s Dasein alleviate the conditions of his or her own inauthenticity?18 Is such an outcome even possible? It would seem that the best that can happen is that Dasein oscillates, in a constant tension, between inauthentic involvement in things in the world, which induces Dasein to see itself as on a par with the things to which it relates, and an authentic attunement to its true character, as possibility, as freedom. To the extent to which Heidegger’s project remains fundamentally tied to the ongoing clarification of Dasein’s own initially inadequate understanding of its place in the world, and its relation to things and others, it is hard to see how Dasein can avoid an unmitigated theoretical abstraction if it is to maintain an authentic understanding of itself. Of course, the obvious riposte to this is that it doesn’t: Dasein, one might argue, cannot sustain a state of authenticity. It can maintain it only in the blink of an eye, for a moment, in the Augenblick.19 Of this, more below. In the preceding remarks, I have suggested that Heidegger does not leave much room for the material, bodily, physical aspects of existence, and that Levinas corrects this neglect of corporeity by developing notions such as position, enjoyment, and dwelling. In his eagerness to avoid equating Dasein’s ontological status with that of a present-at-hand thing, Heidegger seems to divorce his analysis from the tangible realm, providing us with no path back to the material, except insofar as he allows that it remains a necessary starting point and guide for the analysis. In fact, this affirmation turns out to be rather tenuous, since the task to which Dasein is beholden, namely that of ontological clarification, requires it to move beyond the preontological, operational understanding of its world in its inarticulate immediacy, and toward the rarefied climate of ontological clarity. Dasein’s task is to wrest itself away from its initial tendency to see itself on a par with the things that make up its

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world, away from its concrete involvement with the world, and to conceive of its own lack of determination by such concrete concerns—be it only for the moment of authenticity. Heideggerians might reject this criticism, emphasizing that to be authentic in Heidegger’s sense is not a state sustainable beyond the instantaneous: the moment of vision provides no more than a temporary clarity that allows Dasein to reorient itself toward the world in a way that no longer obfuscates Dasein’s own ontological status in that world. The moment of vision, Heideggerians might argue, includes within it an ecstatic openness to the future and the past. It opens onto the future through anticipatory resoluteness, and gathers up the present in the light of its past. It accedes to its destiny not in an aberrant moment, for that moment is isolated neither from the historical processes that led up to it nor from the future possibilities that Dasein has yet to realize. The gathering of temporality into the ecstatic unity of the moment of vision, it might be argued, is no fleeting and insubstantial realization, but endures in its impact, and reinstalls Dasein’s involvement with the world. Even if these are fair comments—and I will explore their validity in the third section of this chapter, “Temporality and History”—it remains the case that the concrete level of Dasein’s preontological involvement in the world is qualified as inauthentic by Heidegger, while ontological clarity of authenticity is reserved for the moment of vision, and the exact relation between the two remains to be thought.

Others in the World of Dasein It is no secret that feminism has got quite a lot of mileage out of the idea, encapsulated most pithily perhaps by care ethics, that women’s approach to morality (and, by association, to practically everything else) is characteristically more empathetic, more open to emotional considerations, and more responsive to connectedness and attachment, than men’s. To put it in a way that highlights my immediate concern, women are taught to care for and be oriented toward others, while men are encouraged to separate from their mothers and become autonomous. In short, women are other-directed, and men are self-directed; women are context-bound, while men strive for objectivity and distance; women,

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in part because of their privileged relationship to childrearing, are caring and nurturing, while men are rational and abstract. While there are good reasons to be cautious about accepting care ethics lock, stock, and barrel, there is also no doubt that some of its implications are worth considering very carefully. I am going to leave aside the legitimate complaints about the failure of care ethics (at least in its earliest manifestations) to address diversity within the group “women,” its consequent harboring of a naive universalism, and its general lack of metaphysical clarity about the status of its central claim that women speak in a different voice. Let me focus instead on what I take to be the most important achievements of care ethics, namely its legitimization of an idea that it shares with a number of other (ultimately perhaps more interesting) versions of feminism—that is, the idea that the values which have been enshrined in traditional moral theories, such as justice, rationality, and rule-governed behavior, tend to privilege an approach to ethics that comes more readily to boys than to girls. Not only are the values celebrated by Enlightenment thinking (autonomy, individuality, reason) typically assumed to constitute and shape the moral fabric of society; they are also assumed to be neutral, objective, and universal, when in fact, feminists suggest, they embody a view that is biased toward a masculine point of view, which is not shared by women, and that is therefore partial to men. Moreover—and this is the kicker—traditional moral theory presents itself as if it were unmarked by all these qualifications. It represents itself as gender-neutral, accessible to all, and the only obvious route to goodness. It adopts a hypermorality about itself. It is not enough that it remains the dominant model of morality; it assumes the right to judge other approaches by its own standards about itself. And if the rest of us raise questions about its ascendancy, we are liable to accusations of immorality—which prejudges the issue as to what constitutes morality. In this section I will suggest that, despite his formal stipulation that others are at the same ontological level as Dasein, Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as highly individualized and unique ultimately prejudices his philosophy against a serious and sustained consideration of others.20 It needs to be acknowledged at the outset that Heidegger makes the claim that “Dasein is essentially Being-with [Mitsein]” (BT 156; SZ 120), and he asserts that this claim has an “existential-ontological” status. Such

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a claim suggests that Heidegger treats others as if they were on a par, ontologically, with Dasein. A number of other claims support such a view, as when Heidegger says that “Being-with and Dasein-with [Mitsein und Mitdasein]” are “equiprimordial with Being-in-the-world” (BT 149; SZ 114), or when he stipulates that “the kind of being which belongs to the Dasein of Others differs . . . from readiness-to-hand and presence-athand . . . they are like the very Dasein which frees them, in that they are there too, and there with it. . . . Being-in-the-world, the world is always the one that I share with Others” (BT 154–55; SZ 118). Heidegger takes pains to emphasize that Dasein is not to be understood as an isolated I whose relation with others must be established. Rather, Dasein’s relation to others is assumed, “‘the Others’ already are there with us” (BT 152; SZ 116). Heidegger goes on to say, “By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the ‘I’ stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself— those among whom one is too” (BT 154; SZ 118). It is clear that Heidegger wants to construe others as ontologically equivalent to Dasein, and to underline the fact that others do not occur in the world in the same way as entities that are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. Others thus have an existential privilege akin to Dasein that sets them apart from all other entities. Despite this, I will suggest that the architectonic structure of Heidegger’s analysis exacts certain demands and requirements which result in a severely attenuated role for others. Heidegger’s rhetoric leans toward sketching the place of others as derivative of Dasein. This point can be specified in several ways. I will organize my discussion under four topics: Heidegger’s concept of world, the distinction between authentic and inauthentic, the “who” of Dasein, and the role that death plays in Heidegger’s analysis.

world First, and most immediately, Heidegger tends to describe others as if they were a characteristic or attribute of Dasein’s world, with the result that others might be included in the world, but the world is always Dasein’s world. Thus, when Heidegger says, “The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]” (BT 155; SZ 118), we understand that he is asserting the unparalleled importance of others in Dasein’s world, but we must

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also concede that what remains unquestioned is that the world belongs to Dasein. Similarly, Heidegger talks of being with others as being part of the “character” of Dasein (BT 154; SZ 118), and he describes “beingwith” as an “existential characteristic of Dasein” (BT 156; SZ 120). Again, Heidegger claims that “Being-with is in every case a characteristic of one’s own Dasein” (BT 157; SZ 121). In his discussion of being-with-others Heidegger’s guiding question is, Who is Dasein in its everydayness? (See BT 149; SZ 114.) In answering his guiding question about the “who” of Dasein, Heidegger takes his orientation from the phenomenon of Being-in-the-world. (See BT 153; SZ 117.) We have already seen that Heidegger is critical of Descartes, along with the rest of the tradition of Western metaphysics, for overlooking the phenomenon of the world, in the specific way that Heidegger understands this term. (See BT 128; SZ 95.) We know that the phenomenon of the world is central to Heidegger’s analysis. At the same time, however, it should be recalled that “Being-in-the-world is always fallen” (BT 225; SZ 181). Since the analysis of the they proceeds in terms of this way of being, it will necessarily also be fallen or inauthentic. Heidegger confirms this when he says, “The self of the everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘they,’ and must first find itself” (BT 167; SZ 129). Dasein’s relation to others is described by Heidegger primarily in terms of its fall or dispersion into the they-self: that is, Dasein’s tendency to interpret itself and its ideas in terms of opinions that it unthinkingly takes over from the public realm. This leaves little room for any systematic consideration of the possibilities of informed, thoughtful, or authentic collective social or political action at the level of protesting prevailing socioeconomic conditions.

authenticity and inauthenticity Given that Heidegger’s discussion of others is oriented to Being-inthe-world, which, as we just saw, is always fallen, and given that, as we have also already seen, the question that Heidegger uses to guide his analysis of being with others is articulated with reference to everydayness, it should hardly be surprising to find that the discussion is over-

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whelmingly devoted to inauthentic, fallen, everyday relations. And this is indeed what we find. Heidegger’s discussion of others includes a brief description of a particular way of being with others that he identifies as authentic, namely a kind of “solicitude” (Fürsorge) which “leaps ahead” of the other (BT 158; SZ 122), thereby helping the other to become “transparent to himself” (BT 159; SZ 123). With the exception of this brief passage, the account that Heidegger provides of possible ways to be with others yields a largely negative picture, and is dominated by what Heidegger calls “the they” (das Man). It is hard to miss the disparaging terms in which Heidegger casts what he calls the “dictatorship of the ‘they,’ ” into which “one’s own Dasein” is dissolved (BT 164; SZ 126). Heidegger says, “We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the ‘great mass’ as they shrink back; we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking. The ‘they,’ which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness” (BT 164; SZ 126–27). The they, which answers to the question of who everyday Dasein is, turns out to be the “‘nobody’ to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-oneanother [Untereinandersein]” (BT 166; SZ 128). Under the sway of the opinions of the neutral they—that is, under the dominion of views that get attributed to the they, but which no particular Dasein owns up to— Dasein exhibits a “failure to stand by one’s Self” (BT 166; SZ 128). The they-self is the inauthentic self, from which Dasein must win itself back.

the “who” of dasein Heidegger wants to avoid the problem of solipsism. Heidegger’s notion of the they-self can be seen as an alternative to positing a subject, defining this subject as essentially a mind that thinks, or a thinking being, and then confronting the Cartesian difficulty of how to bridge the gap not only between mind and body, but also between my mind and the minds of others. Rather than having to solve the problem of how to connect an isolated I to others, Heidegger construes the problem almost in reverse. Dasein is initially lost in the they, adrift among the shifting and groundless opinions of the public which it finds itself surrounded

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with, and a part of. It must gather up its forces, break away from the aimless gossip of public opinion, and find its authentic self, come back to itself. The rhetoric with which Heidegger describes this move away from inauthenticity and toward authenticity suggests that in order to be authentic, Dasein must sever its ties from the they, cut itself off from others—in short, it must approximate itself, at least in some respects, to the isolated Cartesian I which Heidegger seems to be trying so hard to get away from! This aspect of Dasein—Dasein confronting its fate alone—is the aspect that is perhaps expressed most fully in Heidegger’s consideration of death, and I will return to it in a moment. While I think that it does successfully capture a certain strain in Heidegger’s thought, the preceding sketch I have drawn of how Heidegger’s notion of the they approaches the problem of others in a way that avoids solipsism needs to be complicated. It ignores the way in which Heidegger takes up and reworks the two characteristics of Dasein that he sketches at the beginning of Section 9 of Being and Time, namely Dasein’s mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and the fact that Dasein’s essence lies in, or is grounded in, its existence.21 It also leaves out of account the complexities surrounding the ontologico-ontical status of Dasein that Heidegger introduces here (BT 152; SZ 116): Just as the ontical obviousness of the Being-in-itself of entities within-theworld misleads us into the conviction that the meaning of this Being is obvious ontologically, and makes us overlook the phenomenon of the world, the ontical obviousness of the fact that Dasein is in each case mine also hides the possibility that the ontological problematic which belongs to it has been led astray. Proximally the “who” of Dasein is not only a problem ontologically; even ontically it remains concealed.

If the “who” of Dasein is ontically concealed, this is because—despite Heidegger’s insistence on the formal constitution of Dasein as an entity which is in each case I myself (see BT 150; SZ 114)—proximally and for the most part Dasein is not “in each case mine.” That is, it is not an isolated I, but rather, as immersed in the everyday, it is precisely the theyself. Dasein’s usual way of being is inauthentic, which means that ontically it is not in fact itself, but rather “itself ” is a collection of opinions and views that it unwittingly takes over from others. At the ontological level, however, Dasein is not to be equated with the they. Far from it. To

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be oneself is to retrieve oneself from dispersal in the they, to return to oneself, or to come back to oneself, after having been lost in the they. If we bear in mind Heidegger’s assertion that the “who” of Dasein “is not only a problem ontologically; even ontically it remains concealed,” it is possible to make sense of what otherwise appear to be conflicting claims that Heidegger makes in his discussion of being with others. What we have, in effect, are three different levels at which such claims can operate: ontical, ontological, and ontico-ontological. First, there is the “ontically obvious” level, which asserts that “it is I who in each case Dasein is” (BT 150; SZ 115). Heidegger says, “It may be that it is always ontically correct to say of this entity that ‘I’ am it” (BT 151; SZ 116), but ontologically such assertions can be misleading. We might say that this level of understanding provides us with a starting point, but as preontological it remains at the unexamined, vague, average level of understanding Dasein has of its way of being. In answering the question of the “who” of Dasein at this level, we mistake the ontico-ontological character of Dasein. We answer something like “I myself am Dasein”—but on Heidegger’s view, at least from the point of view of the existential analytic, we are wrong to do so. In doing so, we are opting for “the most usual and obvious of answers” instead of retaining the “priority” of “ontico-ontological assertions” which would yield a properly “phenomenological” (BT 151; SZ 115) interpretation. Rather, Heidegger seeks to show that proximally, Dasein exists not as itself for the most part, but rather in the way that “they” exist. Ontically, then, the answer to the question of who Dasein is lies concealed at first. To clarify the ontical status of Dasein as it is for the most part—that is, as it exists inauthentically—would be to demystify Dasein’s idea that it is itself, and reveal to it that it is in fact, for the most part, the they-self. This answer to the question of who Dasein is provides an ontically clarified concept of the self: Dasein’s ontico-ontological understanding of its own self needs to be interpreted as the they-self that it gets lost and dispersed into. This ontico-ontological level is the second level of interpretation. Ontologically, there is yet another obfuscation that Heidegger must clear away, and this brings us to the third level, the ontological. So long as we attempt to answer the question of who Dasein is by taking as our clue an understanding of the self based on substantiality, our answer remains at the level of the present-at-hand. Heidegger wants to interpret Dasein at the onto-

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logical-existential level, and this involves combating the idea that Dasein is a self-identical substance which somehow maintains its coherence throughout a series of changing experiences. (See BT 150; SZ 114.) Rather than appealing to substance as providing the underlying unity that makes the I identical with itself, Heidegger appeals to the ontological conditions of possibility that allow Dasein either to be true to itself or to fail to stand by itself.22 As Otto Pöggeler puts it, “It is not by possessing a substance but by entrusting itself to exist openly that existence receives its constancy.”23 Heidegger appeals to the idea that Dasein can be either authentic or inauthentic. If we recall that authenticity and inauthenticity are “grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterized by mineness” (BT 68; SZ 42), we cannot help but be struck by the circular movement of Heidegger’s analysis. To be authentic, the self cannot remain mired in the they-self, but must elevate itself from the average everydayness of the they, and become free for itself. Dasein must stand alone, but it must do so not out of a naive and misguided understanding of its own isolation from others, as if that were a given, but rather in the knowledge that it has had the strength to tear itself away from the opinions of the they. Heidegger will interpret this standing alone in terms of authentic resoluteness. Thus, Heidegger says that Dasein’s mineness “indicates an ontologically constitutive state, but it does no more than indicate it” (BT 150; SZ 114). In other words, it is ontologically appropriate to define Dasein with regard to its mineness, but one cannot do so without first going through the interpretation of Dasein’s lostness in the everyday. In this state, Dasein is phenomenologically defined not by itself at all, but precisely by others. Only by regaining its sense of itself as free to make its own choices does Dasein come back to itself, into its own, and only then can it be said to be constituted by “its Being . . . in each case mine” (BT 150; SZ 114). If we stand back from the details of Heidegger’s argument, the main question that emerges is this: In the final analysis, does Heidegger’s treatment of being-with-others amount to any more than a distraction from Dasein’s ontological journey toward its quest for its own authenticity, a detour by which Dasein deviates from its own path of selfdiscovery, to which it is destined to return? How far does Dasein ultimately stray from the original priority conferred on the self by its mineness? Is Heidegger’s ontology bound to a philosophical view that fails to

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move much beyond the solipsistic tendencies modern philosophy has inherited from Descartes? Or, as Michel Haar asks, is Heidegger’s enigmatic notion of everydayness in fact a return to Platonism? “Is not the Heideggerian depreciation of collective existence, ‘public’ in the sense of simply Being-with, the continuation of a theme obscurely derived from the Platonic distrust of doxa, that is, of the opinion of the majority or the masses?”24 Let me turn to Heidegger’s understanding of death in an attempt to confirm that Heidegger’s account of Dasein reveals a strong tendency to reassert the individualistic traits of the metaphysical commitments he tried to overcome.

death Interpretively, death would seem to present Heidegger with a problem at first sight. Heidegger’s attempt throughout Being and Time is to provide a picture of Dasein’s being-as-a-whole. The fact of Dasein’s mortality appears to be an obstacle for rendering clearly the totality of Dasein: if Dasein still has some part of its life to live out, it would seem that any analysis of its structure must remain incomplete until such time as death arrives. Yet, when Dasein dies, it is no longer Dasein—it no longer exists. The conundrum that death would seem to pose is that Dasein’s finitude entails that part of it remains outstanding, for so long as Dasein is alive it has not yet completed itself, but as soon as Dasein dies it is no longer Dasein. The problem turns out to be falsely conceived, on Heidegger’s view. It operates on the assumption that it shares with so many other metaphysical problems, namely that Dasein can be ontologically understood as akin to things that are present-at-hand. Heidegger suggests that rather than see death as an obstacle that interferes with the attempt to get the whole of Dasein in view, being-towarddeath should be understood as integral to Dasein’s way of being, as constitutive of Dasein’s being. We are always on our way to death. Since to die is precisely no longer to be Dasein, Dasein’s finitude should be understood as constitutive of Dasein’s very existence. Dasein’s specific way of existing, Existenz, is conceived as distinct from the existence of other things. Dasein’s finitude is essential to its way of existing, just as it is thereby also crucial for Heidegger’s rethinking of temporality. Temporality, for Heidegger, must be thought on the basis of death, and not vice

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versa. Metaphysical philosophy posits an abstract, ongoing, infinite time, and then reads death against this backdrop of time both as that which passes and as that which can be real only in the present. The tension between time as essentially transitory and as lacking reality outside the present is one which Heidegger does not think the Western tradition of philosophy has ever successfully addressed. By reorienting his reflections about time away from the traditional priority philosophers have granted to the present, and toward the future, Heidegger, by the same token, privileges death over the now. This is not to say that he is naive about the impossibility of ever escaping the ineluctable privilege that the present maintains, since even the future cannot be envisaged outside a present, neither can the past be remembered. Representation, memory, imagination may give us a certain freedom toward the present, but they equally serve to underscore its ineliminable priority. One of Heidegger’s great contributions is his constant insistence that the present cannot easily release itself from the hold of the past, any more than it can divorce itself from the impending future. Levinas follows through on this insight when he separates enjoyment from representation. For Heidegger, to abstract the present from the weight of the past, or from the responsibility of the future, is to buy into a model of time that is borrowed from science, rather than to take seriously Dasein’s status as a finite being and to understand that our finitude shapes our very access to, and understanding of, temporality. For Levinas, to retain the privileged present of representation without also attending to the order of enjoyment is to forget the context in which representation occurs. It is also to forget the dwelling and the feminine that welcomes the I and facilitates being at home with oneself. Heidegger emphasizes that as finite beings, we are always on the way to death, and in this sense death is certain. What is not certain is when we will die, and in this sense death is indefinite. (See BT 303; SZ 258.) We typically cover up the certainty of death by assuming that death is in the future, when in fact it is possible at any moment. The solution is not to fear death constantly, but rather to see that the “not yet” of death is part of what it means to exist. Heidegger thus conceives of the “not yet” of death as belonging to Dasein’s very mode of existence, as belonging to Dasein’s way of being. Rather than seeing the time which Dasein has yet to live as interfering with any attempt to grasp Dasein as a totality, Hei-

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degger suggests that Dasein’s finitude be understood as characteristic of Dasein’s way of being. Death is not to be thought of as an additional, accidental event, without which Dasein’s structure cannot be understood, or without which Dasein remains incomplete, but rather as the inevitable end to Dasein. Hence the fact that there is still some time outstanding for any given Dasein is a problem for understanding only so long as we insist on imposing on Dasein an ontology that is appropriate to things. Once we see that the possibility of death structures our way of being, that it can happen at any moment, and that it will happen at some moment for every Dasein, the fact that it has not happened yet does not get in the way of understanding Dasein. Death merely has to be taken seriously as characteristic of Dasein’s mode of existence. Thus Heidegger conceives of death as the “possibility of impossibility.” Heidegger stresses that no one can take my place in dying. (See BT 284; SZ 240.) He says, “coming-to-an-end implies a mode of Being in which the particular Dasein simply cannot be represented by someone else” (BT 286; SZ 242). Clearly, this position is indisputable at an empirical level. No one can stand in for me when it comes to dying. Yet it is also true that one can sacrifice one’s life for another, and it is far from clear whether Heidegger ever seriously takes on the questions raised by this possibility. Levinas suggests, and I concur, that Heidegger preempts the moral issue of what it means to substitute oneself for another, by insisting on construing death as the individualization of Dasein. Heideggerians will object that in understanding death as the supreme individualization of Dasein Heidegger does not rule out the possibility that Dasein might choose to go to its death for another, but the objection misses Levinas’s point. That Dasein might make the choice of sacrificing its life for another does not alter the basic assumption that governs Heidegger’s analyses of death. He still posits Dasein’s freedom as basic, and this is precisely what the Other, according to Levinas, puts in question. As Taminiaux says, “One of the major teachings of Levinas’s early thought is to show . . . that fundamental ontology sins against the other . . . because the very notion of being-with, instead of breaking with solitude, merely expands it.”25 Heidegger simply does not think that the possibility of sacrificing oneself for another is as basic as the empirical truth that even if someone goes to their death for another, everyone must still die their own death.

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He also insists that, in death, all our relations with others are undone (BT 294; SZ 250). I submit that, while this might well be true for Dasein itself, it is certainly not true for the others that Dasein leaves behind. Heidegger devotes little consideration to bereavement and mourning, and his sparse discussion leaves much to be desired. For all the work that the concept of anxiety does for Heidegger, in disclosing Dasein’s “uttermost possibility” (BT 310; SZ 266), in bringing Dasein face to face with the possibility of impossibility, or with the experience of nothingness, it does not ultimately disrupt the circuit of Dasein’s self-understanding. It merely consolidates Dasein’s resolve. In the end, Heidegger’s Dasein stands alone against the world, resolute in its finitude. Dasein’s isolation is uncompromising. It begins and ends in the closed circuit of Dasein’s own self-understanding.26 Levinas aims to construe time as the very relation with the other, and to situate his analysis of solitude within a critique of Heidegger’s understanding of others. For all Heidegger’s attempts to dissociate himself from anthropological inquiry, in favor of ontological inquiry (see, for example, BT 71; SZ 45), Levinas suggests that Heidegger’s investigations between the I and the other remain in need of ontological clarification. He says, “I repudiate the Heideggerian conception that views solitude in the midst of a prior relationship with the other. Though anthropologically incontestable, the conception seems to me ontologically obscure” (TO 40; TA 18). Levinas thinks that the incontestable empirical fact that we are, from the start, always in the world with others influences the structure of Heidegger’s ontology, so that “sociality in Heidegger is found in the subject alone; and it is in terms of solitude that the analysis of Dasein in its authentic form is pursued” (TO 93; TA 89). Thus, the they informs Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, whose task is to overcome its tendency to think and act like “they” do, and to be able to stand alone before its own death. If in one sense Levinas will pursue an analysis of solitude and sociality that reverses the order of priority of Heidegger’s analysis, in another sense he will endorse its order, but reinterpret its meaning. For Levinas, there is a “primary sociality” (TI 304; TeI 281), but it does not consist of being immersed in the inauthentic world of the they; rather it consists “in a situation in which I am not alone, in which I am judged” (TI 304; TeI 281). On the one hand, Levinas finds that it is the relationship that the ego

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has with itself, rather than another, that is best described by the preposition “with.” (See TO 56; TA 37.) Heidegger’s mistake, according to Levinas, was to think that the preposition mit could adequately capture the “original relationship with the other” (TO 41; TA 19). On the other hand, since the sense in which one is “occupied with oneself,” or the sense in which “I am [je suis] encumbered by myself [moi-même]” (TO 56; TA 37), is also a “domestic stirring” (TO 56; TA 37) or, in the language of Totality and Infinity, already refers to the domicile or home (see TI 131–32; TeI 105–6), the I is already in relation to another. As Levinas put it in an interview, “From the very start you are not alone!”27 It needs to be clarified, then, how, in one sense—in the ontological sense—we are always alone, and yet in another sense—in the ethical sense—we are never alone. The difficulty of thinking these two things together comes down to the difficulty of thinking the relation between ethics (or, because ethics remains too Greek, what Levinas will later come to call holiness) and ontology.28 In other words, the welcome of the other, and with it the alterity of the feminine, has announced its presence.29 For Levinas, “It is banal to say we never exist in the singular. . . . Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others [nous sommes avec les autres (my emphasis)]. . . . I touch an object, I see the other. But I am not the other. I am all alone (TO 42; TA 21).30 One could almost say that by trying to render the relation to others by the word “with,” Heidegger insists on the banal, except for the fact that even in order to render this relation beyond the vocabulary of Heidegger’s “being-with,” Levinas not only finds it necessary to “return again to Heidegger” (TO 44; TA 24), as indeed he will throughout his life’s work, but must even acknowledge his profundity. Yet for Levinas, Heidegger’s notion of coexistence, while remaining irreducible to Husserl’s objective cognition, rests “in the final analysis . . . on the relationship with being in general, on comprehension, on ontology” (TI 67; TeI 39). It is therefore, according to Levinas, “not a relation with the other as such but the reduction of the other to the same” (TI 46; TeI 16). As a philosopher of the other, who argues against Heidegger’s ontological affirmation of “the primacy of freedom over ethics,” and against the presupposition of Western philosophy of the “primacy of the same” (TI 45; TeI 16), Levinas bears an affinity with feminist attempts to argue for the priority of our connection to others over the claims of individu-

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alism. As such, he might be understood to make good the promise to which Heidegger seems committed, but on which he cannot deliver. In the words of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Being and Time “proposes the analytic of a being-with (Mitsein) originally constitutive of Dasein.”31 I have suggested that Heidegger’s analysis in fact falls short of this proposal, but that Levinas takes it up.

Temporality and History Typically, women have been associated more with spatiality than with temporality. Heidegger privileges time over space, and in doing so he prioritizes a traditionally masculine trope over a traditionally feminine trope, but without marking it as such. He thereby endorses and reiterates the priority of a masculinized temporal ordering, which becomes the ultimate framework for interpreting the meaning of Dasein’s existence. While maintaining that his analysis of Dasein is neutral with respect to sex, gender, race, and class, Heidegger in fact presents us with a picture of a very specific Dasein. Heidegger’s Dasein is one who is largely untroubled by its bodily existence (except insofar as bodily needs are subordinated to goal-oriented ends, as in the for-the-sake-ofwhich), one who assumes the priority of self over other, and one for whom spatiality is subordinated to temporal ordering. Is it accidental that all these facets of Dasein’s existence articulate traditionally masculine characteristics? Plato’s maternal chôra—for all its indeterminacy and resistance to being named anything, let alone a concept—has more resonance for space than it does for time. Julia Kristeva’s revival of the Platonic chôra of the Timaeus has given life not only to its maternal and spatial connotations, but also to its preverbal associations.32 By relating the chôra to the transition from the pre-Oedipal to the Oedipal, Kristeva preserves its diachronic, retroactive character that Plato had first set forth. Chôra names that which cannot be named, that which lies outside complete incorporation into the symbolic realm, and yet that which, were it not for the symbolic, could not be said to exist. In this sense the chôra represents the impossibility of remaining outside a masculine symbolic: inchoate matter requires the form of symbolic order, even as it incurs a loss whose

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effects will never be entirely recuperated. Llewellyn says that Levinas’s reference to the there is “as the place (endroit) where positing is produced, suggests a comparison with the incomparable placeable place (chôra) of the Timaeus.”33 Just as Kristeva refers to chôra in order to indicate an irrecuperable loss, so Levinas refers to the there is as an “overflowing of sense by nonsense . . . or subversion of essence” (OB 164; AE 209). In Llewelyn’s words, “It is to this anonymous il y a from which the existant stands out that Levinas is referring when he writes that the event of hypostasis, that is to say, chorea the present, has a past and a history without being that past or that history.”34 One could pose the following question to Heidegger: Is there any aspect of preontological experience whose meaning will not be taken up by an ontological schema? Is there any residue of experience that resists ontological analysis? Can the preontological level be signified in any other terms than the ontological? If the answer is no, as I suspect it is, ontological analysis has the effect of sublating a preontological realm. This suspicion is what motivates Levinas when he asks in Otherwise than Being, “Does temporality go beyond essence? . . . Is the subject completely comprehensible out of ontology? That is one of the princip[al] problems of the present research—or, more exactly, that is what it puts into question” (OB 30–31; AE 39). What Kristeva has tried to point toward, by insisting on the differentiation between the semiotic and the symbolic, is the impossibility of having the systematic language of the symbolic or the ontological capture everything that resonates as semiotic or preontological. An analogous point is made by Levinas, who acknowledges the decisive importance of Heidegger’s having raised the question of the ontological difference, but criticizes him for not having followed through its full implications. In focusing on the ontological difference, Heidegger asserts the need to distinguish Being from beings: that is, to distinguish the disclosure of Being as truth in the sense of unconcealment (alêtheia) from the ontic realm of entities or beings. In the same gesture, he shows the difficulty of demonstrating precisely the distinction he wants to state. The truth of Being withdraws, conceals itself, or hides from phenomenal appearance, or Being suffers oblivion, and can therefore be thought only in its withdrawal, or in its relationship to beings. The trace of Being can be found only in the very beings from which Heidegger insists so adamantly that Being’s truth must be distinguished.

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Heidegger sees the impossibility of capturing or containing the meaning of Being within beings—indeed, herein lies the import of his lifelong philosophical project of raising the question of Being anew, of rendering significant this question which the Greeks had posed in preliminary fashion, only to have it succumb to the obfuscation of modern metaphysics. The problem with Heidegger’s account, according to Levinas, is that, while he registers the way in which the meaning of Being exceeds its representation as a being, even though it can only be signaled through beings, Heidegger still approaches Being through a possessive structure. Even if Heidegger resists the move that subordinates Being to Dasein in any simple way, even if he can be said to overcome whatever vestiges of the primacy of subjectivity Being and Time might still harbor, and even if it is too simple to accuse Heidegger of reproducing the idealist legacy whereby the subject understands and thus incorporates into ideas the world it encounters, it remains the case that the task or drama of Dasein’s Existenz is one that is always attached to a protagonist. Existing always belongs to Dasein, unless it is the inauthentic, fallen existence of the they, in which case it must be brought back to itself: reeled in by a resolute Dasein, it must be made mine again. Heidegger cannot admit, according to Levinas, an authentic sense of existing that does not already belong to someone. He cannot admit the anonymous rustle of the il y a that Levinas, in association with Blanchot, makes so much of. In the il y a (there is) Levinas confronts an impersonal sense of existence, a tragic encumbrance that the existent (a term which substitutes for Heidegger’s “Dasein”) finds unavoidable and inescapable. To the extent that Heidegger’s later work appeals not so much to Dasein as to various sites at which the truth of Being emerges, he might be said to avoid Levinas’s charge that existing is always possessed by Dasein. Levinas objects, however, that “Things are not, as in Heidegger, the foundation of the site. . . . The relationship between the same and the other, my welcoming of the other, is the ultimate fact, and in it the things figure not as what one builds but as what one gives” (TI 77; TeI 49). It remains the case that, just as it is Being (understood as the truth of finitude, or the authentic realization of its possibilities) that constitutes the truth of Dasein in the early work, Heidegger’s later philosophy retains as its central reference point the question of Being. In this sense, everything finds its meaning as an expression of the event or disclosure of Being.

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While Heidegger went beyond the idealist impetus of representing Dasein as a subject of understanding, while he depicts Dasein’s freedom not merely as a formal framework for grasping and coming to know the world as its object, but as a relationship or event, he ends up adhering to a conception of the human being in terms of “power . . . truth and light” and “hence disposes of no notion to describe the relation with mystery, already implied in the finitude of Dasein” (TI 276; TeI 253). To the extent that Heidegger’s corrective task vis-à-vis the tradition consists of challenging the traditional priority of the present, and replacing it with an emphasis on the future, he might be seen to reinscribe the relative neglect of those temporal dimensions over which women have been the traditional guardians—birth, new beginnings, generative power. Of course, to say that Heidegger simply swapped an emphasis on the present for an emphasis on the future is hugely oversimplifying, because he tried to emphasize the future’s priority in a way that also allowed for the way in which all three ecstases (past, present, future) equally codetermine one another. In other words, he wanted the priority of the future to facilitate an account of temporality that stressed above all the unity of all three ecstases that subtended whatever privilege the future assumed. His overall point was not to make the future the most important dimension of temporality, whereas traditionally the present had taken pride of place. The point, rather, was to demonstrate how each ecstasis was dependent on a preontological understanding of the other ecstases. One cannot understand the present without a kind of counderstanding of the past out of which it derives, or the future toward which it is headed—this is what Heidegger wanted to show. To say that he wanted to emphasize, above all, the unity of the ecstases is to say that whatever privilege Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death gave to the future, that privilege was intended to redound to the account of Dasein’s finite temporality as a whole. Despite these caveats, it is still fair to say that accompanying, and perhaps grounding, Heidegger’s relative emphasis of the future (as it relates to ending life) over the present is a relative neglect of the past (as it relates to beginning life). In contrast, Levinas emphasizes that each instant is a new birth. He says, “Each instant of historical time in which action commences is, in the last analysis, a birth, and hence breaks the continuous time of history, a time of works and not of wills” (TI 58; TeI

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29). Even in the confrontation of death, Levinas finds that there is still time to be “against death” (TI 235; TeI 212). The notion of postponement, in which the I can “have a distance with regard to the present” (TI 237; TeI 214), or the “not yet,” is, contrary to the more obvious associations of birth with maternity, ultimately played out in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity under the provenance of paternity (TI 247; TeI 225). The feminine is required for fecundity, and is recognized by Levinas in a positive way in that it “withdraws into mystery” (TI 276; TeI 254) and thereby describes “the relation with mystery” that he thinks Heidegger lacks (TI 275–76; TeI 253). But the infinity—and not Heidegger’s finitude—that Levinas thinks “constitutes the essence of time” (TI 284; TeI 260) finds its ultimate meaning in the paternal relation to the son (TI 277; TeI 254). Heidegger admits that he has focused almost exclusively on Beingtoward-the-end and neglects the question of beginning. (See BT 425; SZ 373.) But having acknowledged the problem, rather than rectify it he justifies the neglect. Why? Heidegger couches the problem of “Dasein’s stretching along between birth and death” as a problem of the “connectedness of life” (BT 425; SZ 373). He dismisses the usual understanding of how one phase of life is connected to another as resting on a notion of time as present-at-hand. To see life as a “sequence of Experiences” is to see what is really actual as the present-at-hand now, with past experiences as no longer actual, and future experiences as not yet actual. At the bottom of the problem of connectedness, Heidegger discerns a problem of identity: How does the self remain the same self throughout different times? What accounts for the persistence or self-sameness of the I who experiences otherwise diverse and disconnected stages of life? Connectedness, Heidegger suggests, should be thought of not as a framework that serves to link together fragmentary moments, but rather as the ecstatic structuring of Dasein itself. Resisting the notion that we need to discover the essence or substrate of the self beneath the flow of time, Heidegger prefers to understand the flow of temporality as itself constitutive of Dasein’s “identity,” or rather, in Heidegger’s terms, Dasein’s Being. The stretching along between birth and death must not be thought of on the basis of a container model, according to Heidegger. Both the beginning and the end of Dasein’s life, in some sense are—they exist not as arbitrary boundaries to Dasein’s present, which may or may not be there. Rather they are necessary dimensions of Dasein’s present,

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which help to constitute the present as what it is. Connectedness, or stretching along between birth and death, is not to be thought of as akin to the motion of a thing. The movement by which Dasein stretches itself along, or connects its diverse experiences to itself, is what Heidegger calls historizing (Geschehen), a term which is to be distinguished from our usual idea of history, understood as the object of a science. To study history as an object of science is to do what Heidegger calls “historiology.” But Dasein can engage in such a study of the history of objects only because it is itself historical. If we are to grasp Heidegger’s thoughts about historical consciousness and understand the difference between our normal notion of history and the sense that Heidegger gives the terms “historicity” and “historicality,” we must be clear that a good deal of Heidegger’s argument about time hinges on the ambiguity of the concept of ousia. Usually rendered by Aristotle’s translators as “substance,” it can also be rendered as “essence,” “existence,” or “being.”35 Heidegger claims that “in ontologico-Temporal terms” ousia signifies “presence” (Anwesenheit), and hence entities are grasped as “present” (Gegenwart). That is, they are understood in terms of that particular aspect of time that we designate the present, as distinct from the past and future. According to Heidegger, the Greeks—not only Aristotle, but also Parmenides and Plato— “take time itself as one entity among others, and try to grasp it in the structure of its Being, though that way of understanding Being which they have taken as their horizon is one which is itself naively and inexplicitly oriented towards time” (BT 48; SZ 26). That is, entities “are conceived as presence (ousia),” but “without any acquaintance with the fundamental ontological function of time” (BT 48; SZ 26) that operates in order to allow this interpretation. The ambiguity Heidegger identifies in the Greek conception of ousia resides in its equivocation between the ontological and the ontic. Not only does it designate both the essence or whatness of a being (independently of its existence) and the existence or thatness of being—that it exists. It is also used in an ontic sense, to mean “that which is always available in the everyday Dasein of humans: useful items, the homestead, property assets, possessions, that which is at any time for everyday use, that which is immediately and for the most part always present [anwesende]” (MF 145). Heidegger thinks that for Aristotle—and therefore for the tradition that he inaugurates—time “shows

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itself in circumspective concern” (BT 473; SZ 421). What this means is that, whether explicitly or not, the idea of being that is assumed is presence-at-hand (Vorhandensein). It is worth pausing to note here that Levinas reminds us that “Substance refers to the dwelling, that is, in the etymological sense of the term, to economy” (TI 162; TeI 136). Compare this to Heidegger’s discussion of ousia, in which he seems reluctant to interpret being or presence in terms of substantiality. Throughout Being and Time Heidegger works with a tripartite structure which will ultimately be resolved into the three temporal ecstases. He sets it out in terms of the fundamental existentialia, or basic ontological characteristics of Dasein: existentiality, facticity, and falling. These fundamental characteristics, which describe the basic ways in which Dasein exists, are respectively mapped onto the relations with which Heidegger has described Dasein’s involvement in the world— Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself, its being-already-in, and its beingalongside. (See BT 235; SZ 250.) One can see how these relations prefigure Heidegger’s ultimate reinterpretation of the temporal categories future, past, and present. In their undifferentiated states, the future is understood as ahead-of-itself (Sich-vorweg: see BT 386; SZ 337), the past as having-been (Gewesenheit), and the present as Gegenwart (see BT 397; SZ 346).36 Temporality makes possible the unity of existence, facticity, and falling. Heidegger understands the future, past, and present in terms of the future as “toward oneself,” having-been (or the past) as “back to,” and the present as “letting-oneself be encountered by.”37 He interprets temporally the structural items of care: understanding as futural, state-of-mind as thrown—that is, as having-been—and falling in its existential meaning as present. Against the background of this overview of Heidegger’s notion of temporality, let me now turn to the question of history. At the beginning of Section 72, Heidegger reminds us that an understanding of Being belongs to Dasein’s very state of Being. He stipulates that this understanding must be interpreted primordially, in order for us to gain a concept of this understanding. Conceptual clarity is to be produced out of an initially prereflective (preontological) grasp of Being. There is a sense, then, in which Dasein’s understanding, or its way of Being, presupposes the very Being that is asked about. Another way of putting this would be to say that, in its understanding, Dasein projects a sense of Being, and

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thereby assumes precisely the object of inquiry, albeit in a vague and unthematic way. Because Dasein’s understanding is itself a way of Being, Dasein already operates within the horizon of Being. The task remains to elucidate more exactly what is being projected. This idea of Dasein’s understanding always already positing in some vague sense what Heidegger sets out to discover (the meaning of Being) gives some guidance as to why temporality is so important, as the “primordial condition for the possibility of care” (“care” being the name Heidegger gives to the overall structure of Dasein). Dasein is immersed in a world, through circumspective involvement, “always already.” This dimension of experience, the “always already,” Heidegger designates by the term “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). In keeping with his claim that temporality is the primordial condition for the possibility of care, Heidegger claims that historicality is “rooted in temporality” (BT 428 and SZ 375; BT 444 and SZ 392), but the exact relationship between temporality, historicality, and historicity is a matter of some dispute.38 The problem is further complicated by the difficulty of distinguishing historicity from understanding.39 I suggest that the notion of projection, which is also closely linked to the notion of understanding, is crucial for seeing how Heidegger construes the relationship between historicality and temporality. Heidegger says, “The existential projection of Dasein’s historicality merely reveals what already lies enveloped in the temporalizing of temporality” (BT 428; SZ 376). I develop this problem more fully in Chapter 3, but we can gain some idea of what the projection of historicality amounts to from Heidegger’s observation that “historicality will prove to be, at bottom, just a more concrete working out of temporality” (BT 434; SZ 383). This more concrete idea of temporality takes shape as grasping the “finitude of one’s existence,” which “brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate [Schicksals]” (BT 435; 384). Here Dasein renounces “comfortableness, shirking, and taking things lightly.” How does one achieve the simplicity of fate, and avoid the “endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one” (BT 435; 384)? Heidegger takes up the notion of fate when he says that “Dasein can be reached by the blows of fate only because in the depths of its Being Dasein is fate” (BT 436; SZ 384). In anticipating death, Dasein realizes its own “superior power” (Übermacht) as it chooses to be free for death, and thus “can take over the pow-

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erlessness of abandonment to its having done so. . . . But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people [Volkes]” (BT 436; SZ 384). To be with others authentically is not so much to identify with a community as to “have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities” (BT 436; SZ 385). With this last claim, one can see why Levinas was so motivated to argue vehemently against the primacy of the same. So far, I have emphasized primarily that Levinas issues a corrective to Heidegger’s emphasis on the future, by insisting on the drama and ambiguity of the instant, and by elaborating the dynamic of the hypostasis, in an attempt to convey the complexity of the present. But how does this take into account the view of some Heideggerians that Being and Time is in fact, in Pöggeler’s words, an “attempt to work out a philosophy of the moment”?40 For Levinas, the complexity of the instant involves the materiality of the self, and the burden that the self is to itself in its very existing—not through anxiety that derives from the realization of finitude, but through the irremissible weight of being oneself. Heidegger’s ecstatical-horizonal conception of temporality has a very different intention. As Pöggeler says, for Heidegger,41 No longer are sensibility and understanding contrasted with one another and related to reason; rather, thrown finding-oneself-in is combined with projective understanding toward articulation or speech. This approach undercuts the traditional starting point of relating temporality to sensibility and of opposing this to the timeless forms of the intellect. When Heidegger begins with an analysis of our dealings with things having significance in our environing world, he breaks the one-sided orientation to theory that, according to him, has persisted from Parmenides to Husserl.

By relating the instant to the corporeal, Levinas returns to the traditional emphasis of temporality and sensibility, but by relating temporality to the Other, and in subordinating the intellect to the morality which consists of my freedom’s being invested by the Other, he disturbs the way the tradition has lined up the categories of sensibility versus intellect, same versus other, time versus eternity. The future that Heidegger’s Dasein faces is not simply divorced from

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the past.42 Far from it. As Pöggeler says, “The moment is effected by and interwoven with the future, which is not merely a set goal but an open possibility. This moment is interwoven just as much with the past which, as having-been, is likewise taken in accord with its being possible.”43 Pöggeler goes on to explain how Dasein turns away from the they in the moment of vision: “The moment must be torn away from selfforgetful ‘everydayness’; in turn, however, existence can even ‘master the everyday in the moment and indeed often only ‘for the moment.’ But it can never eradicate the everyday’. . . momentariness is . . . a weaning from the conventions of the ‘They.’ ”44 Having divorced itself from the inauthentic past of the they, Dasein must rejoin others in authentically projecting a new relation to the past onto the future. Again in Pöggeler’s words:45 Resolutely handing oneself over to the there of the moment is the action that Heidegger calls “fate.” He differentiates the fate of the individual from the destiny of a generation and a people, but he also relates fate and destiny to the world-historical and the relationship with nature. Here many distinctions are necessary, and they must be expressed philosophically and scientifically, for instance, by distinguishing the different kinds of concept formation and respective preconceptions belonging to physics, history, and theology.

In the middle of this paragraph there is a noticeable shift, from a thorough and detailed analysis to a vague and general observation that is hard to pin down. What is Pöggeler drawing back from when he asserts that there are many distinctions to be made? How does the notion of “the world-historical” relate to notions such as “generation” and “people”? The shift I see here seems to me typical of Heidegger commentators who do not want to comment on Heidegger’s political commitments, and yet cannot pass over them entirely without comment. However, in the afterword to the second edition of his book, Pöggeler sheds his reticence, and asks, “Was it not through a definite orientation of his thinking that Heidegger fell—and not merely accidentally—into the proximity of National Socialism without ever truly emerging from this proximity?”46 In the moment of vision, Dasein must have divorced itself from the inauthentic they, in which it unthinkingly inherits tradition, and find a way of retrieving the past so that in the future it is obedient to the

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authentic past. The figures that populate this authentic past, which Dasein must bring into the future, shadowy though they may be, bear an uncanny resemblance to those public officials of National Socialism that Nazis recognized as heroic. Resoluteness “constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own Self” (BT 443; SZ 391), says Heidegger—and here is the invocation to be true to oneself—but resoluteness is also a “fateful repetition,” in which “Dasein brings itself back ‘immediately’—that is to say, in a way that is temporally ecstatical—to what has already been before it” (BT 442–43; SZ 391). And when “its heritage is thus handed down to itself,” Dasein is “more free from Illusion” (BT 443; SZ 391). What illusion Heidegger means is left unspecified, and readers are free to assume that he has in mind the illusions of the they, which begin to look less illusory as the alternative Heidegger hints toward becomes more sinister. Heidegger appeals to the idea of Dasein’s handing itself a “possibility which it has inherited and yet chosen” (BT 435; SZ 383). Some of the more sophisticated versions of postmodern feminism have taken over what, at first glance, looks like precisely such a model. I have in mind those versions of feminism that take seriously the various processes by which subjects are constructed by cultural influences, and in this sense are created by history, but which stop short of allowing the vague idea of “construction” to obliterate completely any concept of agency. The problem with the direction in which Heidegger takes his analysis is that he is too much in thrall to unspecified notions such as “heritage,” which, in the aftermath of his association with Nazism, begin to look highly suspicious. Having repeatedly insisted, throughout Being and Time, that authenticity is not simply a moral category, and having resisted the idea that it means anything like the good, he says, for example, “If everything ‘good’ is a heritage and the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of a heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness” (BT 435; SZ 383). The assumption that everything that is handed down to us is good seems enormous and untenable, to say the very least—no wonder that Levinas found it incumbent upon him to meditate more carefully on the meaning of goodness! Heidegger’s appeals to the simplicity of the fate to which Dasein is brought back sets off further alarm bells. Because of this, the extent to which Heidegger’s understanding of history allows others back into the picture, after having largely banished them in their guise as the they, is more than

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disturbing. For the question posed is: What others, and in whose name do these others speak? Quoting Heidegger’s statement “Dasein may choose its hero” (BT 437; SZ 385), Haar asks, “Is it not rather that it chooses itself as its only hero?”47 I suggest, on the contrary, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Dasein’s heroes, those others who represent the good, whose heritage history hands down to us as our fate, could just as easily be those whom the Nazis believed were destined to rule. It is precisely Heidegger’s equivocation between the need for Dasein to come back to itself and his appeal to community that underscores the need not merely to leave open the possibility that the heroes Heidegger has in mind are indeed those of National Socialism, but to assert its probability. How does Levinas respond to Heidegger’s appeal to the simplicity of fate and his assumption that heritage is good? For Levinas, the virtue of Heidegger’s account is that he succeeds in thinking Dasein’s transcendence in temporal terms, in renewing and deepening the play of inside and outside in which Dasein’s ecstatic transcendence consists, and in understanding Dasein’s existence not as a relationship between an I that thinks and the object or world that is thought, but as a relationship with being itself as an event. Levinas writes (EE 82; DE 139): Without being cognition, temporality in Heidegger is an ecstasy, a “being outside of oneself.” This is not a transcendence characteristic of theory, but is already the leaving of an inwardness for an exteriority. In Heidegger existence remains a movement of the inside toward the outside; indeed it is he who has grasped, in its deepest form, the ultimate and universal essence of this play of inwardness and exteriority, beyond the “subject-object” play to which idealist and realist philosophy reduced it. What is new in this conception is that this ecstasy is seen to be more than a property of the soul; it is taken to be that through which existence exists. It is not a relationship with an object, but with the verb to be, with the action of being. Through ecstasy man takes up his existence. Ecstasy is then found to be the very event of existence.

Levinas applauds Heidegger for having rendered transcendence more radical by thinking it as temporality, but he bemoans the fact that for Heidegger “existence remains a movement of the inside toward the outside.” Ultimately, this means for Levinas that Heidegger’s philosophy reenacts an oscillation to which Western metaphysical efforts to under-

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stand time and death have remained captive, and which they have characterized by a dialectical opposition between being and nothingness, which Levinas claims to move beyond (see TI 232; TeI 208–9).48 In his critique of Heidegger’s understanding of death, the full force of this point will have its impact. For Levinas, “In the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death, as though the approach of death remained one of the modalities of the relation with the Other” (TI 234; TeI 210–11). Death approaches as “mystery,” as that which thwarts my power, cannot be anticipated, as that which cannot be assumed. (See TI 235; TeI 212.) Levinas concedes that in his later works, Heidegger’s philosophy of power, mastery, and comprehension seems to give way to the breakup of unity, to fate, and to the errancy of Being; he maintains that Heidegger can admit mystery only as “impotence” and that it is therefore still “by reference to power” that such impotence is admitted (TI 276; TeI 253). While Levinas gives Heidegger credit for elaborating his theory of ecstatic temporality, the model of ecstasis also introduces a major problem that Levinas will attempt to overcome by introducing the notions of position and hypostasis on the one hand, and mystery and the erotic relation on the other hand. Taminiaux also acknowledges that “the notion of hypostasis was introduced by Levinas in a deliberate objection to the Heideggerian primacy of ekstasis.”49 Levinas’s concern will be to return philosophical attention to the materiality of the body, to a phenomenology of eros, to enjoyment, and to dwelling, to those aspects of bodily existence that Heidegger neglects in his insistent emphasis on the relation that binds Dasein to its world. For Levinas, there is an ontological drama or event whose meaning cannot be cashed out in terms of the worldhood of the world, or reduced to transcendence—even if transcendence is understood as ecstatic temporality. This is thought in Levinas as position, and as accomplishment, as the positing of myself on the earth, as standing or maintaining one’s place in a dwelling, with all the possibilities of enjoyment, sensibility, and relationship to the other that this includes. I have suggested that feminists who are situated within the continental tradition are saddled with the uneasy legacy of Heidegger’s dis-

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comfort with bodies, a legacy that we are still trying to live down. Levinas goes some way toward correcting Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment by acknowledging the importance of position, accomplishment, corporeity, and dwelling. The fact that he associates these material aspects of life with the feminine can be read both negatively and positively. While he can be faulted for relegating the feminine to bodily materiality, which philosophers have typically denigrated, he can also be applauded for at least raising the question of the corporeal, and showing that it has a place in philosophical analysis, however much it is ultimately subordinated to the ethical impulse of his philosophy. I have shown why I think that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein reiterates to some extent the solipsism he wanted to avoid. In its quest to disengage with the they, Dasein remains solitary, confronting death alone, and freely choosing itself as authentic, without much allegiance to others, in its alleged neutrality with regard to race, sex, gender, and ethnicity. But in its quest to become authentic, Dasein rejoins others, in the form of a community, or a people (Volk). Race and ethnicity become very much a factor in the creation of this community, in a way that one would hope had nothing to do with feminism. Heidegger understands the destiny of the community as bound up with the “same world.” In contrast, the main inspiration of Levinas’s philosophy is directed toward a philosophy of exteriority or alterity, where the spontaneous freedom of the self, far from being justified by itself, discovers its arbitrariness in the face of the other. But if a certain pluralism, consisting of the I’s obligation to another, would be the ground of Levinas’s philosophy, this pluralism does not extend beyond a patriarchal and culturally specific view of the world, ensconced as it is in traditional notions of paternity, filiality, and fraternity. The parochialism of Levinas’s thought is indicated in his cavalier dismissal of the claims of what he calls “Oriental thought” (TI 102; TeI 76).50 If Heidegger’s Dasein is solitary in its anticipation of death, it also remains very much beholden to the transcendental subject from which it wants to break away. For all its ingenuity, Heidegger’s reworking of the question of time does not manage to extricate Dasein from an ultimately rather traditional emphasis on subjectivity as the locus of understanding. In the face of death, Dasein stands alone. In authentic anticipation, Dasein is thrown back on its own devices—those of mastery, control,

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and dominance. As Pöggeler says, in anticipating death, “every purpose and goal becomes null and void. But this anticipation affords a distance from which remove Dasein can return to itself and its goals as free.”51 To the extent that Heidegger takes the impact of others seriously, he imports notions of tradition and heritage, which we should approach only with extreme caution. Under the sway of fate, Dasein can apparently cling to traditions that pronounce themselves as destiny, traditions which discriminate on the basis of sex, race, ethnic identity, sexuality, class, and so on, without acknowledging its partiality and bias. For Levinas, in approaching the Other, the I is “uprooted from history” (TI 52; TeI 23). But this I is figured as masculine. It might seem that Levinas’s notion of fecundity offers the most fertile ground for going beyond Heidegger’s notion of temporality and history. Levinas says, “A being capable of another fate than its own is a fecund being” (TI 282; TeI 258). In fact the newness that fecundity would seem to offer is compromised by its thoroughgoing patrilineal associations—it is the son who is a “true other” (TI 63; TeI 35), and it is the “resurrection in the son” that allows a “triumph over death” (TI 56; TeI 27) and that breaks up the finitude of Heidegger’s Dasein. A more promising place for feminism to look in Levinas’s corpus, I suggest, is the feminine welcome of the dwelling, in which the notion of a past not orchestrated by the present of representation is introduced. I explore this promise—and the way in which it is recuperated by certain gestures of Levinas, in the Conclusion.

chapter three

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I

n t h e l e c t u r e s he presented in Marburg, following the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes a detailed investigation of Aristotle’s essay on time—an investigation that he had promised in the introduction of Being and Time (and had already announced in the 1925 lecture course History of the Concept of Time),1 but which he did not deliver until Part 2 of his lecture course of summer 1927, published as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.2 This investigation provides clarification of several issues that were left suspended in Being and Time, not the least of which is exactly how Aristotle’s philosophical understanding of time relates to the common understanding of time, and in precisely what respects Heidegger sees his own revised conception of temporality as going beyond the Aristotelian tradition. According to Heidegger, the Greeks interpret Being “without any acquaintance with the fundamental ontological function of time” (BT 48; SZ 26). Since Aristotle remains determinative for the tradition, the rest of the Western metaphysical tradition is implicated in this judgment. The Greeks, says Heidegger, “take time itself as one entity among other entities, and try to grasp it in the structure of its Being, though that way of understanding Being which they have taken as their horizon is one which is itself naively and inexplicitly oriented towards time” (BT 48; SZ 26). Heidegger announces his intention of giving “an interpretation of Aristotle’s essay on time, which may be chosen as providing a way of discriminating the basis and the limitations of the ancient science of Being” (BT 48; SZ 26). If Heidegger’s stated intention in the opening pages of Being and Time is to use Aristotle’s essay on time as a way of

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pointing out the shortcomings of the ancient treatment of Being, not only is this intention postponed until The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, but by the closing pages of Being and Time the problem undergoes a curious reversal. Heidegger defers discussion of the essay until “a solution for the question of Being” (BT 473; SZ 421) is found. Such a reversal is not surprising, given Heidegger’s contention that the question of Being and the nature of time are intricately bound up with one another. Perhaps the circularity of Heidegger’s articulation of the relationship between Being and time should be attributed not to his own confusion about their order of priority in his path of questioning, but rather to the persistent confusion that characterizes the tradition, and which Heidegger intends to clarify. More specifically, Heidegger needs to work out more fully than he had in Being and Time the structure of Zeitlichkeit—the specific mode of Dasein’s temporality—before he can address the relationship between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität.3 We already know that Heidegger thinks that for Aristotle—and therefore for the tradition that he inaugurates—time “shows itself in circumspective concern” (BT 473; SZ 421), that is, as “naively ontological” (BT 39; SZ 18), as one entity among others (see BT 48; SZ 26). In other words, the common, or natural, or scientific, or traditional (all these words indicate ontologically inadequate ways of understanding time) approach is to ask about the being of time, but without a clear conception of what being is.4 The lack of clarity concerns, in part, the temporal assumptions already at work in the concept of being. The idea of being that informs the tradition, Heidegger suggests, is presence-at-hand (Vorhandensein). If the question of the being or existence of time is at stake—whether and how it exists, or what kind of being it has—and yet the meaning of being is left unclarified, it is hard to know what precisely is being asked about time. To ask What is the being of time? or What kind of being is time? seems to require some clarity about the being proposed in the question. Heidegger thinks that such clarity is lacking in Aristotle and the tradition. (See BT 473; SZ 421.) Heidegger says (BP 272; GP 385– 86):5 Implicit in the Dasein’s own mode of being is that it knows the sequence of nows only in [a] naked form of the nows of sequential juxtaposition. Only on this presupposition, too, is Aristotle’s manner of inquiry possible when he asks whether time is something that is or whether it is a non-existent and

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discusses this question with reference to past and future in the common sense of being-no-longer and being-not-yet. In this question about the being of time, Aristotle understands being in the sense of extantness [Vorhandenseins].

So long as Aristotle adheres to this sense of being as extant, or present-athand, he will deprive himself of posing the question of time in the more original way that Heidegger seeks. Heidegger will elaborate the differences between vulgar, common, or ordinary time on the one hand, and original or primordial time on the other hand, in terms of several distinctions. Thus, time is inauthentic (uneigentliche) or authentic (eigentliche); infinite (unendlich) and endless (endlos) as opposed to finite (endlich); either we are in the mode of falling (Verfallen), or we have in view the full structure of time, (that is, the four moments of what he calls “world-time”: significance, datability, spannedness, and publicness); time is successive, now-time or clock time, or else it is significant, ecstatic, world-time. Or, to express the point in terms of the problem that Heidegger takes to be fundamental, either Dasein is taken as extant, as present-at-hand (Vorhandene), as interpreting itself “by way of things” (that is, ontically: BP 272; GP 384), or else Dasein is understood ontologically, or praesentially (that is, in terms of its horizon).6 When we reckon with time in the equipmental context, we are concerned with time in the sense that we give ourselves time to do a certain task, or we do not have the time to complete it. Here “equipment,” says Heidegger, “in each case has a time of its own” (BT 474; SZ 422), but it is a time that loses sight of its own temporality, and gets lost in the “natural” time of concern, without thematizing the overall sense Dasein has of time in order for it to “lose” or “have” time. In such concern, Heidegger claims, “when one measures time concernfully,” the now gets understood as present-at-hand, as a thing. “Although it is not said explicitly that the ‘nows’ are present-at-hand in the same way as Things, they still get ‘seen’ ontologically within the horizon of the idea of presence-athand” (BT 475; SZ 423). In a passage which does not mention Aristotle by name but clearly has in view his reading of time, as signaled by Heidegger’s mention of dividing the now and the aporia (BT 475–76; SZ 423), he goes on to say:

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Heidegger’s Critique of Metaphysical Presence The sequence of “nows” is uninterrupted and has no gaps. No matter how “far” we proceed in “dividing up” the “now,” it is always now. The continuity of time is seen within the horizon of something which is indissolubly present-at-hand. When one takes one’s ontological orientation from something that is constantly present-at-hand, one either looks for the problem of the Continuity of time or one leaves this impasse [Aporie] alone. In either case the specific structure of world-time must remain covered up.

Rather than assume that time can be thought within a horizon that operates at the level of the present-at-hand, which takes the now as the basic phenomenon of time, Heidegger wants to capture the sense in which we must already have a sense of temporality in order to be capable of measuring time. When we weigh up how much time we need to complete a given task, we already have access to time. We make such calculations in the context of a given horizon of temporality, and in this way are already temporal. Heidegger specifies Zeitlichkeit as the mode of temporality that is peculiar to Dasein: “We shall point to temporality [Zeitlichkeit] as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call ‘Dasein’ ” (BT 38; SZ 17). By temporality (Zeitlichkeit) Heidegger means “the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been [gewesendgegenwärtigende Zukunft]” (BT 374; SZ 326). This formulation stresses both that the ecstases (past, present, future) are to be understood as essentially united to one another, and that in their unity the future has a certain priority. Heidegger interprets the past and future not as derivative versions of the present—not as a past that once was present, nor as a future that is yet to become present. Rather, each ecstasis has its own dynamic, and each ecstasis is also a dimension of each of the other ecstases. The present is not a simple now, adequately represented as an isolated point but capable of being joined up with other now-points to form a linear, graphical, and abstract conception of time as continuous. The present bends under the weight of the past, and has significance because of the impending future. In this sense, the now as present includes within itself a relation to the past and a relation to the future. It is not bounded arbitrarily by that which is not now, but it carries within itself a dimensional quality that confers on it a specific history and a particular, anticipated, future. Any given moment only has its meaning because it follows a given past, and looks to a delineated future in terms of which it understands itself. Insofar as all temporality is structured by our fun-

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damental finitude, there is a sense in which all our experience of time is infused with an understanding of futurity as finite. If Heidegger intends to improve on the common conception of time, which takes the now as basic rather than the future, he understands that he cannot simply ignore our usual understanding of time, but instead must take it as his starting point. (See BP 228; GP 323.) Just as the “vague average understanding of Being” constitutes the “starting point” (BT 25–26; SZ 5–7) for rendering more explicit the question of the meaning of Being, so the common conception of time is adopted as Heidegger’s starting point for his inquiry into temporality (Zeitlichkeit). The structures that Heidegger lays out in Division 1 of Being and Time are reinterpreted in temporal terms in Division 2, with the result that it is nothing else than “temporality” that is meant by “everydayness” (BT 423; SZ 372). Just as, in Being and Time, it is Dasein’s “average everydayness” (BT 38; SZ 16) that provides a way of access to Dasein’s Being, so, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the common concept of time is in need of interrogation so that it can be given a more original interpretation. Since, in Heidegger’s view, Aristotle has provided the common, natural, understanding of time with conceptual clarity, it is Aristotle’s essay on time in the Physics to which Heidegger looks for the exemplar of this common understanding.7 The very fact that Aristotle treats the problem of time under the heading “Physics” is telling for Heidegger. As a natural phenomenon, as part of nature, time is taken to be a sequence of nows that are present-at-hand. Heidegger finds nature an inappropriate category for Dasein’s understanding of time. (See BP 262 and GP 370; BP 272 and GP 385.) If Aristotle provides the standard for the traditional understanding of time, Heidegger also credits Augustine for having seen time in some respects more “originally” than Aristotle, although “Aristotle’s investigations are conceptually [begrifflich] more rigorous and stronger” (BP 232; GP 329).8 Since Heidegger consistently looks to Aristotle’s definition of time as a refinement of the common understanding of time, the implication is that, while Aristotle’s conception of time may be rigorous and clear, it is not for all that “original.” In this respect it is of more than passing interest that it is from Augustine, and not Aristotle, that Heidegger retrieves the word “praesens,” a term which plays a key role in his understanding of temporality, as the name he gives to the “ecstatic hori-

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zon” of the present (Gegenwart: see BP 229 and GP 325; BP 306 and GP 435). Praesens is that upon which “Enpresenting, whether authentic in the sense of the instant, or inauthentic, projects that which it enpresents [gegenwärtigt]” (BP 307; GP 436). As such, praesens is one of the “horizonal schemata” of Temporality (Temporalität: BP 307; GP 436). It is that upon which the present is projected, or that on the basis of which the present is understood. Heidegger distinguishes between two different senses of temporality, Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität. Zeitlichkeit is the term that Heidegger reserves for Dasein’s specific mode of temporality. It is “the condition of the possibility of the constitution of the Dasein’s being,” says Heidegger. He adds that, since “understanding of being” belongs to this constitution, “temporality must also be the condition of a possibility for the understanding of being that belongs to the Dasein” (BP 274; GP 388). By Temporality (Temporalität), which Heidegger’s translators indicate with an upper case “T,” Heidegger means precisely this condition. Having announced in Being and Time the need to work out the meaning of the “Temporality [Temporalität] of Being” (BT 40; SZ 19) without pursuing it, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger specifies this condition in terms of the horizonal structure of temporality. As the “horizon from which we understand being” (BP 228; GP 324), temporality (Zeitlichkeit) is called Temporality (Temporalität). When it functions as a condition for understanding being as such (whether ontologically or preontologically) temporality is Temporality, as distinct from when it designates what makes Dasein’s specific being possible. According to Heidegger, Aristotle’s definition of time reveals that he had access to the horizonal structure of temporality. Rendered in a standard translation, Aristotle’s definition of time is as follows: “For time is just this—number of motion in respect of before and after.” It might seem that such a definition leaves Aristotle open to the charge of tautology: time is defined in terms of the before and after, or time is time. Heidegger rejects such a suggestion, proposing instead that Aristotle has seen something essential about time. He interprets Aristotle’s definition of time at Physics 4.11.219b as follows: “time is this, namely, something counted which shows itself in and for regard to the before and after [proteron kai husteron] in motion [kinêseôs] or, in short, something counted in connection with motion as encountered in the horizon of

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earlier and later” (BP 235; GP 333). On this reading, Aristotle has already caught sight of the horizonal structure of temporality that Heidegger will insist on. Given Heidegger’s discussion of the apparently tautological nature of Aristotle’s definition of time, a definition which, Heidegger will maintain, in fact speaks from the constraint of the horizonal structure of time, it is significant that when Heidegger explains the relationship between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität as one in which temporality can function as the condition for understanding being, he has recourse to the formulation “temporality is Temporality,” thereby echoing Aristotle’s definition of time as time. We might say that, for Heidegger, if Aristotle’s conceptual comprehension of time is to be raised to the level of an ontological understanding, the structure of projection that remains implicit in Aristotle must be articulated. But to articulate this structure of projection is precisely to see that, since the horizon of being is time, the naive, inexplicitly temporal conception of being that Aristotle employs in interrogating time involves an obfuscation not only about being, but also about time. Insofar as Aristotle works within a preontological understanding of time, he sees—at the phenomenological level—the interdependence of time and being. But insofar as he fails to thematize his understanding as preontological, and therefore cannot recognize the necessity of refining this preontological understanding in terms of a more explicit, ontological, framework, he is not in a position to carry through the full significance of his own insight into time. This failure is played out in the fact that Aristotle sees that it is paradoxical to envisage the future as a not yet now, and his definition of time as time catches sight of the double valence that time has, as a concept to which we somehow have advance access, but he does not draw out the full implications of this. He plays down the temporal connotations of the phrase proteron kai husteron in his definition of time (see BP 241; GP 342) rather than take them up.9 Aristotle’s interpretation of time provides the horizon, we might say, on which Heidegger’s own understanding of temporality is projected, even if, in rendering explicit this structure of projection, there is a sense in which Heidegger goes beyond any horizon that Aristotle could explicitly present. Heidegger provides an indication of how to think of the relationship between Aristotle’s method and Heidegger’s own “phe-

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nomenological investigation”—understood as “explicit effort applied to the method of ontology”—by observing that “When a method is genuine and provides access [Zugang] to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing originality [Ursprünglichkeit] of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete” (BP 328; GP 467). Alternatively (and this reading could coexist with the former), this observation about method could be read not as a comment on Aristotle, but as an acknowledgment of the limitations of the phenomenological method itself. Heidegger’s observation would then measure the success of fundamental ontology by its ability to point beyond itself. Fundamental ontology would then provide access to a more original understanding of temporality, and in doing so its very method would be rendered obsolete. Its starting point, the ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, would remain necessary, but only as something to be transcended. The ontological difference would be recast as a temporal difference: the difference between Being and beings would be rethought as the difference between Zeitlichkeit and Temporalität. The necessity of ontology, in other words, could no longer be specified in a priori terms, and the status of ontology would cease to be fundamental, insofar as the a priori itself takes on a new meaning—a temporal meaning. The ontological difference is recast in terms of the difference between temporality as grounding the constitution of Dasein’s being and temporality as the condition of any understanding of being. Since Dasein serves as a vehicle for Heidegger to raise the question of the meaning of Being, and since understanding is, for Heidegger, “a basic determination of existence” (BP 276; GP 390), Heidegger’s two senses of temporality are intrinsically linked to one another, and existentially inseparable from one another.10 At an existentiell (that is, ontic) level, however, Dasein can understand being through projecting it “upon its ability-to-be” (BP 279; GP 395), without understanding the Temporal implications of this projection. In addition, the various modes of existing that Dasein is familiar with preontologically are not initially articulated conceptually: that is, they have not reached the level of ontological clarification, or existential understanding. Heidegger says “Existence [Existieren], being extant or at hand [Vorhandensein], being handy [Zuhandensein], being the fellow of Dasein[Mitdasein Anderer]—these are

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not conceptually comprehended” (BP 279; GP 396). We may have a working understanding of these different modes of being in everydayness, but we have not rigorously distinguished them from one another conceptually. These different modes of being are understood, says Heidegger, “indifferently in an understanding of being that makes possible and guides both the experience of nature and the self-apprehension of the history of being-with-one-another [Miteinanderseins]” (BP 279–80; GP 396). What occurs when such understanding takes place is a projection that is not conceptually comprehended as such. Heidegger says that “Being as such” (BP 280; GP 396) is projected in existentiell understanding. It remains, however, for the structure of projection, and its temporal implications, to be drawn out. A being is understood only as it is projected upon Being, and Being (Sein) itself must be projected on something. “If Dasein harbors the understanding of being within itself, and if temporality makes possible the Dasein in its ontological constitution, then temporality [Zeitlichkeit] must also be the condition of the possibility of the understanding of being and hence of the projection of being on time” (BP 280; GP 397). How exactly are we to understand the relationship between time as commonly understood, time as Aristotle understands it, and, finally, time as Heidegger intends to reinterpret it? Heidegger gives us a clear statement (but one that will become progressively muddied) of how he sees the relationship when he says (BP 257; GP 363):11 [The] common understanding of time [vulgäre Zeitverständnis] comprehends only the time that reveals itself in counting a succession of nows. From this understanding of time there arises the concept of time [der Begriff der Zeit] as a sequence of nows, which has been more particularly defined as a unidirectional irreversible sequence of nows one after the other.

Time as commonly understood, then, is a “succession of nows” that can be measured or counted. Aristotle, according to Heidegger, brings conceptual clarification to this common understanding of time, by defining it as a unidirectional and irreversible sequence of nows, while still allowing his basic approach to time to be governed by the common interpretation. By contrast, Heidegger wants to ask what makes possible the common understanding of time. In order to do so, he must “retain this initial approach to time in terms of clock usage and, by a more precise

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interpretation of this comportment toward time and of the time thus experienced, advance towards what makes this time itself possible” (BP 257; GP 363). According to Heidegger, we cannot entirely abandon the common understanding of time, but we must take it as a clue for a more original, that is—an existential, ecstatic, or horizonal—interpretation of common time. The structures that underlie the common understanding of time, which takes time as a succession of nows, are covered up, as the result of what Heidegger calls “falling” (Verfallen: BP 272; GP 384). Heidegger’s task, as he conceives it, is to explore the “full structure” (BP 261; GP 369) of time: that is, the underlying structural features of time that allow us to know time as a sequence of nows. He investigates the full structure of the “three determinations” of time that we usually call present, future, and past in a way that brings to the fore their dependence not only on the assumption that the now is the basic phenomenon of time, but also on the contrary tendency each of these familiar temporal categories has to bleed into the others, or to be directed outside themselves. Thus, the present, future, and past are understood as “enpresenting” (Gegenwärtigen), “expecting” (Gewärtigen), and “retaining” (Behalten) and, says Heidegger, “express themselves in the now, then, and the atthe-time” (BP 262; GP 369).12 For both Aristotle and Heidegger, the future is primary in some sense. By stipulating in precisely what sense the future is primary, we can see how both the common understanding and Aristotle’s conceptual clarification of this tradition fall short of Heidegger’s formulation of a more originary concept of time. For Aristotle and the tradition, the future is thought on the basis of the now, according to Heidegger an understanding that misinterprets the primary concept of the future. For Heidegger “Dasein is futural [zukünftig] in an original sense,” and the way in which Dasein is futural is in its “coming-toward-itself, expectant of a possibility [Möglichkeit gewärtigenden Auf-sich-zukommen]” (BP 265; GP 375). Heidegger highlights as the “primary concept of the future” an existential understanding, understood as “coming-toward-oneself from one’s ownmost peculiar possibility . . . of which all expecting is a specific mode” (BP 265; GP 375). By reading into the future a directional quality, Heidegger invests it with a dimensional relation to Dasein, rather than seeing it as a static now. The conception of the future in the ordinary understanding of time has the “sense of a pure ‘now’ which has

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not yet come along but is only coming along” (BT 479; SZ 427). That is, the way in which the ordinary understanding of time conceives of the future is, in fact, in terms of a modified now—the now that is not here yet, but which will be present soon, when it comes along. The now is thus understood as present-at-hand. The same kind of dimensional reinterpretation that Heidegger performs on the future is extended to the other esctases. Thus, expecting (Gewärtigen), retaining (Behalten), and enpresenting (Gegenwärtigen), which express themselves in ordinary time as the now, then, and at-thetime, have their essences, respectively, in coming-toward-oneself (Aufsich-zukommen), going-back-to (Zurück-zu), and staying-with or dwelling-with (Sichaufhalten bei). (See BP 266; GP 377.) “These characters of the toward [Auf-zu], back-to [Zurück-zu], with [Bei],” says Heidegger, “reveal the basic constitution of temporality” (BP 266–67; GP 377). Heidegger says that while “Ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future,” it is the now that constitutes the basic phenomenon of time in the ordinary way of understanding, and moreover, it is “that pure ‘now’ which has been shorn of its full structure—that which they call the ‘Present’ [Gegenwart]” (BT 479; SZ 426–27). The priority of the future is precisely what the ordinary understanding of time does not see as basic, but presupposes (see BP 265; GP 375), because it takes as basic the now which has been cut off from its articulation by the structural moments of significance, datability, stretchedness, and publicness (see BP 261; GP 369). The decisive difference, for Heidegger, between the ordinary understanding of time and what he designates as original temporality, Dasein’s temporality, is that Dasein is finite, while the ordinary understanding of time posits it as infinite. Heidegger identifies the idea that time is “infinite” as “the principal thesis of the ordinary way of interpreting time” (BT 476; SZ 424). Unlike the infinite, endless time that is temporalized out of inauthentic and derivative time, Heidegger characterizes primordial temporality as infused with the finitude of the future. He says, “The temptation to overlook the finitude of the primordial and authentic future and therefore the finitude of temporality, or alternatively, to hold ‘a priori’ that such finitude is impossible, arises from the way in which the ordinary understanding of time is constantly thrusting itself to the fore”

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(BT 379; SZ 330). The assumption that time is infinite is fostered by Dasein’s tendency to assume that it will live forever, or, in Heidegger’s terms, the inauthentic relationship toward death that dominates the average everyday understanding of mortality. By affirming our finitude in an authentic anticipation of death, Dasein reorients itself in relation to temporality.13 Rather than taking over the ordinary understanding of time which treats the now as the basic phenomenon of time, it takes the future as the primordial ecstasis, a future that it understands not as unlimited, but precisely as finite. Although Heidegger insists that the common understanding takes for granted that time is akin to a thing, and that, as such, it is assumed to be present-at-hand, there is also a sense in which even the common understanding of time is informed, albeit in a way that is not thematized, by a more ecstatic model. This ambiguity is played out in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, who, at different points, is credited with seeing, understanding, or knowing, with varying degrees of comprehension, the full structure of time. Heidegger posits four characteristics of time understood in its full structure: significance (Bedeutsamkeit), datability (Datierbarkeit), spannedness (Erstrecktheit), and publicness (Öffentlichkeit). Initially, Heidegger claims that Aristotle, and the whole tradition, did not see time in its full structure (BP 262; GP 369). More specifically, Heidegger thinks that while Aristotle overlooks the first two structural features, significance (see BP 262; GP 370) and “pre-calendrical datability” (BP 263; GP 317), he does see the “spannedness” of time. Heidegger says, “This is a feature that Aristotle rightly assigns to the now when he says that it has a certain transitionary character [Übergangscharakter]” (BP 263–64; GP 372–73). On the question of whether or not Aristotle sees the public character of time, Heidegger is unclear. It is significant, however, that Heidegger calls Aristotle’s definition of time an “access definition” (Zugangsdefinition) or “access characterization” (Zugangscharakteristik), and also uses the word “accessible” (zugänglich) to characterize the fourth structure of expressed time, the “publicness of time.” Heidegger says, “The accessibility of the now [Zugänglichkeit des Jetzt] for everyone, without prejudice to the diverse datings, characterizes time as public. The now is accessible [zugänglich] to everyone and thus belongs to no one” (BP 264; GP 373). Compare what Heidegger says about the

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common understanding of time in Being and Time: “The only time one knows is the public time which has been leveled off and which belongs to everyone—and that means, to nobody” (BT 477; SZ 425). Public, accessible, expressed time is also fallen, inauthentic time—the time of average everydayness. The irreversibility of time, or the assumption that it flows in a uniform direction, makes inaccessible a more originary concept of time. Heidegger thinks that “within the horizon of the way time is ordinarily understood, temporality is inaccessible in the reverse direction” (BT 479; SZ 426). To anticipate, the implication Heidegger draws from his assessment of the ordinary understanding of time as irreversible is this: for Heidegger, original temporality is accessible in the reverse direction, through its projection onto the future. Its accessibility is given through Dasein’s finitude. Having stated that Aristotle does not see the full structure of time, Heidegger reevaluates his position. While maintaining that the common understanding knows time only as an “irreversible sequence of nows” (BP 271; GP 384), and that the “significance and datability” of time “remain[s] concealed from it,” while “the structural moments of spannedness and publicness remain ultimately unintelligible to it” (BP 271; GP 384), Heidegger retracts his definitive disavowal that the tradition is unaware of these four structural features of time. Aristotle, in his understanding of time, is now credited with having in view “certain characteristics,” but, suggests Heidegger, since he remains in thrall to the common understanding, he cannot focus explicitly on the original structure of time (BP 272; GP 387): We have stressed that the common understanding of time is not expressly aware of the characters of the now, significance, datability, spannedness, and publicness. We must however qualify this statement at least to some degree, since the Aristotelian interpretation of time already shows that, even if time is taken merely as the time we reckon with, certain characteristics come to view. But they cannot be made an explicit problem as long as the common conception of time represents the sole guide to the interpretation of time.

The qualification bears on the wider question as to how clear and consistent Heidegger is, not only in delineating the common understanding of time from Aristotle’s understanding, but also in distinguishing his own understanding of time from Aristotle’s. This, in turn, has implica-

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tions for Heidegger’s entire project. If Heidegger wants to ground our common understanding of time on a more original conception of temporality, but that more original conception already appears, albeit in a preliminary way, in Aristotle, perhaps Heidegger’s reinterpretation is not as radical as he wants to maintain. Perhaps it is more derivative of the tradition than he would like us to think, and perhaps the distinction between our everyday and inauthentic understanding and Heidegger’s ecstatic, authentic understanding is less sharply delineated than he claims. In fact, while Heidegger rigorously distinguishes authentic temporality from the inauthentic understanding of time, he stops short of claiming that the latter is illegitimate. Heidegger says in Being and Time, “The ordinary representation of time has its natural justification. It belongs to Dasein’s average kind of Being, and to that understanding of Being which proximally prevails” (BT 478; SZ 426). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger is even more conservative in the claims he wants to make for original temporality as compared to the ordinary conception of time. It is not that the ordinary understanding of time is wrong, but rather that “This interpretation of time loses its exclusive and pre-eminent justification only if it claims to convey the ‘true’ conception of time and to be able to prescribe the sole possible horizon within which time is to be Interpreted” (BP 265; GP 374). Perhaps Heidegger is already wondering if, as Derrida has suggested, the very notion of providing us with an alternative concept of time is a misleading and mistaken enterprise, and the distinction between a fallen, inauthentic everyday time and an authentic, ecstatic-horizonal temporality is ultimately untenable. Indeed, perhaps Levinas is right when he suggests that Heidegger does not so much bring into question the traditional metaphysical conception of time, as reiterate its basic tropes. How far Heidegger would agree with this characterization of his own philosophical program depends on what weight he attaches to his philosophy as a rethinking of Greek philosophy, and to what extent he sees his reformulation of the Greeks as a radical reorientation of philosophy itself. There is no doubt that Heidegger construes his attempt to raise anew the question of the meaning of Being as an overcoming of metaphysics, but it is an overcoming that involves a renewal of Greek philosophy. But how is this revival of Greek philosophy to be thought in relation to the

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community, fate, and destiny of Germany in the 1920’s? Heidegger tries to think what the Greeks left unthought, yet what was implicit in their philosophy. In this sense, he sets himself the task of rethinking philosophy from the ground up. Thus he sets out to see how common or ordinary time springs from, or is derivative of (entspringt), original or primordial time. Heidegger says, “The ontological source of Dasein’s Being is not ‘inferior’ to what springs from it [entspringt], but towers above it in power from the outset; in the field of ontology, any ‘springing-from’ [Entspringen] is degeneration” (BT 383; SZ 334). If Aristotle’s definition of time essentially adheres to the ordinary conception of time, differing from it only in the sense that it brings conceptual (but not ontological) clarity to it, there is a sense in which Aristotle’s understanding of time, precisely as dependent on the ordinary understanding of time, presents a degenerative version of original time. According to Heidegger, “Aristotle’s aporia with reference to the being of time—which is still the principal difficulty today—derives from [entspringt] the concept of being as equal to being extant [vorhandensein]” (BP 272; GP 386). As Taminiaux observes, “Heidegger’s ontological attempt to purify existence of any connection with the condition of Vorhandenheit overlooks the fact that ontologically the very emergence of an existent in its relation to Being is itself in a way a form of Vorhandenheit, a sub-stance, and hypostasis.”14 In returning to hypostasis, Levinas tries to avoid the problem that Derrida articulates when he says, with reference to Heidegger’s appeal in the Rectoral Address to the destiny of the West as a spiritual force:15 [O]ne cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its genetic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in an oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectivity [sic], even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long time to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to nazism, to fascism, etc., and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of [the] spirit, in the name of an axiomatic—for example, that of democracy or “human rights”—which, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity.

Levinas is not afraid to reinscribe spirit—as infinity, as responsibility for the Other, as the absolute alterity of the Other, as the irreducible and exceptional presence of the face—but he does not do so in oppositional

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determination. In attempting to break with Eleatic being, he also dislodges the metaphysical determinations that presuppose the primacy of the one or the same. The implications of Heidegger’s reworking of the ontological difference as a temporal difference would appear to be profound. If the interrogation of Dasein has revealed that our most basic distinctions between realms of being are, at bottom, temporal distinctions, and if ontological inquiry no longer presents itself as aspiring to universal pretensions, and no longer pertains to the eternal truths of science, because it has shown that the very distinction between supratemporal and temporal is one that depends upon our experience as finite beings, then Heidegger’s philosophy would seem to point in the direction of a historical, cultural, inquiry with relativist overtones. But I suggest, with Bourdieu, that this is far from the case. He says:16 [I]n the very act of authorizing the reduction of truth to time, history, and the finite, and thereby depriving scientific truth of the eternity which it claims and which is granted by classical philosophy, this ontologization of history and time (like the ontologization of Verstehen which goes with it) snatches from history (and anthropological science) the right to claim eternal truth as ontological foundation of Dasein in temporalization and historicity, and claims for itself the status of a priori and eternal principle of all history (in the sense both of Heidegger’s Historie and of his Geschichte). It founds the transhistorical truth of the philosophy, which, beyond all historical determination, enunciates the transhistorical truth of Dasein as historicity.

By not making Dasein’s exemplarity available for scrutiny (Derrida says that “this exemplarity can become or remain problematical”),17 Heidegger infuses it with a transhistoricality that at once transcends Dasein’s historicity, and appears to ground it. Heidegger does not own the transhistorical character of Dasein. On the one hand, he seems to privilege temporality and historicity, but on the other hand, a certain unspecified universality is reimported into Dasein’s structure. Thus, the disembodiment of Dasein comes to inflect all that can be said of it at the existential level, but not in a way that is available for questioning. There is also an interpretive break between Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology when it comes to the question of death and finitude. Finitude is, as we saw in the Introduction, the decisive axis

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around which Heidegger differentiates his understanding of ecstaticohorizonal temporality from that of the tradition in Being and Time; yet, as Dastur says, “we find no justification of the finitude of time in the 1927 lecture course since this would require a return to the question of Being-towards-death, a question developed in the second section of Being and Time and which alone permits us to understand what is said in §65, namely, that original time is finite precisely because it temporalizes itself from the authentic future as anticipatory resoluteness (vorlaufendene Entschlosenheit), i.e. as authentic Being-towards-death”18 What are we to make of Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is radically individuated, unsubstitutable, in relation to its finitude, if finitude is no longer part of the temporal analysis? Do Dasein’s heroes become completely determinative for it, and if so, is there any way of stepping back from its choices, when these prove to be inauthentic? If death no longer provides the backdrop of nothingness that Dasein confronts in anxiety, and which provides Dasein with the distance necessary for it to exercise its freedom, is Dasein in danger of falling back into inauthenticity, of collapsing the they into the historical community of fate? What space is left for reflective or critical judgment, in the absence of Dasein’s face-to-face confrontation with its own death, and what room is there for an ethical critique of what might later turn out to be inauthentic political commitments?

chapter four

The Temporality of Saying Politics Beyond the Ontological Difference

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h r o u g h o u t h i s w o r k Levinas is concerned to show how philosophy’s preoccupation with positing knowledge as the fundamental relationship between the subject and the world has obscured a more original and archaic responsibility from which the knowing subject’s relation to its world, and the subject/object dichotomy that underlies and informs this relationship, is derivative. The sense in which Levinas construes ethics defies attempts to reduce it to a relationship between subject and object, and ultimately questions the adequacy of construing ethics as a relationship between two subjects. Such a construction still posits the subjects as essentially independent of, yet similar to, one another. Levinas challenges both the idea that a subject can be envisaged as having complete autonomy and integrity, independently of any other subject, and the notion of a fundamental similarity between subjects. The Other is not a theme that can be adequately represented by my idea of an individual participating in the common genus of humanity. Any attempt to assess the impact Levinas’s philosophy might have on politics would have to account for the fact that politics itself—insofar as it rests on a form of knowledge, or is consonant with the effort to achieve rationality—is regarded by Levinas as derivative of a prior responsibility to the Other. This prior responsibility resists the simultaneity of the moment of comprehension in which I extend my charity or generosity to the Other out of an understanding of our common hu-

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manity. It refuses any attempt to impose an immediate equality or symmetry on the ethical relation such that my obligation to the Other would be mirrored by the Other’s obligation to me, and it defines the subject not by its being, nor by its instinct for self-preservation, nor yet by its tendency to incorporate the Other into its own schemes. “The subject,” says Levinas, “is ‘for itself’—it represents itself and knows itself as long as it is. But in knowing or representing itself it possesses itself, dominates itself, extends its identity to what of itself comes to refute this identity. This imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom” (TI 87; TeI 59). Levinas regards the reduction of the Other to the same, and the promotion of freedom, as characteristic of ontology. (See TI 42; TeI 13). For Levinas, “freedom discovers itself murderous in its very exercise. . . . Morality begins when freedom, instead of being justified by itself, feels itself to be arbitrary and violent” (TI 84; TeI 56). Although Levinas says that “the relation between the same and the other is not always reducible to knowledge of the other by the same, nor even to the revelation of the other to the same” (TI 28; TeI xvi), it would be a mistake to read this as a repudiation of knowledge as such.1 Levinas’s point is not to abandon the quest for knowledge, but to argue that ethics “accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge” (TI 43; TeI 13). Levinas understands ethics as critique, “beyond theory and ontology,” as a “calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other” (TI 43; TeI 14). Levinas is critical of what he takes to be phenomenology’s privileging of theoretical consciousness, either as Heidegger’s ontological “reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term that ensures the comprehension of being” (TI 43; TeI 13), or as Husserl’s “theoretical intentionality of the objectifying act” (TI 122; TeI 95). Neither Heidegger nor Husserl distances himself sufficiently from the model of the egoist subject as spontaneous freedom. In this respect, the same objection is brought against political theory. Levinas says, “Political theory derives justice from the undiscussed value of spontaneity; its problem is to ensure, by way of knowledge of the world, the most complete exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with the freedom of the others” (TI 83; TeI 55). Heidegger’s attempt, following Husserl, to reorient the epistemological project, by recasting the subject/object relationship as a relation of intentionality, does not succeed, according to Levinas, in displacing

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the assumption that the fundamental relation with which philosophy should concern itself is the one that describes the passage from an ego to the world. The arc of intentionality traces the intellectual aspiration to uncover the horizon in which objects are perceived, and to bring it within the sphere of intelligibility, to render it knowable. This relation is one that Levinas seeks not to repudiate, but to go beyond—by suggesting that it already presupposes a more primordial, ethical relationship. Even to conceive of it as a relationship is to borrow the language of a philosophy that treats subjects as if they were constituted independently of one another. The ethical relation is “a relation without relation,” and Levinas prefers the term “religion” to “relation” (TI 80; TeI 52), by which he understands “the bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting a totality” (TI 40; TeI 10). Religion is opposed to politics, which “tends toward reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not struggle for recognition. It is . . . glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition of equality itself” (TI 64; TeI 35). Desire originates from the Other (see TI 62; TeI 33); “it is the welcoming of the Other” that Levinas understands in the way that Descartes describes the idea of infinity. But the reason the rationality that follows from having my freedom put in question by the other does not accord with the radiance of Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas (TI 303–4; TeI 280). “Shame does not have the structure of consciousness and clarity”(TI 84; TeI 56). Prior to the “schema of vision from Aristotle to Heidegger” (TI 189; TeI 164), prior to “theoretical consideration,” Levinas finds that “freedom at the same time is discovered in the consciousness of shame and is concealed in the shame itself” (TI 84; TeI 56). To seek one’s foundation not in oneself, but in the other, “turning back to what is prior to oneself, in the presence of the Other” (TI 88; TeI 60), is to be ashamed of one’s freedom. Levinas says, “The shame for oneself, the presence of and desire for the other are not the negation of knowing: knowing is their very articulation. The essence of reason consists not in securing for man a foundation and powers, but in calling him in question and inviting him to justice” (TI 88; TeI 60–61). It is not “that the Other forever escapes knowing,” but “that there is no meaning in speaking here of knowledge or ignorance, for justice, the preeminent transcendence and the condition for

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knowing, is nowise, as one would like, a noesis correlative of a noema” (TI 89–90; TeI 62). Levinas insists that the very identity of the subject is bound up with its encounter with the other—and that the attempt to come to know the other will always be secondary and inadequate to the claim that the other makes on me, or rather has always already made on me in a history resistant to my efforts to calculate what might be owing to the other.2

The Trajectory of Levinas’s Analysis of Temporality It is my contention that Levinas’s reflections on time are shaped in no small part by his engagement with and critique of Heidegger’s account of temporality, and that a sustained interpretation of the apparent discrepancies in Levinas’s philosophical view of time can be produced by reading his apparently divergent characterizations of the present, the instant, or death in the context of his reaction to and reworking of Heidegger’s insights. This is neither to suggest that Levinas’s thoughts on time can be reduced to an endeavor to correct Heidegger, a suggestion which would fail to acknowledge that other figures, such as Husserl, Rosenzweig, and Bergson, inform Levinas’s reflections on time in significant ways. Nor is it to suggest that all the difficulties and tensions that Levinas’s view of time presents can be ironed out by putting them in the context of his lifelong negotiation of Heidegger’s analysis of temporality, nor yet that there are no significant differences between Levinas’s early and late account of time. My point, rather, is to show that Levinas offers a coherent interrogation of time that reveals certain constants from the early to the late work, the development of which can be illuminated by a detailed examination of his response to Heidegger’s attempt to provide an alternative to the traditional view of time. In this chapter, I maintain that there is a shift of emphasis in Levinas’s account of time that can be explained by reference to his attempt on the one hand to take on board Heidegger’s critique of a metaphysical conception of time, and on the other hand to overcome what he saw as the shortcomings of that critique. A cursory look at the various discussions of time and death that oc-

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cur throughout the corpus of work that Levinas has left to his readers might suggest some inconsistencies. It might seem, for example, that in his early work there is an attempt to rehabilitate an account of the present, especially in Levinas’s appeal to notions such as the instant and hypostasis, that is disproportionate with his later emphasis of an immemorial past and a future that cannot be anticipated. The puzzle would then present itself as to how to reconcile Levinas’s early insistence upon the drama or event that the instant signifies for a solitary subject not yet implicated in time, with the later account of a subject who is always already responding to a future that comes from beyond, a future commanded by the Other, before whom the subject finds itself answerable for a past that has never been present. By reading Levinas’s early analysis of temporality as a response to Heidegger’s ecstatico-horizonal conception of temporality, and his later analysis as a response to what Levinas judged to be Heidegger’s inability to completely overcome the traditional metaphysical privileging of presence, the problem of reconciling Levinas’s early affirmation of the present with his later excoriation of the metaphysics of presence can be, if not resolved, at least accounted for. In Heidegger’s ecstatic conception of temporality, any specific meaning that the present might have is subordinated to the coalescing of the ecstases, whereby the present is dissipated under the weight of an inherited past and an anticipated impending future. According to Levinas, to deny the present any meaning independent of its ecstatic function is to construe its significance in the light of a totalizing conception of temporality—a conception which is then liable to have recourse to the very metaphysics of presence that Heidegger wanted to displace.3 The alterity of the past and future is capable of recuperation by a present which thereby proves itself the dominant force. The primacy and centrality of the subject as a controlling agent, able to master the vagaries of time, to withstand the vicissitudes of history, is reinstated. If the ecstatic analysis seemed to open Dasein to the otherness of death, Levinas’s rendering of Heidegger’s finite Dasein reveals that it cannot ultimately tolerate the radical unknown of death, but must convert it into the basis of its own self-understanding, and in this way cancel out the alterity it seemed to present. The solipsistic priority of the self over the other that would then govern Heidegger’s Dasein informs Levinas’s response to Heidegger, which is of course far from igno-

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rant of the need to confront Heidegger’s political allegiance to Nazism. Insofar as Nazism shares with any totalizing system the ideology of obliterating otherness, Levinas—at least theoretically—is not content to substitute for it another political ideology that refuses to acknowledge alterity. The difficulty is whether Levinas, in his extreme caution about the alleged totalizing tendency of all politics, does not either deprive himself of effective means to combat the kind of thinking that leads to Nazism, or fall prey to the illusion that he can offer an apolitical ethics whose apparent neutrality is in fact pervaded by a specific political agenda. If this covert agenda were racially and sexually discriminatory in ways that the pretensions of Levinas’s philosophy to political neutrality would not allow him to acknowledge, one would be justified in asking how far Levinas’s philosophy might replicate a problem that I would argue plagues Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger presents fundamental ontology as if it consisted of universal claims, while obfuscating the ways in which it depends on gender-specific and race-specific Western ideals.4

The Saying and the Said If language is considered merely in terms of its ability to communicate information, it can be understood as functioning at the level of the said. Levinas insists upon an anterior sense of language, that of the saying, which not only is susceptible to the said, but even requires it. The said both undermines and makes possible the saying: it both allows us to articulate the saying and betrays its very meaning, subverts its very existence. Hence the need to undertake a detailed examination of the interrogation of temporality that facilitates Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said. My conviction is that such an interrogation is of central importance to everything Levinas has to say about ethics, to his rethinking of subjectivity, to his demand that we acknowledge the founding role of the Other for the enterprise of philosophy, and to his insistence that to the extent that political agendas ignore the alterity of the Other they cannot avoid false, totalizing claims. It is well known that the distinction between the said and the saying is an organizing distinction for Levinas’s later philosophy. Yet merely to

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assert that there is a distinction between the saying and the said, and to assume that this distinction can be grasped conceptually as the difference between a verb and a noun, or that these terms simply designate separable aspects of language, is to misunderstand both the significance and the difficulty of the movement and functioning of language—and ultimately of philosophy itself—that interest Levinas. There is an essential and irreducible ambiguity that marks the passage from the saying to the said, and the reduction of what shows itself in the said to the signification of the saying. (See OB 43–45; AE 56–58.) The restlessness, the lack of fixity, the resistance of the saying to its assembly in the said, its inexhaustible divergence from the said, defies thematization. In this defiance we catch sight of the malleability of language, or of its ability to go further than the sedimented meanings into which it nevertheless inevitably settles. At the same time, the saying registers the failure of language to contain what it would express. The problem of naming and categorizing, and the underlying fragility of language, call for our urgent attention. To take seriously the peculiar status of the difference between the saying and the said—a difference that can be stated only at the expense of misrepresenting it—is also to see that if this is a distinction that organizes Levinas’s philosophy, the sense in which it can be understood as an organizing distinction must be carefully considered. In raising it to the level of a logical distinction we have already lost sight of the way in which the saying calls for the said out of the very same necessity whereby the saying refuses to be contained by it. Perhaps what should be said is not that this is an organizing distinction, but that it is one that governs by undoing itself: it is an impossible distinction, and it thereby functions not as an organizing thematic, but precisely as a disordering, disruptive force.5 If this is a distinction at all, it is not one that can be sustained by the conceptual resources of philosophy as we usually understand them: it is a distinction that disorganizes the facility with which philosophers have assumed that the will to know and the need to represent knowledge can be adequately treated on the basis of a model which celebrates the synchrony of the “I think” of transcendental apperception. Levinas sees the synthetic gathering into presence that is symptomatic of the Cartesian or Kantian ego extending to Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit, and even to Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct the privilege of the present.6

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Levinas wants not to repudiate the legitimate claims of intelligibility and rationality to provide the conditions of coherent discourse, but rather to show their derivative status. He seeks not to deny the validity of ontology, but to go beyond it. Thus he is compelled to use the resources of reason and the language of ontology not in order to invent another rationality or to create a new ontology, but to indicate the “hither side of the said,” from which the order of reason arises. If it is not a question of outlawing reason, or banishing ontology, neither is it a matter of leaving them entirely intact, unaltered. It is precisely the capacity of rationality to absorb alteration, to deviate from itself and then to recover itself, to recuperate its losses, to catch up with itself, that Levinas tries to capture—or to see as receding from the thought that would capture it. (See DR 103; DRE 89.) There is both the trembling, the oscillation, the vacillation, the breakup, rupture, or interruption of consciousness—and its ability to tie together again each hiatus in order to produce a continuous narrative out of the diachronic, to impose simultaneity upon different times, to join together the tears that interrupt the fabric of being.

Not Yet Time: The Paradox of the Instant Levinas first articulates his departure from a Heideggerian conception of temporality in terms of a corrective to what he sees as an overly abstract account which he thinks overlooks the substantiality and materiality of the subject. He invests the present with the significance of hypostasis, and it is in the drama of the instant that he locates the emergence of the subject from the anonymous background of the il y a (there is). The instant thus has a meaning that is separable from, and irreducible to, a merely negative meaning: it is not simply a limit or boundary of a present that gets canceled as soon as it is born because of the inexorable passing of time. (See EE 74; DE 127.) While Levinas does not—indeed cannot—deny the evanescence, flow, or passing of time, neither does he want to ascribe to this evanescence only a lack. To do so would be to concede that the only meaning an instant can have is what it inherits from time. Even in its attempt to move beyond a “trivial” reduction of the instant to time, the tradition has not managed to completely displace its tendency to envisage the instant as nothing more than a part of time.

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“Philosophy,” says Levinas in Existence and Existents, “throughout its history has understood the instant by starting with time” (EE 74; DE 126–27). To accept that its meaning is merely a continuation of the past, or can be given only in and by the fullness of time, is to endorse the idea of reality or significance as full positivity, or to subordinate the meaning of the present to a projected future—a fault that Levinas attributes not only to the history of philosophy, but also to Heidegger. Levinas says that if the instant is taken “as arising in the upsurge toward the future, which already bends under the weight of the past . . . [it] gets its significance from the dialectic of time; it does not have a dialectic of its own. It has no ontological function other than that which . . . is given to time” (EE 74; DE 127). Again, in “Time and the Other,” Levinas says: “The material character of the present does not result from the fact that the past weighs upon it or that it is anxious about its future” (TO 56; TA 36). He is clearly targeting Heidegger’s notion of a finite Dasein, whose anxiety provides it with a way of anticipating its own death. In contrast, for Levinas, the materiality of the present “results from the present as present” (ibid.). “My being doubles with a having; I am encumbered by myself. And this is material existence” (TO 56; TA 37). In these early (1947) texts, “Time and the Other” and Existence and Existents, Levinas explains modern philosophy’s failure to appreciate the complexity of the instant by pointing to its attempt to avoid materialism, or “the reification of the spirit” (EE 97; DE 168). “One can say that modern philosophy has been little by little led to sacrifice for the sake of the spirituality of the subject its very subjectivity, that is, its substantiality” (ibid.). Levinas seeks to rectify this neglect of the substantiality of the subject, in which one hears strains of a critique of Hegel, by articulating the dynamism of the hypostasis, whereby a subject takes on or contracts existence. Levinas explores notions such as position, in which the subject is “here” and enjoys a relationship with its body as both an opening onto the world and a screen behind which the subject can withdraw, as in sleep. The body is understood not as an expression of the mind or soul, but as an event that occurs, a relationship that the subject has with itself as a material base, in the sense exhibited by Rodin’s sculptures, which “are never set on a conventional or abstract pedestal” but which realize an “event” in “their relationship with the base, in their position” (EE 72; DE 124).

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The “paradoxical” character of the instant is “like a rebound movement” (EE 76; DE 130–31), which consists of both the “mastery the existent exercises on existence” and “the weight of existence on the existent” (EE 77; DE 132). This dual structure is a “doubling up into being and having and succumbing under the burden of its having” (EE 29; DE 41), an ambiguity which Levinas sees reflected in the paradox of the subject as a free being that is already responsible. Levinas says, “This is the great paradox: a free being is already no longer free, because it is responsible for itself” (TO 55; TA 36). He expresses the same paradox of freedom repeatedly (e.g., EE 79; DE 135): The freedom of the present finds a limit in the responsibility for which it is the condition. This is the most profound paradox in the concept of freedom: its synthetic bond with its own negation. A free being alone is responsible, that is, already not free. A being capable of beginning in the present is alone encumbered with itself. The definitiveness which comes to pass in the present is not then initially connected with time; it is an intrinsic mark of the present.

Let me return for a moment to this paradox of freedom, and to the idea of the present as somehow occurring before, and outside, the structure of time.7 Both these ideas are central to Levinas’s philosophy, and they are implicated in one another. Our freedom already presupposes a responsibility, and while “it is a freedom with regard to the past and future, the present is an enchainment in relation to itself” (TO 56; TA 36). This enchainment, a being encumbered with oneself, somehow precedes time. Hypostasis is the moment in which a subject arises; it is the upsurge of the subject, and as such it is a moment of mastery, or virility (see TO 74; TA 64), but this mastery is neither pure nor uncomplicated: the subject is also burdened with itself, unable to escape itself, and subject to suffering. There is a subjection in effort that is not contingent to existence—beyond that brought by the accident or misfortune of slavery or servitude. Levinas says (EE 30–31; DE 43–44): If we find our suitcase too heavy, we can put it down. . . . If there is constraint and servitude in effort, it would seem that that constraint can only be external to it. . . . And yet, the instant of the effort contains something more; it reveals a subjection which compromises our freedom in another sense, and immediately. . . . In the humility of the man who toils bent over

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The Temporality of Saying his work there is surrender, forsaken[n]ess. Despite all its freedom effort reveals a condemnation; it is fatigue and suffering.

Levinas finds something irrevocable in the commitment and effort of labor, and he ties this to the taking up of “an instant as an inevitable present” (EE 34; DE 49). Thus it is that he uses the analysis of effort, and the pain of toiling in labor, to catch sight of a “sort of hesitation” or a “delay” that fatigue enables us to glimpse (EE 35–36; DE 51–52): If the present is thus constituted by the taking charge of the present, if the time-lag of fatigue creates the interval in which the event of the present can occur, and if this event is equivalent to the upsurge of an existent for which to be means to take up being, the existence of an existent is by essence an activity. An existent must be in act, even when it is inactive. This activity of inactivity is not a paradox; it is the act of positing oneself on the ground, it is rest inasmuch as rest is not a pure negation but the very tension of a position, the bringing about of a here. The fundamental activity of rest, foundation, conditioning, thus appears to be the very relationship with being, the upsurge of an existent into existence, a hypostasis.

The strategic role that the notion of hypostasis plays in Levinas’s early philosophy is to provide an account of the event whereby an existent takes on existence. The ambiguity inherent in this event consists in the fact that while the taking on of existence occurs as a mastering of existence by the existent, it also involves a submission to the inevitability of existing. The ineradicable fact of being is brought to the fore in Levinas’s analysis of the il y a, in which one cannot escape existence. With the notion of hypostasis—and the associated notions of the present, position, the here, and the stance of an instant—Levinas reworks Heidegger’s ontological difference: the difference between Being and beings. The ambiguity Levinas catches sight of in the upsurge of the subject or the existent, in the emergence of the existent from existence, is the ambiguity marked by Dasein’s unique relation to the difference between Being (Sein) and a being (das Seiende); and the difficulty of catching sight of the event by which a subject takes up existing is the difficulty of conceptualizing the difference between beings and Being without subsuming the latter by the former, or without reducing Being to entities. Levinas will later recast this difficulty in terms of the saying and the said. In dramatizing the event by which a subject takes up existence, in drawing out the meaning of “hypostasis,” “instant,” “here,” and “posi-

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tion,” Levinas wants to push Heidegger’s ontological difference further, so that it is not only a distinction but an event of separation.8 Levinas is critical of the role that Dasein plays for Heidegger insofar as he thinks that it obscures the fact that there can be a sense of an “existing without existents” (TO 45; TA 24). For Heidegger, “Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone” (TO 45; TA 24). Levinas concedes that Heidegger might acknowledge the “idea of an existing that occurs without us, without a subject” (TO 45; TA 25) with his notion of Geworfenheit (“thrownness”), but sees this as the exception to the rule. Levinas thinks Heidegger’s philosophy ultimately decides in favor of the rhetoric set in motion by Jemeinigkeit (“mineness”) and against that of Geworfenheit. This proves decisive for Levinas’s departure from what he sees as Heidegger’s solipsistic Dasein. The implications of Levinas’s suggestion that Heidegger cannot admit “an existing without existents” are expressed in temporal terms when Levinas says, “The here that belongs to consciousness, the place of its sleep and of its escape into itself, is radically different from the Da involved in Heidegger’s Dasein. The latter already implies the world. The here we are starting with, the here of position, precedes every act of understanding, every horizon and all time” (EE 71; DE 121– 22). The idea that the here of position is prior to time indicates a central motif of Levinas’s view of time. The suggestion that there is some sense to a before-time, or a pretemporal sensibility, is reiterated in Levinas’s claim that “Positing hypostasis as a present is still not to introduce time into being” (TO 52; TA 32). This idea is pursued throughout Levinas’s work, and it is the germ of the notion that Levinas will later call the trace.9 As such, it also anticipates the structural tension and ambiguity that he will explore under the heading of the saying and the said. If in his early work Levinas speaks of a time that is not yet time, and if this pretemporal moment is envisaged as bound up with the continual birth of the subject, considered as a solitary being, Levinas will problematize in his later work both the inherent contradiction of positing a time that is prior to time and the idea that the subject can be construed in abstraction from the other. He will do so by developing the notions of diachrony and substitution. In Levinas’s early work time cannot arise in an isolated subject: “It

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seems impossible to speak of time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration” (TO 77; TA 64). Since we are never empirically alone in the world, since there are always others, and since the passage of time is inexorable, the sense in which it would be possible to speak of a “here” that precedes time, or a hypostasis that is present in a way that “time resists” (EE 73; DE 125), would have to be specified more clearly. Levinas solves the problem—or at least recasts it—by proposing in his later work the risks that I commit just by existing, in terms of the impact my existence can have on the other. “Here is the risk of occupying— from the Da of my Dasein—the place of an Other and, thus, in the concrete, of exiling him, dooming him to a miserable condition in some “third” or “fourth” world, bringing him death” (DR 110; DRE 92). Levinas now finds wanting the Da- of Heidegger’s Dasein, but not because it is unable to capture the sense in which the here of position precedes time and the world, as we saw he did in 1947. Now it is the risk of occupying the place of an Other that concerns him. The difference between Levinas’s early objection to the role Heidegger assigns to Dasein and his later objection is indicative of a wider deviation of his thinking that can be specified with regard to the development of his analysis of time. In his early work, Levinas criticizes Heidegger for not acknowledging the specificity of the instant in its materiality, and his critique rests upon reworking the ontological difference by providing it with the concretion of hypostasis. Levinas would thereby draw back the abstraction achieved by Heideggerian ecstasis to the immediacy of a concrete present. Thus, the Heideggerian analysis of being-toward-death, according to the early Levinas, collapses the event by which the subject is continually renewed into an ecstasis governed by anticipatory resoluteness, understood as the encroachment of the future on the present. By dramatizing the hypostatization of the subject, Levinas seeks to elaborate the dynamic in which the subject becomes an existent. It is no accident that in doing so Levinas is able to provide an account of the concrete materiality of the subject that Heidegger could never accommodate. In Levinas’s later analysis the event by which the subject takes up existence can no longer be articulated as separation. It can no longer be thought independently of the ethical call by which the other commands the subject. The emphasis of Levinas’s critique of Heidegger thus changes, such that the identity of the subject is produced by a movement

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that cannot be thought without the other. Even the substantiality of the subject is discovered as bound up with, and implicated by, the interrogation of the other. In effect, Levinas’s early critique of Heidegger’s ecstatic view of temporality—a view that Levinas supplemented by providing an account of hypostasis by which the subject took on subjectivity in a substantive sense—is now replaced by a critique that focuses not so much on the alleged abstraction of Heideggerian ecstasis and the subject’s consequent lack of concretion, but rather on the failure of a subject defined by ecstasis to allow for radical alterity. In Heidegger the placeholder of alterity is death. Levinas provides an account of death as radically other—as irrecuperable—and, at the same time, he revises his critique of Heidegger. The problem is no longer that an overly abstract account of the subject neglects its materiality, which suggests that the substantiality of the subject is dissipated through the movement of ecstasis, but rather that ecstasis remains a projective movement originating from a subject capable of having ideas, and, as such, it compromises absolute alterity. Levinas thus reads Heidegger’s philosophy as repeating, at some level, the epistemological trope of rendering the world knowable, thereby eradicating any possibility of radical alterity. Heidegger’s inability to articulate a sufficiently radical notion of ecstasis is rendered as his allegiance to the immanence of intentionality, which in turn privileges the now. (See DR 98–99; DRE 86.) At a schematic level, it is almost as if Levinas has reversed his earlier position. Instead of emphasizing the present, the concretion of which he thinks Heidegger’s ecstatic account of temporality dissipates, Levinas argues that Heidegger never manages to insert sufficient distance between himself and the metaphysical discourse about time that privileges the now. Revealed in the nuances with which Levinas invests his early account of the instant as pretemporal, however, is an underlying structural similarity between the status of the present as somehow outside and resistant to time proper and the claim that the other always already has on me. Levinas’s early response to Heidegger issues in an account of the concrete subject, while his later critique is concerned with how the subject’s very identity is always already bound up with the demand the other has made on me, prior to a time that could be calculated in terms of my personal history—in terms of acts I have done or left undone. My place

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in the sun is, after the fact, no longer constituted by the simplicity of satisfying intentions that originate from me, but is put in question by a contestation that reaches farther than the chronology that could be related as a narrative, and that would reduce the world to a cognition, production, or aspiration of an independent subject. In challenging Heidegger’s ecstatico-horizonal analysis of temporality, Levinas also offers an account of death that departs significantly from Heidegger’s conception of being-toward-death and his central notion of anticipatory resoluteness. Any serious attempt to understand the differences between the accounts of time provided by Levinas and Heidegger will also have to come to terms with their divergent conceptions of death. Before turning to this task, let me offer a brief summary of the trajectory of Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian temporality. Initially, Levinas suggests that Heidegger’s account of temporality tends to totalize the ecstases, collapsing the past and the future into the present. In 1947, as we have seen, Levinas argues that there is a specific dynamic of the instant that Heidegger, together with the rest of the tradition, has ignored, reducing the dialectic of the instant to that of time. In 1961, by emphasizing fecundity in Totality and Infinity, Levinas points to a future that cannot be synchronized with Heidegger’s notion of anticipatory resoluteness.10 As his reflections of time progress, and notably in Otherwise than Being (1974), Levinas will pay more attention to the past that was never present—an irrecusable past that signals a diachrony which is not captured by Heidegger’s tendency to posit the ecstases as a unity capable of recuperating the alterity of time.11 I have suggested that while Levinas’s emphases might be different throughout his corpus, his basic approach to time—one that can be effectively mapped by specifying his critique of Heidegger’s notion of temporality—is governed by the effort to depart from a tradition that retains as its central reference point a subject whose subjectivity consists primarily in coming to know the world. If, in his early work, Levinas specifies this problem in terms of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the subject into the ecstatic other, in the later work, he will pose the difficulty as Heidegger’s recourse to a Dasein that remains defined by the effort of reducing alterity to itself. While appreciating Heidegger’s challenge to the tradition, crediting him, in particular, with the recognition

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of the intrinsic and irreducible link between time and existence (or being), Levinas’s overall strategy in his reading of Heidegger is to identify him with the very tradition that Heidegger sought to go beyond. Levinas achieves his critique of Heidegger by maintaining two central and related theses: Heidegger remained bound to the metaphysics of presence despite his efforts to displace it, and Heidegger’s reworking of the subject under the rubric of the Dasein-analytic failed to overcome the epistemological bias of the Western tradition, in that it ultimately reiterates that tradition, albeit by radicalizing it. He continues to construe philosophy’s basic task as clarifying the relation of the ego to the world. We have seen that in his analyses of the instant and hypostasis, Levinas uncovers the notion of a time before time, a not-yet time. By 1982, in his essay “Diachrony and Representation,” Levinas has transposed his earlier insight into a language that is less concerned with the instant as separable from time, and more concerned with acknowledging a plurality of times. He thus recognizes another temporality that subtends and makes possible the time of consciousness. For Levinas, the “responsibility for the Other signifies an original and concrete temporality” (DR 104; DRE 89). How does this other temporality, a diachronic notion of temporality, depart from, and build upon, what Heidegger designates as original temporality? By original, or primordial, temporality Heidegger means to identify a structure which underlies and makes possible everyday temporality. Elaborating original temporality as the way in which Dasein experiences temporality, Heidegger’s concern is to show that what is ordinarily taken to be time is, in fact, a truncated distortion of the full ecstatic structure of temporality. This more original structure would then be foundational. Derrida has observed the difficulty of maintaining the distinction between a derivative, inauthentic, everyday understanding of time, and a fundamental, original, authentic conception. (See OG 63–67.) What is the status of Levinas’s other temporality in relation to such a problematic? Several further, related, questions can be posed. Can Levinas’s sense of time as diachrony—rather than the synchronic, totalizing, projective character of temporality that he maintains serves as a basis for Dasein’s understanding of itself—be usefully seen as a reworking of what Heidegger called authentic temporality, and, if so, does it succumb to the

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same problems as Heidegger’s attempt to provide an alternative account of temporality? Is Levinas exaggerating the totalizing character of Heidegger’s philosophy? Would it be possible to envision temporality in any other way than metaphysically? What precisely is the role of death for Heidegger, and in what ways does it determine the importance of solicitude? What exactly is the relationship between resoluteness and conscience in Heidegger’s analysis? How does Levinas’s critical assessment of Heidegger’s understanding of being-toward-death relate to his wider claim that Heidegger, despite his intentions, remains tied to the very privileging of the present that he identifies at the heart of Western philosophical attempts to unravel the enigma of time, and which he tried to go beyond? Is Levinas fair in his criticism of Heidegger’s conception of beingtoward-death? Does Heidegger marginalize the other in his philosophical analysis of death, or does Levinas’s critique of his position ignore important claims that Heidegger makes about the other, which should be given their due? Does Heidegger’s reconceptualization of time in fact fall prey to a privileging of the present? How far does Levinas’s own reworking of the problematic of time succeed in surpassing a naive attachment to a philosophy of presence? I will allow these questions to be organized by investigating Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s notion of death, and his related objections to Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s Zeitlichkeit—the term that Heidegger reserves for the specific way in which Dasein temporalizes itself. I will then consider some possible Heideggerian responses to this critique, and suggest that Levinas is able to avoid some of the pitfalls of Heidegger’s attempt to ground our everyday understanding of temporality in a more primordial conception of temporality. By thinking temporality in relation to Levinas’s distinction between the saying and the said, I propose that Levinas is able to avoid the trap to which Derrida thinks Heidegger falls prey, whereby an effort is made to displace the metaphysical account of temporality with another allegedly more adequate conception. This new account then becomes susceptible to the very metaphysical assumptions that it was intended to displace. One might say that Levinas’s interest lies more in displacing the priority of one’s own death by the death of the other, and in so doing he dislocates the logic of the same that, despite his efforts,

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Heidegger’s new account of temporality could not dislodge. To assess the validity of Levinas’s claims in relation to Heidegger I now turn to Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death, which is the cornerstone of his conception of temporality.

Heidegger on Death, Time, and Others In his 1987 lecture “Mourir pour . . .” Levinas quotes a passage in which Heidegger emphasizes the solitary nature of death as the freeing up of Dasein’s possibilities (see BT 294; SZ 250):12 With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-forBeing. This is a possibility in which the issue is nothing less than Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. Its death is the possibility of no-longer being-able-tobe-there. If Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it has been fully assigned to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone.

Levinas comments that for Heidegger, “solicitude is certainly assured, but conditioned by being-in-the-world” (MP 227). Heidegger, he goes on, recognizes the “approach of the other,” but only by starting with “work in the world, without recognizing faces, without the death of the other signifying to being-there”—beyond the administrations to the other in funeral and memorial ceremonies (MP 227). Could one marshal evidence to the contrary? Is solicitude conditioned by being-in-the-world, and if so, what limitations would this place on the approach of the other? What would the conditioning of solicitude by being-in-the-world amount to? Does Heidegger reduce to the ceremonial the effects of the death of the other on survivors? There are passages in Being and Time that suggest that solicitude in fact conditions Dasein’s existence. Do such claims run contrary to Levinas’s reading? Heidegger says, for example (BT 308; SZ 263): all Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue. Dasein can be authentically itself only if it makes this possible for itself of its own accord. But if concern and solicitude fail us, this does not signify at all that these ways of Dasein have been cut off from its authentically Being-its-Self. As structures essential to Dasein’s constitution, these have a

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The Temporality of Saying share in conditioning the possibility of any existence whatsoever. Dasein is authentically itself only to the extent that, as concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with, it projects itself upon its ownmost potentialityfor-Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self.

The question remains, however: How, exactly, does solicitude condition “the possibility of any existence whatever”? What could such a conditioning mean, and how might it be played out? Levinas’s question remains intact insofar as Heidegger posits solicitude without providing any concrete clues as to how it might have practical significance or structural consequences. How does solicitude directly affect Dasein’s existence? How does it shape, alter, or impact the overriding priority that Heidegger maintains for Dasein’s own self-understanding of itself in its potentiality for being, an understanding that is ultimately based on one’s own relation to one’s own death?13 Despite the claims Heidegger makes about the existential status of solicitude—claims which indicate that being-with-others is equiprimordial with Dasein’s being itself, as part of what it means to exist in the world—he also expresses the relation between Dasein and others in terms which tend to assume the priority of Dasein. Even when Heidegger seems to be taking pains to include others within the scope of his analyses, his means of expression often lead him to articulate his point in a way that relies upon a tension, or exploits the ambiguity of Dasein’s possible modes of existence. He says, for example: “As the non-relational possibility, death individualizes—but only in such a manner that, as the possibility which is not be outstripped, it makes Dasein, as Being-with [Mitsein], have some understanding of the potentiality-for-Being-of-others” (BT 309; SZ 264). Here Heidegger asserts the ineradicable priority of death as that which individualizes Dasein, but also reminds us that Dasein “as Mitsein” has some understanding of others’ potentiality-for-being. How is this relationship to be conceived? Is Dasein always already with others? What would it mean to claim that Dasein is “always already” with others, given that death is accorded a privileged relation in Dasein’s understanding of its own temporality? Could the as-structure, understood existentially, contain a reference to what Levinas will refer to as a past that was never present? Would this mean that there is some sense in which Levinas’s insistence that the other always precedes me is implicit in Heidegger’s analysis?14 Certainly

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there are moments at which Heidegger seems to glimpse the sense in which Dasein can come into view as a whole only on the basis of its relations with others as having always preceded it. But, equally, there are moments when Heidegger stresses, above all, the fundamental priority of Dasein in being-toward-death, to the exclusion of all relations with others, as in the following summary passage (Being and Time, Division 2, Chapter 1, Section 53 [BT 311; SZ 266]): We may now summarize our characterization of authentic Being-towardsdeath as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude out of being itself, rather in an impassioned freedom towards death—a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the “they,” and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.

Dasein’s isolation from the they, and its lack of dependence on others, seem to be the hallmark of authenticity as Heidegger describes it here. This does not prevent Dasein from being solicitous to others, although the fact that Heidegger neglects to mention such a possibility in his summation of Section 53 might in itself be taken as indicative of its relative lack of importance. He does, however, stipulate that Dasein can become the “‘conscience’ of others” in Section 59, at which point “resoluteness” bears the interpretive burden of such a possibility. (See BT 344; SZ 298.) In order to assess what it might mean for Dasein to become the conscience of others when resolute, it is worth recalling exactly how Heidegger defines the concept of resoluteness (Entschlossensheit), which plays such a central and organizing role not only in relation to conscience, but also in Heidegger’s temporal analysis. In fact, the passage in which Heidegger explains what he designates as resoluteness appeals to a complex set of relations—relations that will be recast in Section 68, Heidegger’s temporal reinterpretation of the structural items of care. Here is the passage (BT 343; SZ 297–98): The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus constituted by anxiety as state-of-mind, by understanding as a projection of oneself upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, and by discourse as reticence. This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in Dasein itself by its conscience—this reticent self-projection upon one’s ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety—we call “resoluteness.”

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Heidegger names here three of the four existentialia: state-of-mind, understanding, and discourse; the fourth one is falling.15 In Section 68, in effect, Heidegger correlates three of the four existentialia (state-of-mind, understanding, falling) with the three ecstases (future, present, past), which leaves discourse to correspond to the temporal unity of all three ecstases. Understanding will be reinterpreted as futural (see Section 68a); state-of-mind as thrown will be interpreted (see Section 68b) as temporalizing itself primarily in having-been (Gewesenheit), while the temporality of falling (Verfallen) will find its existential meaning in the present (see Section 68c). Within the analyses of each ecstasis, Heidegger reserves a particular term to describe the specific modes (inauthentic or authentic) of the past, present, and future. The term that he reserves as the authentic future of having-been is the “future of resoluteness” (Zukunft der Entschlossenheit).16 Heidegger has prepared for such an understanding of resoluteness. An exhaustive treatment of the steps he takes to arrive at such an understanding is beyond the scope of this analysis, but one key passage occurs in Section 65. It is worth drawing attention to this formulation, because it makes clear what a crucial role resoluteness plays in structuring the way in which ecstatic temporality functions as a unity in which all the ecstases are implicated in each other. Heidegger says (BT 374; SZ 326): Only as the Present [Gegenwart] in the sense of making present can resoluteness be what it is: namely, letting itself be encountered undisguisedly by that which it seizes upon in taking action. Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the Situation by making present. The character of “having been” arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which “has been” (or better which “is in the process of having been”) releases itself from the Present. This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as “temporality” [Zeitlichkeit].

Resoluteness is, then, “a distinctive mode of Dasein’s disclosedness” (BT 343; SZ 297). More specifically, since disclosedness has been interpreted existentially as the “primordial truth,” Heidegger goes on to say: “In resoluteness we have now arrived at the truth of Dasein, which is most primordial because it is authentic. Whenever a ‘there’ is disclosed, its whole Being-in-the-world—that is to say, the world, Being-in, and the

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Self which, as an ‘I am’ this entity is—is disclosed with equal primordiality” (BT 343; SZ 297). The unity of the ecstases governs Heidegger’s view of temporality. Insofar as thrownness is projected onto a future which is granted by resolutely anticipating one’s own death, or by making it present, one might want to grant Levinas’s suggestion that the possibilities that Heidegger opens up with his notion of Geworfenheit are ultimately closed down and subordinated to Jemeinigkeit. The implications of this subordination would be to reinstate Dasein’s self-understanding as the ultimate movement of the Dasein-analytic, thereby reducing even the alterity of death to a moment of this self-understanding. In this way, Levinas’s reading of Heidegger as capitulating to the metaphysics of presence he tried so hard to avoid might be vindicated—but not without acknowledging that there is a trace of the other in the as-structure so fundamental to the rhetoric of Being and Time. Dasein would individualize itself as always already including within itself the possibilities of solicitude. The question still remains as to what these possibilities would amount to, and to what extent they could remain dormant and unrealized. What possibilities would remain unexplored by Dasein’s reticent resoluteness, and what commitments or denials could be facilitated by according priority to resoluteness, and by understanding resoluteness as reticence? These are questions I take up, with reference to Derrida, in Chapter 6. Bearing in mind the indeterminacy of the role that others retain for Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, we can turn back to Heidegger’s statement that Dasein, when resolute, can become the conscience of others. Let me recall the context in which he makes the claim that Dasein can be the conscience of others (BT 344–45; SZ 298): authentic disclosedness modifies with equal primordiality both the way in which the ‘world’ is discovered (and this is founded upon that disclosedness) and the way in which the Dasein-with of others is disclosed. The ‘world’ which is ready-to-hand does not become another one ‘in its content,’ nor does the circle of Others get exchanged for a new one; but both one’s Being towards the ready-to-hand understandingly and concernfully, and one’s solicitous Being with Others, are now given a definite character in terms of their ownmost potentiality-for-Being-their-Selves. . . .

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The Temporality of Saying Resoluteness brings the Self right into its current concernful Beingalongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being with Others. . . . When Dasein is resolute, it can become the ‘conscience’ of Others. Only by authentically Being-their-Selves in resoluteness can people authentically be with one another—not by ambiguous and jealous stipulations and talkative fraternizing in the “they” and in what “they” want to undertake.

It is noteworthy that even at the moment when Heidegger is most responsive to the idea of solicitude, his allegiance to this idea is still mediated by the insistence that Dasein must first be itself. It is precisely the impossibility of merely being oneself—the necessary complication that freedom is always burdened with responsibility—that Levinas seeks to draw out.

Politics The problematic of time is at the heart of much contemporary discourse. We have become accustomed to hearing the phrase “metaphysics of presence” in discussions of Heidegger or Derrida, and to associating with this catch-phrase ideas which are apparently outmoded. These ideas include assumptions about the centrality of the subject as a mastering, controlling, virile author of its own meaning; about the value and integrity of the unity and coherence of totalizing systems; about the desirability or viability of envisaging our place and function in the world in terms of a model that posits human beings as rational agents, capable of formulating teleological projects whose realization depends upon envisaging their creators as conscious and discrete centers of power. Politics would then be a matter of achieving agreement among a collectivity on the basis of communication, and by means of recognition involving give-and-take, and taking for granted mutually beneficial and shared communal goals. Reason is thereby assumed to be unassailable, and the quest of the Enlightenment continues unabashed. A concept of time informs the view that depends on maintaining the conscious, rational, dominating subject at the center of its account, and envisages the world as so many objects to be organized and orchestrated into a coherent plan, by means of a collectivity of subjects who must find

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some way of ensuring rational agreement among themselves, and thus promising justice for all. Whatever the specific values a particular community might endorse, and however the concept of a shared, rationally agreed-upon goal is understood (whether as happiness, or as some collective good), in order to reach the desired goal that a community more or less rationally agrees upon, a future is posited. Time would here be thought by reference to a present that presides over a future and a past: the achievement of the desired goal depends upon the effective cooperation of a multiplicity of subjects in a present. This present inherits a history that can inform and shape it, but the collectivity of subjects who are assumed to be essentially rational, and to share the same goals, can also exert power over the institutions that constitute the legacy of this past. The model of the subject as an active and controlling center capable of exerting an organizing power and force on the world accords to the present a certain privilege and envisages the future as holding nothing radically new. The future will be shaped according to the prevailing will that imposes order by means of achieving a set of agreed-upon ends in the present. The subjects’ understanding of the present will be informed by a reflective relationship to the past, and the community will be construed as a group capable of developing a more or less adequate selfconsciousness—of taking control of its past and future from the vantage point of the present, and with the hindsight of past generations, and the insight of presumed utopian models. While this characterization of subjective agency, rationality, and coherence, with its associated notions of community and politics, remains at a high level of generality, it can nonetheless be seen that while particular ethical, social, and political theories might differ significantly from one another when it comes to endorsing certain strategies to achieve certain ends, a specific conception of knowledge is discernible across the spectrum. The subject is posited essentially as a being capable of knowing the world, including other subjects. Hope for a better future resides in ideals that are formulated on the basis of a knowing subject, who is assumed to be capable in principle of adequate self-understanding, selfconsciousness, and self-representation. Not only is the knowing subject construed as fully able to grasp its own essence, to gather up its past, and to represent itself in a present in order to project its goals onto a future; it

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is also considered as fundamentally similar to other knowing subjects, who, as such, are assumed to be willing and able to combine with one another in order to achieve justice and fairness. A number of difficulties arise from embracing this idea of time— what might be called, following Levinas, the time of knowledge and representation—an idea of time dominated by the present, and understood by reference to a series of more or less identical subjects (at least insofar as they share a set of desirable goals, and understand themselves in relation to those common goals). Reservations about this model can be articulated by calling to mind the challenge psychoanalysis has posed to the idea that we are rational subjects in charge of the world, able to fully recuperate our histories in order to successfully organize our objects according to coherent ends. By insisting that desires cannot always be reined in, that the subject is essentially fragmented, and often driven by desires that are not necessarily identifiable as consciously defined goals, psychoanalysis questions the usefulness of a model which places the subject at the center of the world and construes it as a controlling being, successfully able to manipulate objects around it, and to subordinate its desires to rational ends in a way that satisfies its desires. Part of the psychoanalytic challenge consists of questioning the idea of time as dominated by a present—the moment in which the masterful and capable subject imposes its will on the world. To refer briefly to just one figure who has contributed to the discourse of psychoanalysis in a way that allows questions about the possibilities of political and ethical knowledge to come to the fore, Kristeva’s distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic provides an alternative way of thinking temporality. In a move that is structurally not dissimilar to the distinction Levinas articulates in terms of the saying and the said, Kristeva offers an account of the subject as the conjunction or intertwining of two processes, an account that questions the idea of time underlying modernist and Enlightenment notions of a rational and controlling, mastering center of agency. In place of a sequential, linear, projective teleological view of time, the pre-Oedipal rhythms of motility that are identified with the semiotic are posited retroactively, from the point of view of linguistic and sociocultural forms of coherence in and through which the subject identifies itself as a unifying center, drawing

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on norms that are articulated through symbolic processes. Thus, the subject is not posited as in control of itself from the start, but neither is it referred to some mechanism capable of completely transcending cultural norms, however this might be defined: biologically, psychologically, or determined in some other way that ultimately appeals to a physicalist conception of reality or a materialist conception of nature. From the point of view of the symbolically constituted subject, the semiotic operations of pre-Oedipal drives derive their meaning after the fact, from their interaction with the symbolic. As such, they are intracultural: that is, they come into being in a context that is always already cultural—a context that may exceed the grasp of a particular subject, but a context already marked by specific cultural norms. If time is understood as the time of consciousness—a time that gathers up the past into a present in order to represent it more or less adequately, a time that anticipates the future—the semiotic might be ascribed to a pretemporal realm: to a time before time, a time that is not yet time, or a level of meaning that is constructed only retrospectively by a subject who comes into being partly in and through this operation, but subsequently takes on the role of an agent who tries to negotiate its own destiny. Here the subject is not one who was always already at the center of its world, but one who has also succumbed, or submitted, to the material demands of motility, registered at the bodily or physical level of sensations, rhythms, one who is forever trying to catch up with its forgotten or lost past. Here we catch sight of a disorienting or disruptive force at the heart of what is nonetheless posited as a potentially controlling and unifying subject, and a site of meaningful action. The disjunction of the semiotic and the symbolic has some structural parallels to the excess that the saying effects in relation to the said. The saying both requires, and is dependent on, the said for its expression or recognition, and therefore also, in some sense, for its existence; yet by the same token, its meaning goes beyond what can be represented at the level of the said. Reminiscent of the way in which Kristeva’s semiotic chôra functions in relation to the symbolic, the said both brings the saying into existence, and as such is the condition for its possibility, while, at the same time, it undermines, subverts, and cancels it.17 Theme, logic, rationality, or the written word occurs as the said of language, but language is inspired by a saying, just

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as the semiotic infuses the symbolic with the register of the poetic or musical, or rhythm, which the symbolic both depends upon, and transforms into communicable meaning. The difference between Kristeva’s semiotic level of meaning and Levinas’s saying is that the latter derives its inspiration not from the one who speaks but from the addressee.18 And the echo of the saying that reverberates in the said, for Levinas, is unequivocally ethical. How far is the vacillation from the saying to the said, and back to the saying, different from a poststructuralist stance that posits reason as nothing but the privileged site from which those with the power to protect it, as representative of themselves, distance themselves from reason’s other—that is, from desire, corporeality, emotions, instinct? One of the contributions of so-called poststructuralist thinking is to have shown that reason depends for its articulation and delineation upon social and contingent forces that not only should be constrained by reason but which also help to constitute reason. By focusing on the temporal discourse that subtends Levinas’s notion of the saying and the said, I have tried to draw out the implications of this distinction that is not a distinction. In “Diachrony and Representation” Levinas poses the question “Is language only reasonable in its said[dit]? . . . Is it not reasonable in the sociality of saying[dire] . . . in responsibility with regard to the Other . . . through the nonpresence . . . of the interlocutor who thus contrasts strongly with the presence of things?” (DR 103; DRE 89). Let me quote a final passage from the same essay, in which Levinas reiterates his aversion to the use to which Heidegger puts Jemeinigkeit (DR 115– 16; DRE 96):19 In the finitude of time the “being-toward-death” of Being and Time sketches out—despite all the renewals of received philosophy that this brilliant book brings—the meaningful remains enclosed within the immanence of the Jemeinigkeit of the Dasein that has to be and that thus—in spite of the denunciation of being as presence—still belongs to a philosophy of presence. Does not responsibility for the Other’s death—the fear for the Other that no longer enters into the Heideggerian phenomenology of state-of-mind, Befindlichkeit—consist in understanding, in the finite being of the mortal ego starting from the Other’s face, the meaning of a future beyond what happens to me, beyond what, for an ego, is to-come? One would thus not have gone to the end of thought and meaningfulness in dying. The meaningful continues beyond my death.

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In pointing to meaning beyond death, Levinas evokes the saying in the said. In criticizing Heidegger for elevating the discourse of Jemeinigkeit over that of Geworfenheit, Levinas asserts a future that cannot in principle be anticipated by a present, but the significance of such a future is derivative of an ethical commitment to the other that is always already past. Does this mean that even the future that Levinas proposes as beyond my death is already circumscribed by history? Or does it mean that a future politics can renew itself by returning to an ethical commitment to the other from which it must of necessity deviate? These questions take on a particular urgency for me in the light of the sterility and revisionism of commentators on Heidegger who have sought to apologize for Heidegger’s gross and unforgivable political misjudgments. Does Levinas—who refuses to allow his abhorrence of Heidegger’s Nazism to negate the greatness of Heidegger’s philosophy—teach us something about how to read Heidegger responsibly, without losing sight of the need for politics to remain ethical? Or does Levinas’s own tendency to support Zionism alert us to a certain extremism that might be seen as a reactive politics, instigated by the Holocaust, that is in a deep sense continuous with Nazism? Will we allow the same kind of obfuscation of Heidegger’s politics that has plagued Heideggerian commentators for so long to suppress legitimate questions about the political implications of Levinas’s philosophy? Is Levinas scholarship already showing signs of a romanticized appropriation of the Judaic aspects of his thinking that lends itself too easily to partisan political agendas? Can Levinas’s philosophy be read in a way that remains responsible to the priority he accords to ethics, without either erasing or distorting his own political commitments, or being afraid to diverge from them? Levinas calls politics the “art of foreseeing war and winning it by every means” (TI 21; TeI ix). As such, politics is strictly opposed to morality, which the “state of war suspends” (ibid.). Levinas’s opposition to war is expressed in terms of his opposition to totality: “The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy” (ibid.). In this context, Levinas tells us, “violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will

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destroy every possibility for action” (ibid.). It is worth pausing to note that Levinas is thinking not only of the victims of war, but also of the perpetrators—or rather he thinks of both those upon whom war is declared and those who declare it as victims, for he says: “Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same” (ibid.). We might have expected Levinas to make the opposite claim—that war destroys the alterity of the other. Given that the themes of separation and transcendence that Levinas sets out to explore in Totality and Infinity (see TI 81; TeI 53) cannot be abstracted from one another, the destruction of the same also entails the destruction of the other. It is nonetheless significant that Levinas emphasizes at the beginning of Totality and Infinity that the violence of war destroys the identity of the same. Following up his claim that violence consists in interrupting the continuity of persons—by which he implicitly acknowledges the necessity of continuity and self-recognition—Levinas goes on to specify the violence of war in explicitly temporal terms, terms which also call up his opposition to Heidegger. He says: “Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from totality. The unicity of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to to bring forth its objective meaning. For the ultimate meaning alone counts; the last act alone changes beings into themselves” (TI 21–22; TeI x). Clearly Levinas has in mind Heidegger’s emphasis on Dasein’s futurity, and equally clearly, in my view, he also has in mind not only the objection he will specify against Heidegger’s notion of freedom as “an obedience to Being” (TI 45; TeI 16), but also Heidegger’s political commitments as a Nazi, when he says, “Individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves.” Against Heidegger, for whom, Levinas thinks—in a statement carefully worded to avoid endorsing the idea that Heidegger does in fact ultimately embrace historicism—“the thesis of the primacy of history constitutes an option,” one that sacrifices “interiority” (TI 57; TeI 28–29), Levinas appeals to eschatology (TI 23; TeI xi):20

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The eschatological, as the “beyond” of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility. Submitting history as a whole to judgment, exterior to the very wars that mark its end, it restores to each instant its full signification in that very instant: all the causes are ready to be heard. . . . The eschatological vision breaks with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak. It does not envisage the end of history within being understood as totality, but institutes a relation with the infinity of being which exceeds totality.

Wars totalize, and violence interrupts continuity. Eschatology endorses discontinuity inasmuch as it restores to each instant its due, but it also restores continuity, by emphasizing the importance of speaking. In language the relation of the I to the other is accomplished, but in order for the face-to-face relation to remain face-to-face, I must also remain I. The extent to which Levinas’s appeal to eschatology succeeds in indicating a new direction for thought that does not privilege war over peace will depend on how unproblematic his insistence on separating definitively the realm of politics from that of ethics proves to be. I will take up this question in the Conclusion, where I suggest that Levinas’s attempt to draw a rigorous distinction between the two realms needs to be brought into question.

chapter five

Giving Time and Death Levinas, Heidegger, and the Trauma of the Gift

I

n 1 9 3 2 e m m a n u e l l e v i n a s published a study entitled “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” which was to form the first part of a book on Heidegger.1 One has only to look at the introductory remarks of this essay to discover that its tone is unique among Levinas’s writings concerning Heidegger. Here we read: “Anyone who has studied philosophy cannot, when confronted by Heidegger’s work, fail to recognize how the originality and force of his achievements, stemming from genius, are combined with an attentive, painstaking, and close working-out of the argument—with that craftsmanship of the patient artisan in which phenomenologists take such pride” (MH 11; MO 395). Never again will Levinas be able to express such unreserved enthusiasm for Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy, although it remains the fundamental reference for him throughout his life’s work. In the 1949 abridged and edited version of the essay “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” Levinas omits altogether the effusive praise for Heidegger with which he opened the 1932 version, and alters the essay considerably.2 In effect, then, we have not one but two essays—one written prior to 1933, prior to Heidegger’s infamous Rectoral Address, and a considerably reworked version produced shortly after the end of World War II. A third significant point along the path of Levinas’s profound sojourn with Heidegger’s philosophy is marked by an essay that was the fruit of Levinas’s long years of meditation on the war, on philosophy, and, above all, on philosophy after Heidegger. In “Mourir pour . . . ,”

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(“Dying for . . .”), written in 1987, Levinas recalls his “youthful admiration” (MP 219) for Heidegger’s “genius” in the unforgettable year that he spent in Freiburg “almost half a century ago . . . when 1933 was not yet thinkable” (MP 220)—a phrase he also uses elsewhere (see EI 34). In these mature reflections Levinas still finds Heidegger’s thought “irresistible” (MP 219), still holds to the conviction that Heidegger’s philosophical intelligence ranks him among the greatest, but he can no longer allow these observations to go unqualified. He cannot forgo mentioning the “irreversible abomination” of National Socialism, “in which this brilliant man had in one fashion or another—this is of little import!— taken part” (MP 219); he does not fail to recall “all the horror which today has come to be associated with the name of Heidegger—and which has never come to be dissipated” (MP 220). Heidegger’s thinking, particularly his meditation on Being, continued to provoke Levinas’s admiration until the end of his life, “despite” or beyond the horror elicited by the abomination of National Socialism. It is from a certain “ambiguity” that Levinas will draw the inspiration for this late essay, dedicated to and entitled after Heidegger. The words making up its title, “Dying for . . . ,” are quoted from Heidegger’s Being and Time. In honor of Heidegger’s philosophy, these words are lifted from Heidegger’s magnum opus, appropriated, their meaning arrested. The arrest is marked by ellipses. Having been taken only to succumb to a new meaning, these two words are given back to Heidegger, altered, yet the same. Having undergone the alteration of Levinas’s meditations, they are offered, brought as an offering, an honoring of Heidegger—despite everything. A gift, one might say. One that eludes the economy of gift giving that would insist on giving back, returning, rendering account, reflecting, echoing, mimicking the same—a gift evading this economy of the same even as it knows itself caught by the very trap of which it is most vigilant. A gift, then, that is traumatized. Heidegger could not have hoped for a more careful reader than Levinas, as I will try to show. No one, I would venture to suggest, had understood and assimilated Heidegger’s critique of the traditional conception of time in the way that Levinas had already managed to do as early as 1932.3 In this 1932 essay on which I want to focus here, at least initially, Levinas does Heidegger more than justice. If a reader, new to Levinas’s philosophy, were to come across these

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two essays by Levinas, “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” written when the young Levinas was still unknown, and “Dying for . . . ,” written toward the end of Levinas’s lucid years, in 1987, when his philosophical originality had already started to give way to repetition and generalization, such a novice would describe Levinas as a devotee of Heidegger, thinking that nothing more need be added. My task in this chapter consists in reading these two essays together: one early and one late; one conceived before the Shoah (and revised after it), the other conceived after long years of reflection on it; one written in unconstrained youthful enthusiasm for Heidegger’s genius, the other with the hindsight of over half a century. The first essay was intended as part of a never to be completed book on Heidegger, the second presented at a conference in honor of the late Heidegger. Although stylistically the two essays, among the first and last of Levinas’s writings, framing his philosophical output, diverge significantly from one another—the first is detailed, didactic, and exegetical, while the second is more general, anecdotal, and meditative—they share an enthusiasm for Heidegger’s philosophy that sets them apart from the intervening works. To situate them in Levinas’s corpus as a whole is to find his early enthusiasm tempered, first by the enforced silence that marked Levinas’s years in captivity, and then by his sustained philosophical reflections in the wake of those years, reflections in which a challenge is issued not only to Heidegger but to the entire tradition. With the exception of one or two important essays, including the 1935 “On Evasion,” Levinas published very little in the later 1930’s and early 1940’s. His book on Heidegger, which was to have included “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” was abandoned, and the 1932 essay was distilled and incorporated instead (with some significant revisions to which I will return) into a 1949 collection of essays on Husserl and Heidegger. Two years before this collection appeared, two texts that revealed an entirely different attitude to Heidegger were published. Existence and Existents, Levinas tells us in the preface, was “begun before the war [and] continued and written down for the most part in captivity” (EE 1978). “Time and the Other,” based on lectures given in 1946–47, was also published in 1947. While the 1932 essay “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” is devoted to a wholly sympathetic and detailed analysis of Heidegger’s work, in 1947 Levinas’s own philosophical agenda is what guides his

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analysis. The tone of his comments about Heidegger after 1947 is respectful yet critical, the emphasis on marking what is important in Heidegger’s philosophy—what can be retained as a starting point—and, most insistently, on going beyond it. In one of the few publications that emerges from the silence in which the period 1933–45 is shrouded for the most part, Levinas provides a concise conceptual analysis of the thinking that informed the events of those years. In “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934) he gives an account of the disillusionment that led up to the misguided acceptance of racism that marks Nazism. While Heidegger’s name is not mentioned in the 1934 essay itself, in a 1990 letter which prefaces the English translation of the essay Levinas associates Heidegger’s fundamental ontology with the possibility of elemental evil that came to be embodied in National Socialism (RP 63). Liberalism, as Levinas sees it in this important 1934 essay, replaces the Christian idea of Redemption or “liberation through grace” with an appeal to the individual’s autonomy and reason. (See RP 66; QR 202). In both Christianity and modern liberalism Levinas identifies a tendency which he will often cite as a decisive hallmark of the Western tradition, from which he will rigorously distinguish his own philosophy: the primacy of freedom. This primary freedom carries with it as an inherent possibility the freedom of never being definitively committed to any ideal. One can always go back on one’s word, for one is free to choose differently. In the face of the skepticism Levinas sees as inscribed in the essence of liberal idealism as its logical extreme, there was a reactionary resorting to the “certainties” that materialism or racist particularism seemed to offer. Accepting the degenerate ideal which amounted to embracing an idea of a “society based on consanguinity” (RP 69; QR 206), Nazism exempted individuals from facing the uncertainty that their own freedom appeared to entail. Levinas says (RP 70; QR 207): Man no longer finds himself confronted by a world of ideas in which he can choose his own truth on the basis of a sovereign decision made by his free reason. He is already linked to a certain number of ideas, just as he is linked by birth to all those who are his blood. He can no longer play with the idea. . . . Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. . . . It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no.

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Looking at the rewritten version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” it is difficult not to see some of the changes Levinas made after the war— which, as we just saw, Levinas characterizes as a retreat from the skepticism that freedom harbors—as in part a response to it. It is difficult, that is, not to see some of the passages Levinas inserts into the new version of the essay as extending the ideas he had begun to work out in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism.” For example, Levinas alters a discussion of the relationship between implicit or preontological understanding and explicit or ontological understanding. The original statement reads: “The passage from implicit and inauthentic understanding to explicit and authentic understanding comprises the fundamental drama of human existence” (MH 16; MO 403). In the revised version, Levinas drops the word “fundamental” and appends the phrase “with its hopes and failures,” so that in 1949 the sentence reads: “The passage from the implicit and inauthentic understanding to explicit and authentic understanding comprises the drama of human existence, with its hopes and failures” (DEHH 57). He then inserts this new sentence: “To pass from the implicit comprehension of being to explicit comprehension, is to propose a task of mastery and domination at the heart of a naive familiarity with existence which would perhaps have leapt over the very security of this familiarity” (DEHH 57). Is it reading too much into this observation to see in it a thought that runs parallel to the suggestion Levinas develops in his 1934 essay about the disastrous retreat from skepticism that Nazism consists in? Is it going too far to recall the passage where Levinas describes the thought of the materialist? Here Levinas writes (RP 69; QR 206): Man’s essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage [enchaînment]. To be truly oneself . . . means becoming aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this chaining. . . . A society based on consanguinity immediately ensues from this concretization of spirit. And then, if race does not exist, one has to invent it!

Could Levinas’s concern about the mastery and domination entailed in the ontological clarification of preontological existence—the rendering explicit an understanding that was previously vague and implicit—could his fear of the insecurity that this might introduce into the familiarity of everyday existence amount to an admission that Heideg-

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ger’s ontology opened a path for the invention, in the context of Nazism, of race? Perhaps I am moving too quickly, as Levinas says in “Mourir pour . . .” when he affirms “as alternative to the severity of the authentic, the peace of the love of the neighbor” (MP 227). Let me step back, then, and move, if not more cautiously, more slowly. Not surprisingly, time is central to the early version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” but it is even more pronounced in the 1949 version, since Levinas eliminates not only the first laudatory paragraph, as we have seen, but also a preliminary discussion of the problem of knowledge, which, in the earlier version, he used to gain access to Heidegger’s philosophy. There he showed how Heidegger challenged the Neo-Kantian assumption that philosophy’s central concern was to establish criteria for the arena of knowledge, and to ask what constituted the legitimacy of such knowledge. Levinas points out the underlying reliance of this Neo-Kantian inquiry on a conception of the subject inherited from Descartes, which attributed a privileged place to subjectivity construed on the basis of the cogito. Such a construal formulates the relationship between subjects and objects in terms of a correspondence theory of knowledge, a theory that calls for some form of guarantee that the ideas of the thinking subject conform to the objects of the world. For Descartes, God becomes the guarantor of truth. The Cartesian notion of the subject, as a thinking substance, assumes the subject occupies a special place in the world by virtue of its capacity to reflect upon itself, its ability to look inward in order to discover within itself the conditions which enable it to represent objects to itself. Idealism thus finds a solution to the difficulty of how an immanent, thinking subject can connect to a transcendent, extended world, by virtue of the ideas that are already within the subject as thinking substance: there is no need for the subject to establish a connection, since the ideas are already there. All that needs to be done is to ensure that these ideas or thoughts are reliable; the subject need not bridge any gap between itself and the world after all—it already contains the world in some sense. This idea of an enclosed subject which “must search within its own interior for signs of its conformity with being” (MH 12; MO 397) is one that will become for Levinas an abiding point of reference. He does not want to replicate the enclosure and immanence of the idealist subject, which would reduce the world to itself; for in this model, there is no

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room for alterity, only a subject that has always already anticipated whatever is presented to it. Thus, by 1947 the crucial question for Levinas is no longer his 1932 Heideggerian reformulation of the problem of knowledge: “How does knowledge correspond to being?” or, as he also puts it there, “How does the subject take leave of itself to attain the object?” (MH 12; MO 396), but rather, in the words of Time and the Other, “What can the other’s relationship with a being, an existent be?” or “How can a being enter into relation with the other without allowing its very self to be crushed by the other?” (TO 77; TA 65). If the specifics of Levinas’s way of posing this question in 1947 are progressively refined as he reworks this basic problem “of the preservation of the ego in transcendence” (ibid.), the origins of his formulation are still visible. At issue is how the I can remain a subject in the face of the other, or how the subject can remain a subject without either absorbing the other or being absorbed by it. The problem is taken up in the language of separation when Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity (1961): “How could separated beings maintain any relation, even violence?” (TI 223: TeI 198). In Otherwise than Being (1974) the question remains, but it finds a new inflection as Levinas attempts to convey the passivity of obsession. He asks: “How in consciousness can there be an undergoing or a passion whose active source does not, in any way, occur in consciousness?” (OB 102; AE 129). At issue still in these later questions is an exteriority that resists any attempt of recuperation that the subject might make, whereby the other is rendered nothing more than a part of the I’s sphere of immanence. Alterity would thus be reduced to the thinking subject—to a cogito that is posited as having preceded any otherness, whose transcendence therefore would be merely an illusory projection of the self. Against the claims of idealism and its appeal to a privileged subjectivity, Levinas remains constant in his affirmation of the transcendence of the other, and in his insistence on the irreducibility of the other to the I. The fact that in 1949 Levinas dispenses with his 1932 prefatory observations concerning the correspondence theory of knowledge should not then be taken as an indication that he abandons his interest in recasting, after Heidegger, the relationship between subjects and objects, or between subjects and others. It does, however, have the effect of emphasizing the importance of time, which, as already noted, already plays a

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prominent role in 1932. Summarizing in a few lines the steps he had taken four pages or so to develop in 1932, Levinas moves straight to the way in which the problem of time is evaded (DEHH 53), having briefly established that the notion of the subject in modern philosophy maintains for itself a specificity which “affirms that the condition of its being is not a being in its turn” (DEHH 53.). What the subject of modern philosophy evades—and this formulation is reminiscent of Derrida’s question in “Ousia and Gramme¯”—is the temporality of the subject.4 By treating the subject as a thinking substance, marked off from extended substance only by its capacity to think, to reflect, either philosophy had placed the subject in the world of objective things, assigning it the same being and the same temporality as things in the world, treating Dasein as present-at-hand; or the assumption was made, however tacitly or uneasily, that the subject somehow transcended time, occupying a realm that could be thought only as extratemporal or eternal. Heidegger saw, as is well known, that in order to grasp Dasein’s specific way of being, a basic contrast must be established between the way in which objects in the world can be said to be present, and the way in which Dasein is present. Far from being a thinking substance—that is, a being on a par with other things in the extended world, marked out, however, by a capacity to think rather than by any extension—Dasein has a specific mode of temporalizing. Heidegger, says Levinas, “reserves the name of Vorhandenheit—‘presence’—for the being of [brute] inert things” (MH 17; MO 405; DEHH 58), while the term “existence”(Existenz) is reserved for the way in which Dasein is temporal. As a result of the specific mode of temporalizing that Dasein has—or rather, which Dasein is—a mode expressed by the verbal form of Dasein’s Being (Sein), which designates, says Levinas, that “man’s essence consists in existence” (MH 17; MO 405; DEHH 58), a fundamental redefinition of the philosophical subject takes place.5 Levinas says (MH 18; MO 408; DEHH 61):6 [for the first time], the finitude of human existence, of which philosophy has spoken since antiquity (without, by the way, ever having grasped it ontologically), turns out to be the foundation of the concept of the subject, such as we have known it since Descartes. Finitude will no longer be a simple de-

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Of course by 1961, Levinas will no longer affirm this basic Heideggerian thesis; in Totality and Infinity Levinas will take up infinity as the principle of the subject. Levinas embraces Descartes’s discovery of God’s infinite perfection in the Third Meditation as retroactively grounding the cogito in a way that confers independence on both God (the other) and the I (the same). The use that Levinas makes of this Cartesian trope is instructive both as a way of clarifying the sense in which time is bound up with the relationship the I maintains to the other, and as a means of distinguishing between Levinas’s philosophy as represented in Totality and Infinity and the language he uses in Otherwise than Being. “The present of the cogito,” says Levinas, “despite the support it discovers for itself after the fact in the absolute that transcends it, maintains itself all by itself—be it only for an instant, the space of a cogito” (TI 54; TeI 25). The fact that the cause of the cogito is discovered, after the fact, does not make the cogito into nothing. Levinas wants to “restor[e] to each instant its full signification” (TI 23; TeI xi) rather than follow the tradition of Western philosophy, in which he thinks “The unicity of each present is incessantly sacrificed to a future appealed to to bring forth its objective meaning” (TI 22; TeI x). By conferring on the ego the status of a subject, understood not primarily as an autonomous, rational, free subject but in terms of the response that the concrete I takes on before the other, the other alters the status of the ego—converting it from its egoistic tendencies to a subject that is for the other. To state this in another way we might say that whereas egoism is lived from moment to moment, as instantaneous enjoyment, the ethical relation to the other introduces time into the subject. Life is no longer lived as happiness, experienced as the satisfying fulfillment of needs, the rhythm of which is constituted by a series of needs that are met through labor and the expenditure of effort, structured as a series of lacks which gives way to instances of fulfillment. In place of the complacency brought by the happiness consisting of enjoying good soup, Desire— insatiable and infinite—comes to define the subject. In the upsurge of an instant, there arises a need which falls away in satisfaction, only to be

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followed by a new need, another instant: there is a lurching out of the self as effort, and a falling back on the self with the expenditure of effort. This is a fundamentally economic model. But the other produces a time that does not merely link one instant to another, as need is satiated and instants are extinguished. The other introduces a new dimension, a time that disrupts the economy of instants, that of the absolute past. The subject discovers itself as answerable to a past that has never been represented in a present, an archaic time that comes from an immemorial past. This ethical call does not dispense with instantaneous enjoyment: it intervenes in it, which means it occurs in its midst. Time comes to me from the other, in the midst of my concrete and egoistic enjoyment of life. While Levinas certainly wants to avoid any naive appeal to egoism (TI 25–6; TeI xiv), there is nonetheless, in Totality and Infinity, an acknowledgment of egoism (see TI 59; TeI 30). To understand the sense in which for Levinas the subject can both be founded by the idea of infinity and be egoist, we need to take account of the movement of “inversion,” by which the positing ego can be “preoccupied by another being” (TI 63; TeI 34). We need, in other words, to follow the sense in which for Levinas a retroactive grounding takes place, whereby concrete egoism (TI 38 and TeI 8; TI 54 and TeI 24) finds itself displaced by a responsibility for the other. It is “the ambiguity of Descartes’ first evidence, revealing the I and God in turn without merging them, revealing them as two distinct moments of evidence mutually founding one another” (TI 48; TeI 19) that provides Levinas with a model of separation. It is appropriate to specify at this point, albeit briefly, the difference in mode of exposition between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. As long as the egoism of the self is described in terms that are independent of its responsibility of the other—as the order of analyses in Totality and Infinity suggests—there is something misleading about the description. But if Levinas’s emphasis in Totality and Infinity of the two distinct orders—the chronological and the logical—is taken seriously, a different picture emerges, one that anticipates the insight that he will elaborate later in terms of the trace. Levinas’s understanding of these two distinct orders finds a source in his Cartesian-inspired insight that the cause of the “I think” is both “older than itself” and “still to come” (TI 54; TeI 25). Yet it is not a matter of the self’s being first of all perfectly

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content in its happiness, and only then—as if by some further development—being called into question by the other. Levinas says in Totality and Infinity, “that there be the very order of or distance of time . . . articulates the ontological separation between the metaphysician and the metaphysical” (TI 55; TeI 25). This is why the language of Otherwise than Being is more adequate to the position that Levinas wants to articulate: substitution describes the sense in which the subject cannot be conceived without already taking account of its responsibility for the other—except in bad conscience. Developing a temporal lexicon that privileges notions such as “lapse” and “diachrony,” Levinas puts into question a philosophical tradition that has tended to recuperate the irreducible alterity of time, insisting instead on the meaning of this retroactive grounding, this reversion of the I to the other. Levinas’s Cartesian reference is not, for all that, a return to preHeideggerian Cartesianism. He emphasizes the importance of the accusative in the “Here I am” but there is no sense in which his use of Descartes’s Third Meditation is consonant with the overall Cartesian intention of establishing an epistemological ground on which to build a reflective certainty about the truth of the world. To assert the primacy of the reflective mode of consciousness would also be to throw in one’s lot with the primacy of the theoretical attitude, to understand the subject primarily in terms of the “I think” of representation, to define the I by its capacity to unify, master, and control: to gather up the diversity of the world into adequate ideas and to imagine that the essence or meaning of what is thereby represented could be recuperated without loss—all assumptions that are very far from Levinas’s understanding of the subject in its diachrony with the other. For Levinas, “The original role of the psychism does not, in fact, consist in only reflecting being; it is already a way of being, resistance to the totality” (TI 54; TeI 24). In evidence here is the Heideggerian insistence on Dasein’s mode of being as already giving us access to an understanding of our place in the world. But in seeing the subject as founded by infinity, Levinas emphasizes the immediacy of the face-to-face (TI 52; TeI 23), the immediacy of my responsibility for the other (OB 157; AE 200)—not the immediacy of the positing subject, nor the implicit, vague, preontological understanding of Dasein’s average everydayness in the world. Neither the understanding nor the positing

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subject comes first: “in the ‘prehistory’ of the ego posited for itself speaks a responsibility” (OB 117: AE 150). Levinas articulates a notion of time as the relation with the Other. He says: “The relationship with the other is time” (DEL 57). Given that Levinas wants to preserve both the radical alterity of the other and the independence of the I in this relation that is a nonrelation, this relationship from which the other “absolves” itself (TI 50; TeI 21), he must find a way of articulating time that does not dissolve the immediacy of the face-to-face (TI 52; TeI 23) into a higher unity, or into a continuum of time. In “Diachrony and Representation” Levinas understands time as that which compromises neither the alterity of an immemorial and unrepresentable past nor the alterity of a future. The past cannot be adequately thought by reducing it to history, and the future cannot be anticipated by gathering it into presence. (See TO 102.) Levinas’s reflections on time are both grounded in Heidegger’s challenge to the tradition and critical of Heidegger for not entirely distancing himself from the assumptions of Western metaphysics. Situating himself in terms of the legacies of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas says: “if it was Husserl who opened up for me the radical possibilities of a phenomenological analysis of knowledge, it was Heidegger who first gave these possibilities a positive and concrete grounding in our everyday existence; Heidegger showed that the phenomenological search for eternal truths and essences ultimately originates in time, in our temporal and historical existence” (DEL 52). Levinas tries to take Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of presence further than Heidegger himself was able to: “while Heidegger heralds the end of the metaphysics of presence, he continues to think of Being as a coming-into-presence; he seems unable to break away from the hegemony of presence which he denounces” (DEL 56). Levinas neither reduces the past and the future to modalities of the present (as he thinks Husserl does) nor subordinates the specificity of each instant to Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality—which, while it admits alterity to some extent, Levinas thinks remains ultimately totalizing. (See DEL 62.) Heidegger’s ecstatico-horizonal analysis of temporality marks an advance over Husserl, according to Levinas, because Heidegger introduces “an element of alterity” by analyzing time in terms of “our an-

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guish before death,” thereby disclosing temporality as “an ecstatic beingtowards-death which releases us from the present into an ultimate horizon of possibles, rather than as a holding or seizing or retaining of the present” (DEL 62). Nonetheless Heidegger’s ecstatic analysis of temporality eclipses, in the final analysis, its own radicality, insofar as death promises to admit the alterity of temporality but capitulates to the privilege of Dasein as Jemeinigkeit. For Levinas it is not death that individuates Dasein, but the impossibility of evading my responsibility to the other. Dasein remains at the center of Heidegger’s analysis, while, in Levinas, the self is decentered in its response to the other. For Heidegger, Levinas says, “The ultimate and most authentic mission of existence or Dasein is to recollect (wiederholen) and totalize its temporal dispersal into past, present and future” (DEL 56). The problem with such a mission is that it obliterates alterity, and privileges the present, not by reinstating the specific meaning of the instant, but by precisely collapsing the present into the other temporal ecstases of past and future: “Dasein is its history to the extent that it can interpret and narrate its existence as a finite and contemporaneous story (histoire), a totalizing co-presence of past, present and future” (DEL 56). While many of the minor changes Levinas makes in the 1949 version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” are insignificant, some are symptomatic of the distance Levinas wants to insert between his own position and Heidegger’s. Levinas is no longer a disciple sitting at his master’s feet, but a philosopher whose admiration for Heidegger is still clear but whose horror in the face of Heidegger’s political commitments is equally clear. His rhetoric, whether conscious and deliberate or unconscious and involuntary, reflects this shift. Levinas adopts a more neutral terminology in the 1949 version—either by altogether missing out phrases that align him with Heidegger, or by replacing them with language that does not emphasize the continuity between Levinas as commentator and the Heideggerian position under investigation.7 At first sight, it is harder to make sense of Levinas’s decision to delete the following passage that deals with the everydayness of others (MH 25; MO 419): We have not been able to insist on the character of Dasein by virtue of which it understands other persons, by virtue of which it coexists. We make the

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point here to say that in “everyday life” this coexistence becomes equally commonplace; it is reduced to superficial social relations, which are entirely determined by handling in common [maniement en commun], other persons being understood as one understands oneself, in terms of things.

Given his propensity to claim that philosophers, including Heidegger, have failed to accord to others the priority that is their due, one might expect Levinas to elaborate, rather than cut, such a passage.8 What explains this? Must we simply assume that Levinas cut the passage because he was still in the process of working out exactly how to assess Heidegger’s account of Mitsein? Two further changes can be considered alongside Levinas’s decision to omit this discussion of everyday being with others—and this is not the only instance in which he cuts such discussions (see MH 26; MO 420; DEHH 71).9 Both changes involve terminological shifts that occur between the 1932 and 1949 versions. First, in 1932 Levinas says that “Heidegger defines th[e] possibility of existing by the term sollicitude (Sorge)” (MH 30; MO 428), but in the 1949 version he translates Sorge by souci. One might pass over this shift from translating “care” first as “sollicitude” and then as souci without comment, were it not for the fact that “care,” “concern,” and “solicitude” have such specific and rigorously delineated meanings for Heidegger— albeit they are etymologically linked with one another. In the light of the technical role that terms such as “care” (Sorge), “concern” (Besorgen) and “solicitude” (Fürsorge) have in Heidegger’s analyses, and their importance in determining the status of Dasein’s relations with others, this substitution takes on significance.10 Second, still more significant is Levinas’s translation of the Heideggerian phrase “being-ahead-of [or in-front-of] itself,” sich-vorweg, as l’être-au-devant-de-soi in 1932, but as l’être-au-delà-de-soi, “beingbeyond-itself,” in 1949. “Being-ahead-of-itself” plays a prominent role for Heidegger in Being and Time. The phrase “ahead-of-itself,” sichvorweg, indicates for Heidegger “the future as of a sort which would make it possible for Dasein to be such that its potentiality-for-Being is an issue” (BT 375; SZ 327). That is, it is the term designating the future, not yet differentiated into authentic or inauthentic. It is neither the authentic future of “anticipation” (Vorlaufen) nor the inauthentic future of “awaiting” (gewärtigen). (See BT 386; SZ 336–37) In Heidegger’s tem-

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poral reinterpretation of the structural items of care, the term “ahead-ofitself” is the basis for Dasein’s being-toward-death, as the undifferentiated future of the temporality of understanding. So when Levinas renders this being-ahead-of-itself as a way of Dasein’s being-beyond (audelà), this has crucial implications for Heidegger’s understanding of death. The significance of the term “beyond” (au-delà) for Levinas’s later philosophy is, of course, underscored in the title of Otherwise than Being or, Beyond Essence (Autrement qu’être ou Au-delà de l’essence). Taken together, the shift marked by these two series of substitutions and Levinas’s omission of any discussion of everyday relations with others suggest Levinas’s tendency to find an opening onto alterity in Heidegger not through his analyses of being-with as such, but rather through the temporality of being-toward-death. At one level this is hardly surprising, since all the analyses in Division 1 of Being and Time are subject to the temporal reinterpretation of Division 2. Heidegger says, “those structures of Dasein which we shall provisionally exhibit must be interpreted over again as modes of temporality” (BT 38; SZ 17). However, the difficulty of ascertaining exactly what impact this reinterpretation has on the earlier analyses, particularly the account of beingwith-others, should not be underestimated. What Levinas sees, when he omits in 1949 any reference to everyday being-with-others, is that the decisive passages for understanding Mitsein lie not in these early descriptions, but in the temporal reinterpretation of the understanding as futural, where being-with is relegated to inauthenticity, and where Dasein’s authentic anticipation of death occurs in an essentially solitary manner. Levinas is not prepared simply to dismiss Heidegger’s account of others as inauthentic; still in 1949 he is at pains to point out the crucial importance of Heidegger’s analyses of Dasein’s everydayness, even commenting that “the many pages devoted to it are of singular beauty, or rare analytical perfection” (MH 26; MO 420; DEHH 71). But neither is he convinced that being-with-others has any effective role in the authentic anticipation of being-toward-death. He thus revises the essay in a way that prepares for his own understanding of death as that which can admit alterity in “Dying for . . .” by writing the beyond into Dasein’s futural understanding, by altering au-devant to au-delà. If Levinas retains from Heidegger the ultimate importance of death even in his very late work, as signaled preeminently by the title “Dying

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for . . . ,” he alters the meaning attached to it. Death signifies for Heidegger Dasein’s standing before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-being (see MP 226; BT 294; SZ 250), and in this standing before itself “all its relations to any other Dasein have been undone” (BT 294; SZ 250). As we saw in Chapter 4, Levinas emphasizes this “dissolution of all relations with the Other” (MP 226), and this difference, above all, marks the discontinuity between Heidegger and Levinas. For Levinas, “contrary to the Heideggerian analysis, in death, there is not a dissolving of all relations to the other” (MP 228). There is a “beyond ontology” (MP 229) indicated in the relation to death; there is a preoccupation with the other, even, or perhaps especially, in death—that is, in the election of sacrifice for the other. Readers have often been disturbed by Levinas’s apparently cavalier critique of Heidegger. If one restricts oneself to isolated statements about Heidegger drawn from texts in which Levinas is concerned primarily to develop his own philosophy, it is easy to read Levinas’s sometimes sweeping gestures of dismissal as either too general and vague or as partial and superficial. My intention here is to provide a wider context for what might pass for off-the-cuff remarks to those unfamiliar with the trajectory of Levinas’s work, and to suggest that his critical remarks are, in fact, based on a sustained critique of Heidegger—a critique to which his objections to, and reworking of, Heideggerian temporality are crucially important. Levinas’s lesser-known essays, both early and late, such as “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” and “Mourir pour . . .,” show not only that Levinas was thoroughly familiar with the details and nuances of Heidegger’s philosophy, but also that his engagement with Heidegger was mediated by Heidegger’s Nazism and Levinas’s Judaism. Levinas’s statements about Heidegger could be seen as hasty or loose judgments only by those who fail to recognize, first, how profoundly influenced Levinas was by Heidegger’s position, as testified by the 1932 version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” and second, how much Levinas’s philosophy, after the early 1930’s, is shaped by his need to negotiate the early and decisive philosophical influence of Heidegger and the need to confront the fact of Heidegger’s Nazism. Against this background, Levinas wrestled to delineate his own philosophy. In light of this, the late essay “Mourir pour . . .” is all the more remarkable, since it provides a most well-considered and sympathetic rendering of Heidegger. Perhaps Levi-

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nas could not have written such an essay while Heidegger was still alive. Whatever the case, in this late 1987 essay we find Levinas acknowledging that “the original concreteness” of Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit “implies an I and a you” (MP 224). The statement reads as a concession when compared to Levinas’s earlier references to Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, which he points to as evidence rather of the distance between himself and Heidegger than of their proximity. (See TO 45; TA 24; EI 62.) We also find Levinas frankly admitting that Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s concern for being carries with it a “concern for the other man, the solicitude of the one for the other” (MP 225), whereas earlier Levinas has tended to represent Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein as affording no effective role for being-with-others. (See EE 94–95; DE 162.) Despite this generosity, in “Mourir pour . . .” we are presented with the essential, intractable problem that Levinas identifies in Heidegger’s philosophy: for Heidegger, authentic death severs relations between Dasein and its others, whereas, for Levinas, death can constitute this relation. And this is possible because, for Levinas, relations between others are fundamentally ethical, rather than fundamentally ontological. If Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is pared down to the most economic, the barest statement, in the title, “Dying for . . . ,” the title is also an occasion of generosity. If this title encapsulates the most basic objection that Levinas has made to Heidegger’s philosophy, it is also a title which names the ambiguity that centrally concerns Levinas. For the words, taken from Heidegger, are also returned to Heidegger, given back, and in the process of giving, they are rendered ambiguous, becoming other than what they were, undergoing an alteration. Here, in an essay that pays homage to Heidegger, and where Levinas is at pains to be as fair as he can be to Heidegger’s phenomenology—not to overwhelm it “by a discourse on the face” (MP 229)—these words are transformed. They begin as Heidegger’s words, and as such, they are in the service of Being. But in Levinas’s hands they undergo a transformation, as Levinas invokes them in the service of another meaning, one that he announces as the principal theme of the essay for which he appropriates Heidegger’s words as his title. These words, “Dying for . . . ,” now come to render the sense in which “the human permits . . . a going-beyond-being to take on meaning!” (MP 223). By establishing this equivocal, ambiguous meaning in the phrase

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“Dying for . . . ,” and by highlighting the ambiguity with ellipses—leaving its sense forever incomplete, unfinished, still to come—Levinas marks Heidegger’s philosophy both as his constant point of departure, and as a philosophy which must be gone beyond. Stopping Heidegger’s thinking in its tracks, putting it into question, arresting the movement by which Eigentlickeit (“authenticity”) “reconquers itself”—rescuing itself from the everyday world of the they—Levinas reads into Heidegger’s meditation on Sein an ambiguity that interrupts the authentic selfovercoming which would remain “interior to the everyday existence of the they” (MP 226). This ambiguity, we have seen, is rooted in the undifferentiated future, in the way in which Dasein is ahead-of-itself, before any decision is made for authenticity or inauthenticity, before the adumbration of the future into authenticity and inauthenticity. We have seen how in 1949 Levinas reinterprets Dasein’s ecstatic futural understanding of itself in terms of the beyond, the au-delà, and how in 1987 he insists on the ambiguity of Heidegger’s phrase “Dying for . . .” so that it becomes a question: Dying for whom? Dying for what? Prior to authenticity, which is cashed out in terms of a return of Dasein from the they-self to its own self, Levinas locates a rupture, a disruption of this return. The beyond of death marks a hiatus, in which a question is posed about the certainty with which one can still pronounce, after 1945, the difference between dying for others and dying for oneself. Prior to the solitude and courage of facing my death all alone, and prior to the everyday fallenness in which Dasein is caught up in the they, Levinas locates the beyond of death. Beyond dying for, in the space of the ellipses, inarticulate, lies Heidegger’s refusal to take dying for others as a legitimate route to an authentic understanding of death. In the absence of Levinas’s comments on everyday being-with-others in 1949, inarticulate, lies a question about how relevant such an account can remain in the absence of any analyses of what it might mean to be forced to die for others, to choose to die for others, or to lose the possibility of dying for oneself. In 1987, responding to an echo that is, says Levinas, older than the question of the meaning of Being, older than the Shoah, hearing in Being an echo that alters the privilege of authenticity, Levinas reads into Being an alteration. Altering Being’s essence, its way of being, the other comes to face me, as a presence that disturbs from beyond. The question

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of Being has been remembered to Heidegger by Levinas, remembered and altered, having become otherwise, given the question of the other, a gift from inside, given from Heidegger to Levinas, and from Levinas back to Heidegger, a gesture of return that evades the economy of the same even as it confirms it, as it gives a reading, in honor of Heidegger. A giving that gives otherwise, gives being to the other, gives time to death, a gift traumatized by history, an impossible gift. To philosophize, Levinas has taught us, is to reduce the other to the same, to being, but Levinas has also shown us that it is to discover, in being, the other.

chapter six

Impossible Possibility Thinking Ethics After Levinas with Rosenzweig and Heidegger in the Wake of the Shoah

I

n t h e p r e f a c e o f Totality and Infinity (1961) Levinas writes: “We were impressed by the opposition to the idea of totality in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, a work too often present in this book to be cited. But the presentation and the development of the notions employed owe everything to the phenomenological method” (TI 28; TeI xvi). Although it is Husserl, and not Heidegger, to whom Levinas refers in the comments directly following this twofold debt of acknowledgment, the Husserlian influence on Levinas is never innocent of Heidegger’s challenge to the founder of phenomenology. By considering the Heideggerian inflection of Levinas’s response to Rosenzweig, I not only want to reflect on the relation between two of the thinkers to have deeply influenced Levinas’s thought—thinkers whose influence produces a tension in Levinas’s philosophy—I also want to confront what it means to philosophize after the Shoah. In reconsidering the essay “Franz Rosenzweig: A Modern Jewish Thinker”—written by a Jewish philosopher who lived through the experience of forced labor in a prison camp during the war years, which many members of his family did not survive— it is far from irrelevant that Rosenzweig anticipated in an important sense the crisis of humanity that was to occur during the Shoah, and that Heidegger’s philosophy was to become implicated in that crisis. Neither is it irrelevant that Rosenzweig’s work was, explicitly and overtly, an affirmation, an interrogation of his Judaism, while Heidegger did not want his philosophy to be read through the lens of Christianity.

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Levinas’s philosophy has put into question the presuppositions that accord priority to the power of thought, to our ability to foresee what might happen, and to the principle according to which the other presents me with a duty, commanding me to act out of a perceived obligation. The metaphysical assumptions about archê (“principle,” “origin”) and telos (purpose, goal) informing our usual preconceptions of what it means to be ethical are uprooted by a careful reading of Levinas’s texts.1 The belief that a normative ethics can and should be elicited from philosophy is contested, and the simplicity of what it would mean to respond to Levinas’s philosophy is put into question. I want to think about what it means for Levinas to have raised the question of ethics in the context of his engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy, and after the Shoah. In doing so, I want to circumvent the conventional attitudes that one develops—which are perhaps only a series of defenses—in the face of disaster, evil, injustice. I want to resist sinking into pathos, although there is certainly plenty to provoke a pathetic—in the sense of emotional—response. What can be said that will neither trivialize the victims of the Shoah by provoking a misplaced empathy or a sympathetic horror, nor render merely pathetic—in the sense of contemptible, abhorrent, or unthinkable—the visions of the Nazis? There is a tendency for two extremes to neutralize the significance of the museums memorializing the Shoah and the meaning of narratives written by survivors: we cannot allow our capacity for thought to be satisfied either by transforming the Shoah into something manageable, taming it, relegating it to history, distancing ourselves from it through avoidance or ignorance; nor can we merely elevate it into an event that defies our categories for thinking, thereby placing it outside the scope of our inquiry and refusing its enormity. In neither case have we begun to accept the necessity of thinking the impossible. We have turned away from the responsibility of thinking impossibility. Is the Shoah a singular event, in a category of its own, or is it comparable to other events? To imagine that our responsibility is exhausted by asking such questions is to fail to raise the right ones. To compare the Shoah to other events is to reduce it to a mere event in history—one to be recounted in a narrative and sanitized in the telling, however graphic; one to be stacked up on the shelves of history, among the countless bound volumes, weighty tomes collecting dust. It is to reduce it to the

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records of the historiographer.2 But to treat it as if it were in a category of its own is to run the risk of rendering it unthinkable—as if the break that it represents with all previous events ruptures any continuity that one might try to establish with other atrocities (whether these remain future possibilities, or whether we cite events in Bosnia or Rwanda). It is to place it beyond the scope of thought and outside the purview of philosophy, to exempt ourselves from the responsibility of a thoughtful response. If there is a sense in which thought is suspended by what is unrepresentable, a void, a place that is not a place, a vortex that centers, and decenters, European history—indeed world history—one cannot bear witness to the Shoah by merely integrating it into a story about the development of a European sensibility. But neither can we retreat from the necessity of thinking the impossible. Geoffrey Hartman recently suggested that despite all the texts that have been devoted to the Shoah—good and bad—all the ways we have constructed of remembering the Shoah, all the reminders we have invented in order not to forget, despite all this, we have not yet begun to know how to think about the Shoah.3 And perhaps we never will— which is not an invitation not to think. Far from it. It is rather an invitation not to stop trying, not to act as if we could settle the matter once and for all. I say this not from a position of certainty, but rather from one of radical uncertainty. The question remains, then, how to think ethically after the Shoah. I want to avoid any straightforward celebration of the merely confessional—which does not mean that one can legitimately ignore testimony, or dispense with the need for others to witness.4 As Emil Fackenheim says about Elie Wiesel and others, “to attempt to go beyond witnesses such as these is to have remained behind.”5 Foucault, perhaps more than anyone else, has taught us to be wary of what it is we are doing when we confess, whether we confess our sins in a religious setting, to a religious authority, or whether we tell the truth about ourselves (our sex) from a couch, in the presence of a psychoanalyst. Foucault meant to suggest not that confession has no place, but rather that we must pay attention to what it is that sets in motion our will to confess, to what authority governs our confession, and whether the aim and purpose of confession is clear to us. Insofar as witnessing

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amounts to confession, we should be prepared to be vigilant about what we take ourselves to be answerable for, in the name of what motivation or by what right we confess, and to whom we take ourselves to be confessing. Who or what sanctions our confession? What can testimony accomplish? The Foucauldian suspicion that we harbor about the mechanics of confession may be legitimate, but it is based on an assumption about the nature of confession that is uprooted by Levinas’s understanding of what constitutes testimony. Testimony is not to be conflated with the confession of the soul. For Levinas, testimony does not testify to the experience of the individual who is offering witness. It testifies to the infinite, neither to the prior experience of one who is confessing past sins, nor simply as the witness of one who has undergone a trauma, and for whom testifying presents a means of recovery.6 Testimony, in Levinas’s sense, is not concerned with self-expression; it is precisely an expression of the infinite.7 The infinite cannot be adequately represented by the saying which is a testimony—the role of language here is not captured by the rubric of representation. The function of testimony in Levinas’s philosophy is perhaps best understood by focusing on two other concepts whose meaning we might be tempted ordinarily to take for granted, as if we could be confident in our ability to know what we are saying when we name them: language and religion. For Levinas, language is not merely a reflection of things; it is not merely a “doubling up [of] thought and being” (CPP 170; DP 123), and religion cannot be understood by reference to some kind of religious experience.8 Levinas brings into question, and reworks, these received meanings. Understood as “saying without a said” (CPP 170; DP 123), language does not refer to a prior meaning or to the contents of consciousness; it is what makes sincerity possible. Levinas likens saying to silence. As silence speaking, as excess, “saying bears witness to the other” (CPP 170; DP 123). “Saying as testimony” signifies “prior to all experience” (CPP 170; DP 124). Levinas calls “pure testimony” an “obedience that precedes the hearing of any order” (CPP 170: DP 124). Thus the sense of the religious that is implicated in this hearing cannot depend on a previous experience. Religious discourse, as Levinas understands it, is not a matter of attesting to my experience; it occurs not in my name, but “In the name of God” (CPP 170; DP 124). It is the “Here

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I am,” an obedience that resists thematization, which is “said to a neighbor to whom I am given over” (CPP 170; DP 124), but which comes from elsewhere, expressing—albeit inadequately representing—the infinite.

Rosenzweig on Creation, Revelation, and Redemption In his presentation of Franz Rosenzweig’s philosophy, in the essay “Franz Rosenzweig: A Modern Jewish Thinker,” first presented in 1964, Levinas says: “Religion is not here a ‘confession,’ but the texture or drama of being, prior to philosophy’s totalization” (OS 56; HS 82). Levinas represents as the characteristic trait of Rosenzweig’s thought a movement that in leading “him to Judaism also leads him to the recognition of Christianity” (OS 52; HS 76). He tells the story of Rosenzweig’s return to Judaism from the brink of conversion to Christianity. For Levinas, this personal and religious crisis not only constitutes a turning point in Rosenzweig’s biography; it also frames his central insight into the relationship of Judaism to Christianity. Levinas says: “The Jew must, then, remain a Jew, even from a Christian point of view. That is why, on the brink of conversion, Rosenzweig, held by Judaism, considered apostasy impossible and useless. His homage to Christianity consisted in his remaining Jewish” (OS 63; HS 91). I want to sketch the trajectory that Levinas follows in articulating the reciprocal necessity that Rosenzweig discovers in the meaning that Judaism has for Christianity, and that Christianity holds for Judaism. In mapping Rosenzweig’s discovery, Levinas deepens our understanding of religion—despite the fact that the word does not appear in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, which Levinas calls the “book of his life” (OS 51; HS 75).9 In the course of this mapping, Levinas also offers a reading of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, the three notions central to Rosenzweig’s thought, and on which Levinas confers the Kantian “dignity of ‘categories’ or ‘syntheses of the understanding’ ” (OS 56; HS 82). Levinas’s reading allows us to see a correspondence between the role that Rosenzweig attributes to these three pivotal concepts in The Star of Redemption (1921)10 and Heidegger’s critique of the traditional conception of temporality.

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Let me begin this brief discussion of the important essay Levinas dedicates to the life and thought of Rosenzweig by recalling a statement from it that could be taken as axiomatic for Levinas’s philosophy too. Levinas says, “Rosenzweig’s thought presents itself as a revolt against Hegel” (OS 53; HS 78). Given Rosenzweig’s impact on shaping the concerns that were to preoccupy Levinas in his own work, not least the rejection of a “recourse to totality” (OS 55; HS 81) that Levinas singles out as a hallmark of Rosenzweig’s thought, it is hardly surprising that Levinas’s thought could be equally well described as a revolt against Hegel. Evidence of this can easily be found. Rosenzweig, in Levinas’s words, retrieved for philosophy the “importance of prephilosophical experiences” (OS 53; HS 78), and opposed the imprisonment of the individual by the “system,” or the “supremacy of totality and the state” (OS 54; HS 79). If Rosenzweig “denies the totality of being,”11 so too is Levinas’s own work structured by the “irreducible singularity” (OS 55; HS 81) or the acute uniqueness of subjectivity, by a refusal to submit to “the power to dominate and integrate the totality of being in a self-consciousness” (CPP 127; HH 67), a refusal to be circumscribed or reduced to “a particular case of the universal” (OB 139; AE 177). Just as the individual cannot be sublimated by a system of thought that would supersede it, so “Religion,” in Levinas’s words, “is not a stammering precursor of humanity’s philosophical adventure” (OS 54; HS 80). Rather, Rosenzweig discerns in religion, according to Levinas, a “life that, in [a] precise sense, is alive.” It is alive in the sense of being “life that surmounts the immobility of concepts and limits” (ibid.). But what it means for Judaism to be alive, and what it means for Christianity to be alive, mark the difference between the two religions. Levinas says, “Judaism is alive and true to the degree that it stays close by God, while Christianity is alive and true as a mission to the extent that it marches into the world and penetrates it” (OS 62; HS 91). Both Christianity and Judaism exhibit a partial truth. Levinas says, “The truth that is one in God becomes two outside God: partial in Christianity, it is related to the also partial truth of Judaism. . . . The Truth in Itself is articulated and split in the human” (OS 62; HS 91). The fact that truth is partial, far from soliciting a relaxation on the part of the individual, entails that this truth, as my truth, is a commitment that is inescapable, and “irremissible” (OS 63; HS 91). Thus, Judaism and Christianity are not seen as “limiting one

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another reciprocally,” but each one “claim[s] the infinity of the human” (OS 54; HS 80). As such, Judaism and Christianity are irreducible—both to each other, and to a higher truth, whether this ostensible authority presents itself in the secular guise of the state, or as the claim of judgment by “anonymous history” (OS 64; HS 93). Judaism and Christianity thus “take on the meaning of primordial structures” (OS 60; HS 87). They are “primarily two ways of relating the time of the individual, the passing of instants, to absolute time” (OS 55; HS 80). Elaborating the sense in which the Judaic and Christian religions can be understood as temporal relations, Levinas specifies the significance that Rosenzweig attaches to Creation, Revelation, and Redemption as respectively connected to the past, present, and future. In doing so, he draws on Heidegger’s understanding of temporality as ecstatic unity. Of Creation, Levinas says: “The relation between God and the World is accomplished as always past. Creation opens and sustains the dimension of the past; the past does not merely house Creation” (OS 57; HS 83). Revelation, as “the movement of God toward man and human singularity” (OS 57; HS 83), is to be understood as love, or more specifically, as God’s “commandment to love” (OS 57; HS 83). Levinas says, “the present is the time of Revelation, just as the past was shown to be the time of Creation” (OS 57; HS 83). Emphasizing the sense in which commandment does not amount to a “moral formalism” (OS 57; HS 84), Levinas insists that Judaism enacts rather the “specific and concrete” relation between the individual and the world. He thereby expresses the continuity that he sees between Rosenzweig’s interpretation of Judaism and Heidegger’s deformalized ecstatic conception of temporality. Levinas says: “Judaism, woven of commandments, attests the renewal of the instants of God’s love for man” (OS 57; HS 83). Commandment has the sense of “the living presence of love” or—and here Levinas appeals to a Heideggerian term—“the very ‘temporalization’ of the present” (OS 57; HS 84). If Creation “sustains the dimension of the past,” and if Revelation, as commandment and as love, is the temporalization of the present, it falls to Redemption to play the role of the time of the future. “Redemption,” says Levinas, “lays out the future” (OS 58; HS 84). For Rosenzweig, as Levinas describes it, Revelation is the present that ushers in the redemptive future. It is Revelation that begins the redemptive work that is the

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work of human love. Levinas says: “The Revelation, which is love, awaits man’s response. This response does not ascend the path opened up by the movement come from God: the response to the love God bestows on man is the love of man for his neighbor” (OS 58; HS 84). Whereas Christianity is seen as a mission that goes out into the world, evangelizing, Judaism is seen as closed in upon itself. Judaism “begins with the end,” while Christianity “is always at the beginning” (OS 61; HS 88); for Judaism “Man is the mediator of redemption, the indispensable relay of the movement that began in God” (OS 59; HS 85), but “Christianity’s eternity is an eternal relay, a march, a mission” (OS 61; HS 88–89). Judaism negates the chronological order of time, joins time and eternity, through the collective life of a community that is already established, “by the birth of its members-naturally-close by the Lord,” although “the Messiah has not yet come” (OS 60; HS 87). Christianity, on the other hand, “traverses the world,” “takes the chronology of the world seriously,” moves “from Incarnation to Second Coming” (OS 61; HS 88–89). When Levinas adds that Christianity is an “irremissible expansion,” and that it “transforms pagan into Christian society, subjugating institutions and persons, founding cultures and countries” (OS 61; HS 89), it is difficult not to see in these lines an echo of the question Levinas asked in his 1934 essay “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism”—What made possible the confusion of “Christian universalism” with the “racist particularism” of Nazism (RP 64; QR 199)?12 Having sketched the differences between Judaism and Christianity that Levinas traces in Rosenzweig’s work, and having seen how Levinas establishes a parallel between Heidegger’s theory of temporality and the “categories” of Rosenzweig’s philosophy, let me draw attention to two aspects of the temporal schema that Levinas elicits from Rosenzweig, both of which are implicit in what has already been said: the role of ecstasis, and the role of death. In Levinas’s account of the three elements that dominate Rosenzweig’s thinking, Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, there can be discerned the pervasive influence of the ecstatic relationship that pertains between these three dimensions. This ecstasy, or being beyond, standing out from itself, is modeled on Heidegger’s conception of the way in which the temporal ecstases of past, present, and future constitute a unity such that they are irrevocably interwoven with one another. A

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relationship of mutuality and reciprocity informs Levinas’s description of Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, such that each depends upon, derives from, and calls for the other: “God and Man, the conjunction is precisely Creation. God and Man, the bond is precisely Revelation. Man and the World (but man already illuminated by the revelation and the world already marked by the creation) is precisely Redemption” (OS 56; HS 82).13 It is almost impossible to miss, in descriptions such as these, a reflection of Heidegger’s ecstatic notion of temporality, in which the future can be authentically anticipated only in the present understood as a moment of vision (Augenblick), and in the light of a taking up of the past as a recovery of oneself as historical. Second, the role that Levinas identifies for mortality is of particular importance for us. Notwithstanding the extent of Levinas’s debt to Heidegger’s critique of the traditional Western conception of time, which he fully acknowledges here (as elsewhere), we see the emergence of a decisive difference between Levinas’s view of time and Heidegger’s account of the ecstatic unity of temporality. This divergence can be provisionally stated in terms of the weight that Levinas and Heidegger each attach to the meaning of death. In the words of Michel Haar, “only by way of a relation to its death can Dasein grasp its own temporality.”14 Whereas for Heidegger, at least in Being and Time, Dasein’s anticipation of death is the pivotal feature of his entire analysis of temporality, the priority given to one’s own death, while still important for Levinas, does not enjoy the uncontested privilege it has in the analyses of Being and Time. Levinas says, “love is stronger than death,” but death “makes redeeming love possible” (OS 58; HS 84). Elsewhere he describes my responsibility to the other as “A devotedness as strong as death, and in a sense stronger than death. In finitude death outlines a destiny which it interrupts, but nothing can dispense me from the response which I am passively held to. The tomb is not a refuge; it is not a pardon. The debt remains.”15 To “love one’s neighbor” is for Levinas “to redeem the world” (OS 58; HS 84). It is also “to go to Eternity” (OS 58; HS 84).

Death and the Totality of History In 1947 Levinas published “Le temps et l’autre” and De l’existence à l’existant, in which he begins to undertake a serious and far-reaching

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critique of Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s being-toward-death, and the existential analytic that is implicated in this understanding. Levinas continues to develop his critique in various essays, in Totality and Infinity, and, more recently, in lectures presented in the 1970’s. In the remainder of this chapter I want to sketch this critique, and, at least in a provisional way, to draw out some of its implications for how to think ethically after the Shoah. According to Heidegger, if death is to be ontologically clarified, the sense in which death is an end for Dasein must be distinguished from the ending of something present-at-hand or ready-to-hand. (See BT 289; SZ 245.) In order to see the specific meaning that Heidegger gives to the dying of Dasein, we cannot equate this ending with the encountering of a limit, boundary, or barrier, at least not in the ordinary sense. As Derrida points out in Aporias, Heidegger “distinguishes the death of Dasein from any other end, from any other limit. This crucial distinction, which Heidegger considers indispensable, allows him to situate his existential analysis of death before any ‘metaphysics of death’ and before all biology.”16 As a negation of life that cannot be experienced, death might be thought to provide the border of life, constituting a boundary or limit; but since Dasein is only this side of death, the nothingness of death can only be anticipated. To think of death as a barrier, as that which prevents me from getting a conceptual grasp on my life as a whole, is to see the nullity of death as that which hinders me from ever being complete, fulfilled, or whole. Heidegger’s point is that ontologically, to exist is to lack completion—and that this lack is the very nature of what it means for Dasein to exist. To exist comprehendingly is therefore to take account of one’s mortality, not by thinking death as a limit—which is to imply that it could be transgressed. The impossibility of death for Dasein becomes the ground of its possibility. Fundamental to Dasein’s being is its lack of being, its lack of completion, its finitude. “Dasein is always in a position of surpassing” a border, in the sense of a limit, end, or telos. “Dasein is the very transgression of this borderline” (A 26), as Derrida says. In Heidegger’s language, “Dasein is already its ‘not-yet.’ ” Its ending is a “Being-towards-the-end” (BT 289; SZ 245), and in this sense, “Death, in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life” (BT 290; SZ 246). It is Dasein’s “way of being” (Seinsweise: BT 291; SZ 247). Distinct from the ending of other things that are alive, for which Heidegger re-

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serves the term “perishing” (Verenden: BT 284; SZ 240), Dasein’s “dying” (Sterben) as “the way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death” can be authentic, or inauthentic. Dasein’s dying can amount to a mere “demise” (Ableben) (BT 291; SZ 247), or it can be understood as “thrown Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, which is nonrelational and not to be outstripped” (BT 295; SZ 251). Authentic anticipation of one’s own death consists in understanding one’s existence as finite.

Death as Fundamental No account of Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian theme of being-toward-death can ignore the influence of Blanchot,17 who writes, in The Space of Literature, that Heidegger’s “system of thought”—along with Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s—attempts to make “death possible.”18 For Levinas, death, in essence, is evasion, otherness, ungraspable. It defies us. It is impossible. It comes to us as other, as mysterious, foreign. We are no longer masters of ourselves. Death presents itself as murder; it comes to us as if from another. It surprises us—we cannot anticipate it, despite the depths of Heidegger’s analysis. Its power lies not so much in its unpredictability, as in its unknowability. Death is other. Death is not me. The shrill laughter of Shakespeare’s witches evoke the mood of Levinas’s meditations on death. Death is a ruse. It makes fun of us, ridicules us, makes of us fools. The last laugh is on us—if we try, like Macbeth, to take death on, to try the last, tho’ Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane, and though Macduff is not of woman born. (See TO 72; TA 60). I am not master of my own death. Suicide provides a shallow reprieve—I reach for death, but my aim is mistaken. “To kill oneself,” says Blanchot, “is to mistake one death for the other” (SL 104). For death is precisely that over which “I have no power” (SL 104). To try to kill myself is to try to die for others—it is to have in mind the effect of my death on others, and not my death at all. Hence Blanchot speaks of the impossibility of suicide (SL 104–7). Mortality is fundamental both for Heidegger and for Levinas—but what is in question is what it means for death to be fundamental: Is it my

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death or the other’s death that comes first? “Mortality,” says Levinas, “is the concrete and primary phenomenon. It forbids the positing of a for itself that would not already be delivered over to the Other and consequently be a thing” (TI 235; TeI 212). Levinas’s view of time is informed by his attempt to take on board Heidegger’s critique of the traditional conception of temporality and to go beyond it. To the extent that the Heideggerian notion of beingtoward-death allows Heidegger to reorient the tradition’s assumptions about time, Levinas is obliged to take seriously Heidegger’s account of death. At the same time, the Heideggerian conception of death is strongly contested by Levinas, both because it seems to cancel the radical alterity of death and because it grants priority to Dasein’s own death over the death of others. The decisive achievement of Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death was to put into question a certain naive privileging of the present, characteristic of the traditional Western view of time. Levinas confronts the question of whether Heidegger’s apparent overturning of the naïveté underlying the metaphysical conception of presence does not, in fact, succumb to a reiteration of the very trope of metaphysics Heidegger wanted to renounce. Does Heidegger’s account of being-toward-death appear to establish a certain privilege of the future over the present, while in reality extending the metaphysics of presence? Does it do anything to dislodge the priority of presence assumed by the tradition of Western philosophy, or is his reinterpretation of temporality a repetition, at some level, of the priority of presence? Can it be otherwise? Does the priority of presence inevitably assert itself? Must any attempt to evade the metaphysics of presence surreptitiously draw on its resources? Is it, then, a matter only of remarking upon the inevitable priority of presence so as to avoid, at least, naïveté? These are questions Derrida raises about Heidegger’s attempt to reorient the metaphysical conception of time.19 They are also questions Levinas takes on as he offers his own interpretation of time, but only after having thoroughly reflected upon the implications of Heidegger’s critique of the tradition. When Levinas insists on the irreducible specificity of the instant, his insistence takes shape, in part, as a response to what he sees as Heidegger’s abstraction and dissolution of the present into the future of anticipatory resoluteness. In effect, Levinas asks if Heidegger’s emphasis on

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Dasein’s finitude, and the apparent import that futurity takes on in Dasein’s authentic anticipatory mode, does not in fact collapse the future into the present, rendering Dasein a mastering, virile existent, in control of his own destiny. Does Heidegger finally obliterate the alterity of death, incorporating it into an extended present, making it continuous with the now, establishing a moment of supremacy, in which Dasein overcomes even its own mortality, by converting it into the ground of its projects? And if Heidegger transmutes the otherness of death into the positivity of Dasein’s structure as potentiality-for-Being, can he do so only by construing the present as always already laboring under the sign of the future, and bending under the weight of the past? Does Heidegger sacrifice the specific and irreducible dynamic of the instant, or the now, to impending death, only to reappropriate the nothingness that death seemed to present by grasping its nothingness in the anxiety that frees up Dasein for its own possibilities? Is Heideggerian authenticity a way of combating even the impossibility of death? Critical of Heidegger for compromising the alterity of the future, and for allowing the present to be structured not by itself, but by its capacity or failure to tolerate Dasein’s realization of itself as finite, Levinas interprets death as intrinsically bound up with the other. Rather than understanding Dasein’s ability to grasp its own mortality as an index of authenticity, so that death loses its radical otherness, Levinas insists that death is absolutely unknowable, that it cannot be brought within the compass of Dasein’s gathering of itself into an ecstatic unity. While, for Heidegger, the nothingness of death is recuperated by authentic Dasein, Levinas acknowledges another kind of unease that invades the existent. The subject is unsettled not only by confronting its own death in the experience of anxiety, but by existence itself, and the impossibility of getting away from itself, or escaping existence. Levinas expresses this as the impossibility of ever completely warding off the threat of the il y a, the interminable, anonymous disturbance that invades the sense of security of even the most successful Dasein. The hypostatic, instantaneous, upsurge of the subject in the here that is not yet time consists of both a freedom, mastery, or virility, and an enchainment, commitment, or submission to existence. For Levinas, it is death, and not existence, that seems to offer a respite. “One more minute, Mr. Hangman!” Death is irrevocably bound up with the other in

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Levinas’s analysis at several levels. First, because death approaches as murder, and as such it seems to include the possibility of evasion, a possibility inscribed in corporeal skill and subtlety. Second, death is other in the sense that it is unknowable. Third, alterity is also inseparable from death in the sense that even in my death I am implicated by the Other— to the point of my death also being implicated in the death of the Other. While there may be various senses in which Heidegger’s account can accommodate the recognition that death concerns alterity, some of which I will explore below, there is no denying the final incompatibility between Heidegger’s and Levinas’s understanding of death and temporality on this point. For Heidegger, death concerns Dasein’s ownness, in a way that is existentially unparalleled by any claim the other’s death might have. For Levinas, death is inseparable from murder—it approaches as other. Murder is “at the origin of death,” Levinas tells us (TI 236; TeI 213). It is, he says, “as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions of dying, were inseparable from the essence of death” (TI 234; TeI 210– 11). Why is murder at the origin of death, according to Levinas? Because in both killing and dying there is an effort to “escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate” (EE 61; DE 100). Death approaches not as nothingness, but as fear—fear “for my being” (TI 233; TeI 209), “fear of violence” (TI 235; TeI 212). By emphasizing not only that death involves fear of being, but also its essential unknowability, Levinas retrieves precisely the aspects of death that Heidegger designates as inauthentic. To fear death is, for Heidegger, an inauthentic way of relating to death. As is well known, the only authentic way to relate to death, for Heidegger, is through anxiety, and part of what it means to have an authentic relation to death is to understand one’s own finitude.20 Refusing the alternative of nothingness or being that the tradition presents us with for negotiating death—in which we imagine it “either as a passage to nothingness or as a passage to another existence”(TI 232; TeI 208)—Levinas includes Heidegger in this alternative, not because Heidegger is concerned with life after death (Heidegger explicitly distances himself from offering any opinion on this question), but because death is understood by Heidegger as the nothingness upon which I project any possibility whatsoever.21 One might want to claim that Heidegger’s understanding of tempo-

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rality offers sites of resistance comparable to the uncontrollable and disturbing invasion of Levinas’s il y a. Doesn’t Heidegger’s conception of thrownness offer such resistance? Heidegger says, for example, that the character of every Dasein “is determined by thrownness” and that “it has in each case already been delivered over to existence, and it constantly so remains” (BT 321; SZ 276).22 By “thrownness” Heidegger means the “facticity” of Dasein’s “being delivered over” (BT 174; SZ 135) to its “there.” Because Heidegger qualifies Dasein’s sense “that it is and has to be” as a way of Being that is “Being-in-the-world,” the resistance of thrownness would be radical only if this way of being involved an unconquerable alterity. Heidegger says, “The ‘that it is’ which is disclosed in Dasein’s state-of-mind must . . . be conceived as an existential attribute of the entity which has Being-in-the-world as its way of Being” (BT 174; SZ 135). Levinas’s rejoinder is that Being-in-the-world remains circumscribed by an isolated Dasein. Perhaps the closest Heidegger comes to acknowledging such alterity is with his notion of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit). That the call of conscience “comes from uncanniness” (BT 325; SZ 280) is of more than passing interest, given Levinas’s overall position that Heidegger domesticates absolute alterity. One might want to claim, on the basis of the fact that Heidegger grants existential status to being-toward-death, and to Mitsein (“Beingwith”), that Levinas is wrong to criticize Heidegger for prioritizing my death over the other’s death. Doesn’t Heidegger see others as equiprimordial, as structural to the world? Isn’t there a constant recognition by Heidegger that authentic anticipation of one’s own death takes place only in terms of an acceptance of others? As we have already seen, in Being and Time, Section 53, we read, “As the non-relational possibility, death individualizes—but only in such a manner that, as the possibility which is not to be outstripped, it makes Dasein, as Being-with, have some understanding of the potentiality-for-Being of Others” (BT 309; SZ 264). Notwithstanding the existential status of being-with-others as equiprimordial with Dasein’s ownmost possibility for death, it remains the case that, for Heidegger, authentic death is a return from, a recovery of one’s possibilities from, the inauthenticity of the-they self, in which death is covered up. Dasein, as finite, remains fundamentally alone. Even the call of conscience comes from Dasein itself. I have argued that Levinas sees Heidegger’s account of time as total-

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izing, as an account which dispenses with alterity, and with the irreducible singularity of the instant. Stipulating the need to depart from a tradition that retains as its central reference point a subject whose subjectivity consists primarily in coming to know the world, Levinas does not think that Heidegger succeeds in definitively distancing himself from this epistemological approach. Initially, Levinas specifies this problem in terms of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the subject into the ecstatic other, whereas in the later work he will reformulate the problem, stating it in terms of Dasein’s reduction of alterity to itself. Here we rejoin Rosenzweig’s idea of “eternal life,” which arises, in Levinas’s words, “on the basis of . . . irreducible and fresh (quasi Bergsonian) instants” and “outside the petrified system in which conceptual philosophy imprisons such moments” (OS 54; HS 79). Levinas accepts from Heidegger the suggestion that there is a fundamental connection between death and language, but reworks this connection. Like the origin of Me voici, “Here I am,” which Levinas calls the first word, “Thou shalt not kill” comes from elsewhere, from another shore. I am not the master of this original—originary and anarchical and therefore also not originary—speech. The other dictates the sense of my words, and I discover in my words my response. This is not a spontaneous or free speech. I do not project my meaning, I do not anticipate my response, I do not coincide with myself. For Levinas, I am not first of all an autonomous being. I find myself uprooted before the other’s command. I am powerless. The temptation of murder is also prohibited— elicited and prohibited in one movement. The face of the Other, says Levinas, “expresses my moral impossibility of annihilating. This interdiction is to be sure not equivalent to pure and simple impossibility, and even presupposes the possibility which precisely it forbids—but in fact the interdiction already dwells in this very possibility rather than presupposing it” (TI 232–33; TeI 209). As Jill Robbins asks, “does not murder aim at speech itself?”23 Levinas’s understanding of the relation between speech and murder, to quote Robbins again, “suggests the enigmatic relation between murder and primordial speech. It suggests the way in which the (im)possibility of murder inhabits the language relation to the other at its origin.”24 In Blanchot’s words, quoted by Robbins, the choice is either “to speak or to kill,” and it is speech that “founds the alternative.”25

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Levinas’s assertion of the priority of ethics over ontology is both implicated in, and implicates, his insistence that death is to be understood not as the possibility of impossibility, but precisely the reverse: as the impossibility of possibility. There is an assumption that informs Heidegger’s analysis of death: that Dasein’s character lies in its possibility. Fackenheim says “In Being and Time historicity emerges as permeating man’s very being, and hence as inescapable; yet far from being a curse, its core—man’s being toward death—is the decisive condition of all true human freedom. Man is free to live his own life only because he is free to die his own death.”26 In Heidegger’s words, it is in death that “Dasein’s character as possibility lets itself be revealed most precisely” (BT 293; SZ 248–49); or, as Levinas says: “Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom” (TO 70; TA 57). It is this primary freedom that Levinas contests. For Levinas, the character of Dasein is not fundamentally possibility. I am not first of all a power or a freedom to be—whether or not this is cashed out in terms of potentiality-for-Being. I am first of all sensibility, passivity, responsibility. As passivity and exposure to the other, I am not first of all a potentiality for anything, least of all death. That death is represented for Levinas by the irrecusability of the other, that death cannot be thought without also thinking murder, is a function of his refusal to take the potentiality-for-Being as the basic determinative character of Dasein.27 Levinas asks if there is not a more basic meaning in death than the understanding that sees in it a setting oneself free for one’s own possibilities: Does this more basic meaning consist in being free to be free for others, in the sense of being free to recognize a prior claim that another has on me? Not to recognize that prior claim, not to be free to do so, may be the empirical reality of extreme cruelty, but far from being the exercise of freedom it constitutes precisely the extremity of cruelty. It is surely not enough to reserve the term “inauthentic” for those who freely and willingly—even righteously—reduced others to a state in which murder was not merely permissible, but obligatory in order to survive. A new way of thinking about death, freedom, and others must be found. In the face of accounts by Jewish witnesses to their experiences in concentration camps, how can an account of being-towarddeath that establishes an absolute distinction between the ways in which human beings and animals die remain relevant? What can it mean to in-

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sist on the ultimacy of death as being free for possibilities, free for life, when we are confronted with a situation in which the cost of survival is to kill one’s own? What can it mean to assert an essential connection between death and language, as if by doing so one is confirming the humanity of individuals, where humanity is systematically and methodically destroyed, where individuality is replaced by wild animality, where respect for the dignity of persons is replaced by a blind will to survive that is beyond recognition of the sanctity of life, even in the person of one’s own family members?28 Levinas isolates “two specifically Jewish traits” of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption (OS 59; HS 85). One is that love is manifested as commandment; the other is that the individual mediates Redemption. In a world (in the Heideggerian sense of this term) where Jews were not allowed to die their own deaths29—which denial in turn denies the possibility of transcendence (and transcendence is required in order for love—not of this world—to manifest itself as commandment)—and where individuals are deprived of their role as mediators of Redemption, what is left of humanity?30

Thinking After Levinas My concern is not only the shadow cast over us by the Shoah—a shadow under which Levinas lived—but also the shadow of Levinas’s death To think ethics after the Shoah, and after Levinas, is to confront both the impossibility that the event of the Shoah presents for thinking—the moral impossibility of it, the impossibility of containing it in thought—and the “impossible possibility” of death as such. The phrase refers to Levinas’s understanding of death as the “impossibility of possibility,” itself a reference to, and a reversal of, the Heideggerian understanding of death as the “possibility of impossibility.” Levinas’s death represents an end: the ending of certain possibilities that never were realized, which might never have been realized—but which now never can be realized. One might say, bearing in mind Heidegger’s celebrated analysis of death, that a certain potentiality-for-Being has been removed for Levinas. For Levinas—but not for us. To think after Levinas—that is our task, those of us who take seri-

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ously his philosophy. Given what we know of Levinas’s philosophy, it seems inappropriate for me to translate this task into a question about what my response to his life’s work should be. If I may frame this in the light of Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of death, to ask what my response should be is still to posit my freedom as basic, as if I have a choice to respond to Levinas’s ethical challenge or not. The force of his philosophy lies not in the recognition of a choice, but in the recognition that it is already too late to pose the issue of responsibility in these terms. Given that the Shoah has occurred, given this ineluctable fact, what then is the appropriate question, the right question? Perhaps I had better ask not how my response will appear—which assumes that the sort of response that is at stake is one that can appear as such. Better to ask how responsible my response will have been, not according to the realm of appearances or phenomena, but according to the other for whom I am responsible. Of course, this is an impossible question for me to answer. It may be an impossible question for me to pose—but perhaps the effort of attempting to formulate it, even in its impossibility, is not one that will have been wasted. We have to ask in what sense impossible questions remain impossible—and in what sense they remain possible. It may be that the impossibility of adequately formulating a question about the responsibility of my response is inseparable from the possibility of asking the question. It may turn out that the question of my responsibility is impossible in the sense that it can never be definitively posed—still less answered in any determinative way. This failure to pose the question once and for all, this necessity to continue to insist that it remain a question—and that I remain in question along with my responsibility—may be precisely the impossibility of the question. In this very impossibility, it may be that we also find its necessity, its imperative, its unavoidability, its incessant return. “Here I am”—I quote these words as a testimony to Levinas. If to testify is to testify to the infinite, the words Levinas quotes so often from Isaiah, “Here I am,” point beyond philosophy, to a restlessness, to an ethics that can never rest. Levinas—both as a philosopher, and as a survivor of the Shoah—has asked, perhaps more insistently than any other philosopher, after the meaning of ethics. To be answerable to his legacy is to see that ethics in our era can no longer be a call to responsibility, as if it were a duty abstractly outlined, a future possibility, yet to be real-

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ized. Ethics is a responsibility to which I, unique and irreplaceable, come always too late. Whether this means one should go out into the world, ethically, or stay close to God, is a matter of religion. But it is not merely a matter of arbitrary choice. By this I do not invoke religion in any conventional sense. I recall religion as a dedication to Levinas’s insight that to testify is to bear witness to the infinite.31

chapter seven

A Mourning of Philosophy Levinas’s Legacy as Traumatic Response

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e t w e e n n o v e m b e r 1 9 7 5 and May 1976, Levinas presented a lecture course under the title “La mort et le temps.”1 Alongside a course called “God and Onto-theology,” presented during the same period (indeed on the same days, an hour apart from one another), this series of lectures constituted the last regular course that Levinas taught at the Sorbonne.2 The lectures warrant attention for a number of reasons. Presented in the year after the publication of Otherwise than Being (1974), and fifteen years after Totality and Infinity (1961), they allow us to develop a new perspective both on these works for which Levinas is best known, and on the intervening essays. In particular, the lectures provide the first available mature and sustained critique of the Heideggerian notions of temporality and beingtoward-death. References to Heidegger’s understanding of death and time are scattered widely throughout Levinas’s corpus, and there are one or two texts, such as the early essay “Time and the Other” (1947) and the much later “Diachrony and Representation” (1982), in which Levinas devotes concentrated attention to the interrelated themes of time and death. At a much earlier date, as we saw in Chapter 5, Levinas wrote “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” which provides a detailed discussion of the Heidegger of Being and Time, but which predates World War II, and so can neither take account of Heidegger’s later work, nor bring to bear the hindsight of Levinas’s own ethical philosophy—a philosophy marked by his experience as a survivor.3 So it was only with the appearance of the 1975–76 lectures that we were given the opportunity to knit

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together the context for Levinas’s frequent, but often abrupt and undeveloped, remarks about Heidegger’s conceptions of time and death in the light of his developed philosophical position. These apparently gnomic utterances now take on the character of a well-articulated, albeit partisan, critique of Heidegger’s celebrated analyses of being-towarddeath. In devoting close attention to Heidegger’s Being and Time, the lectures represent a crucial contribution to sorting out the politically and ethically difficult, if not impossible, relationship that Levinas’s philosophy bears to Heidegger’s. They are especially illuminating since they not only constitute a rare instance in which Levinas’s later published work treats Heidegger’s philosophy in any detail or at any length, but they also present a unique record of Levinas’s mature meditations on Heidegger. Despite its inestimable importance for his entire thought, Heidegger’s work tends not to be the focus of Levinas’s developed philosophy. The 1975–76 lectures discuss Heidegger more elaborately, and in the context of key figures of the history of philosophy, thus shedding new light on Levinas’s earlier declarations about Heidegger. Not only, then, does Levinas provide here the rationale for the distance he found it necessary to take in relation to Heidegger’s attempt to establish an originary concept of time, a distance which had until this point only been intimated; he also gives us considerable insight as to how he thinks the philosophies of Bergson, Kant, Hegel, Ernst Bloch, and Eugene Fink fare in comparison to Heidegger’s. While in some respects these figures remain consonant with the tradition Levinas seeks to go beyond, their philosophies also contain aspects which break with Heideggerian ontology. Heidegger has accustomed us, says Levinas, “to seek in the history of philosophy the very history of being; all his work consists of reducing metaphysics to the history of being” (MT 66). For Levinas, “Reducing every philosophical effort to the error or errancy of ontotheology is only one possible reading of the history of philosophy” (MT 67). Levinas’s own reading of the history of philosophy might be described as affirming that “in the history of philosophy, there can be meaning other than finitude” (MT 68). Thus Levinas retrieves from Bergson the notion of “duration,” the ultimate significance of which is understood not in terms of the vital élan of Creative Evolution, but in the sense that Bergson gives it in The

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Two Sources of Morality and Religion, as “the fact that man can emit a call to the interiority of the other man” (MT 63).4 And in the notion of hope that Kant presents in his practical philosophy, Levinas finds evidence that something other than finitude can signify (MT 68). These lectures provide rich resources for assessing Levinas’s reflections on time and death as thought not only by Heidegger, but also by other key figures in the history of the philosophy of time, such as Hegel and Aristotle, and in relation to contemporary philosophers, who are no less crucial to Levinas’s own analyses of time because he ultimately seeks to go beyond them. Derrida, for example, in The Gift of Death, and in Adieu, cites and comments on “La mort et le temps.”5 It is the latter course that I shall focus on here, while making some references to the course “God and Onto-theology.” The lectures stand as a token of last things, as a memorial to Levinas. If the text of these lectures provides new insight into Levinas’s relation to Heidegger, and to Hegel (among others), if it fleshes out his understanding of the history of philosophy, and reveals the sense in which Levinas sees himself as going beyond this tradition, above all, this text on death and time provokes a response to Levinas’s own death. I propose to think about what Levinas means when he speaks of trauma, both in this text and elsewhere, and sometimes by naming it in other ways. The word occurs only three times in this text, once toward the beginning of the published lecture course, and twice on its penultimate page. It is perhaps not insignificant that each occurrence is structured as a question. I want to think about the question that trauma poses to us, as survivors of Levinas, as readers of his work, as teachers of philosophy in the twenty-first century. So I begin this chapter with a question: Can the trauma which I am more than ever convinced is the central orchestrating event of Levinas’s philosophy be understood or thought? What would be required by the understanding or thought that responds to the trauma of the Shoah? Does trauma require trauma to be rendered communicable or transferable? And how would such a transfer take place? Whose trauma puts me in question? Or does trauma put in question the notion of belonging? I want to think about the way in which trauma informs Levinas’s philosophy, the ways in which it exceeds his philosophy, the possibility for trauma to be communicated to Levinas’s readers at a time when sur-

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vivors of the Holocaust are so few, and when the opportunity to hear these survivors’ witness to trauma diminishes at an accelerated speed. As we move beyond the end of a century indelibly marked by the most extreme suffering, suffering conceived and orchestrated by state officials, this trauma poses a question: How will it be remembered? Let me express more carefully and precisely, not my intentions, but my response: not what I might imagine to be the task of Levinas’s general readership, but my own traumatic response to Levinas’s death. Let me speak of the gift of his work, of the texts that provide me with a legacy, and of books abandoned to a future that takes shape in the wake of his death—a death that has put me in question, and a future which poses the question of my responsibility. In marking this shift from the general issue of how a loosely defined “we,” how an already constituted community—we philosophers—should read Levinas now (now, in the shadow of his death), to the question with which Levinas’s death confronts me, I mean to take note of two points observed by Levinas in his 1975–76 lectures. The first appears in a lecture, in the course on death and time—a lecture to which I will return—on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; and the second appears in the course “God and Onto-theology,” in a lecture entitled “The Ethical Relation as a Departure from Ontology.” Levinas reminds us, in an aside, to note well that “For Hegel, ethics is always universal. The person is always thought in virtue of the universality of the law. Hegel is Kantian on this point. As an individual the person is not Spirit and has no ethics. Here, in the present study, the person is the other individual, and any universal starts from there. But in German idealism, the person is the universal” (MT 97). This parenthetical remark interrupts Levinas’s explication of one of the most renowned passages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in which the state appears as split into the human and civic law, the law of the city which Hegel calls masculine, and the law of the family, the divine law, which he construes as feminine.6 Spirit in the immediate substance of individual action can be ethical inasmuch as it becomes universal. Taking on death through the act of burial, the blood relative transforms death from a natural and abstract event into an operation by which the dead are honored by the living. I will return to the extraordinary relation with death that Levinas

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credits Hegel as having articulated here. For the moment I want only to emphasize the basic contrast to which Levinas draws attention. For German idealism, the person as an individual cannot be ethical unless considered from the standpoint of universality, whereas, for Levinas, ethics starts with the individual, and tends to be submerged or obliterated by universality. What meaning this can have—given that we are, as a matter of empirical fact, in a social order that at every moment complicates my responsibility for my neighbor—is a question that must be broached in terms of what Levinas calls the “third party.”7 The second point I want to draw from the lectures is a difference that Levinas indicates by substituting a lowercase letter for an uppercase: the difference between “Being me,” where the word moi is not capitalized, and being “Me,” with Moi capitalized. To be Me, in the second sense, concerns “the perseverance of one’s being” (DMT 209), where to be me is understood in the sense of conatus essendi (MT 75), whereas the substitution of a lowercase letter indicates the substitution of the “hostage” (DMT 209).8 What is indicated by this alteration is that “Freedom is not first. The self is responsible before freedom” (DMT 209). Responsibility before freedom, ethics before universal ontology, infinity before totality, the other before me, passivity before power, the “Here I am” of witness before the “I think” of representation: disrupting the primacy that the tradition has maintained for the subject defined, first of all, by its free capacity for representation, Levinas effects yet another reversal of philosophy in terms of death and time, in the challenge he brings to the Heideggerian understanding of death as the “possibility of impossibility.” Just as he reverses the order of priority that the tradition granted ontology over ethics, and totality over infinity, Levinas substituted (as we saw in Chapter 6) for Heidegger’s formula for the notion of death as the “possibility of impossibility” the idea of death as the “impossibility of possibility.” But if this way of articulating Levinas’s objection to Heidegger’s notion of beingtoward-death is characteristic of Levinas’s earlier work (in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity, for example), it makes way for a different formulation in the lectures on death and time. While the phrase “impossibility of possibility” is not entirely absent from the later work (as in Otherwise than Being), the reversal that it signals is expressed in a new refrain, namely the suggestion that it is not that

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time must be understood on the basis of death, as Heidegger’s analyses of Dasein’s finite temporality indicates—for Heidegger, Levinas says, “It is through death that there is time and there is Dasein” (MT 59). Rather, for Levinas, death must be understood on the basis of time— the time of patience. In the opening lecture Levinas signals “the direction of this course—death as the patience of time” (MT 8).9 Levinas wants not to think time on the basis of Dasein’s finitude, which involves the projection of the future as determined by beingthere, but to find the signification that death has for time. (See 55–56.) Levinas proposes, in short, “To think death starting from time—and not, as in Heidegger—time starting from death” (MT 122).10 In order to appreciate what Levinas is doing when he says that time must be understood not on the basis of death, or starting with Dasein’s finitude, but the other way around, as the patience of time, we need to see how he arrives at this formulation. Before turning to this task, allow me to recall some of the basic points of our previous discussion. When Levinas reverses the order of priority Heidegger’s analyses of being-toward-death sets up between death and time, he is far from innocent of Heidegger’s challenge to traditional metaphysical conceptions of time from Aristotle to Bergson (as Levinas—following Heidegger—is fond of saying). We must not imagine that Levinas wants to return to a naive conception of time as an infinite series of nows parading along, capable of being represented adequately in a linear fashion, on a line that joins instants to one another as if they were no more than placeholders, points which coalesce to form an unbroken continuity. We must not imagine, in other words, that Levinas intends a rehabilitation of the everyday time that Heidegger enabled us to rethink from the perspective of a more original temporality, from Dasein’s own perspective, a perspective which is most my own—that of finite temporality understood in the experience of anxiety. Levinas fully understands the difficulties that Heidegger brought to light in the traditional way of posing the question: What is the being of time? (MT 8 and 30). In fact he opens his lecture course by acknowledging the significance of Heidegger’s insight that the very way of formulating the question What is time? presupposes that it is a being. Levinas maintains, however, that because Heidegger admits no other source of meaning than the ontological, because everything is in the final analysis reduced to the comprehension of being, time and death

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too—despite what Heidegger would wish—are subordinate to the study of being. (See MT 51.) Levinas is well aware of the radical implications of Heidegger’s revised and original notion of temporality, well aware of the break with the tradition that Heidegger introduces by his reorientation of temporality away from scientific time and toward Dasein’s finitude. The importance of death in Heidegger’s analysis is not lost on Levinas. He departs from Heidegger, not in order to return to the traditional separation of time from death, but in answering the question of whose death matters most: mine, or the other’s? It is because Heidegger assumes that the importance of death lies in my own death, and not in the death of the other, that Levinas thinks Heidegger’s critique of the Western tradition, for all its originality, does not go far enough, does not take death—neither the alterity of death, nor the other’s death—seriously enough. For Heidegger, death is “certainty par excellence” (MT 11 and 15). Levinas shows that, for Heidegger, death is not only the “origin of certainty” (MT 11), but it is also in essence possibility. In Levinas’s words, “Death is an absolutely certain possibility; it is the possibility which renders possible all possibility” (MT 52). Suffice it to say that death initially appears to pose a problem for Heidegger’s analysis insofar as it would seem to stand in the way of grasping Dasein’s life as a totality, as a structural whole. By thinking death in terms of Dasein’s authentic anticipation, as that which is always already ahead of it, and, in this sense, as that which belongs to Dasein from the start, the problem that death seemed to have posed for Heidegger’s Dasein is resolved into Dasein’s very mode of being. As Levinas says, “In dying is revealed the ontological structure which is mineness, Jemeinigkeit” (MT 44). So, for Levinas, “The way in which Heidegger goes toward death is entirely commanded by his preoccupation with the ontological” (MT 38), or as he also puts it, “There is a reduction of everything human to ontology” (MT 64). Not only is death a “modality of being,” but so is man. Thus “Death marks above all the primary achievement of being-there, it is through death that being-there or man who by way of being is the event of its beingthere, is the totality of that which it is, or is properly there” (MT 56). Heidegger’s advance over the tradition was to posit a more original time than clock time, or measurable time. Since Aristotle, for whom “Time is the number of movement” (MT 30), our access to time has

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been governed by a notion of time that we measure by clocks; but even in Aristotle’s definition of time there is a tentative access to a sense of temporality that is not reducible to its measurable quality. (See BP 227– 74.) With the notion of being-toward-death, Heidegger sharpens this access. (See MT 8.) By establishing time as a relation to death, Heidegger “allows it to be thought otherwise than the pure and simple flux and flow of instants” (MT 40). For the question What is time? he substitutes Who is time? (MT 30). By thinking Dasein’s end in “its mode of being-there,” rather than as present-at-hand, Heidegger rethinks death not as something outside, or added on to Dasein, but as Dasein’s very mode of being-ahead-of-itself. Heidegger’s originality consists in thinking time not as though it were made of “adjoining parts” (MT 45). Rather, “Dasein is in such a manner that its ‘not-yet’ belongs to it and yet is not yet” (MT 45). For Heidegger, as Levinas says, “Death is not a moment but a way of being with which Dasein is charged as soon as it exists, such that the formula ‘having to be’ signifies also ‘having to die.’ It is not as a future unaccomplished that death must be thought, it is on the contrary starting from the to-be that is also a to-die that time must be originally thought” (MT 48–49). Thus, “dying is not that which marks the last instant of Dasein, but what characterizes the very way in which man is his being” (MT 56). By starting from mortality, then, Heidegger discovers behind linear time a more original time (MT 60). Summing up Heidegger’s analyses, Levinas says: “One sees how measurable time is not original time, how there is a priority of the relation with the future [see BT 378 and SZ 329; BT 479 and SZ 426–27] as the relation with a possibility and not as a reality: the concrete way in which such an idea is thought is therefore by the analysis of death. It is through death that there is time and there is Dasein” (MT 59). Heidegger’s contribution lies in overcoming the idea of death thought on the model of the “destruction of a thing,” or as an ending, or limit, in the sense of an interruption of the flux of time (MT 39). For Heidegger, time itself is rethought from death, and this is why Levinas considers Heidegger’s rethinking of time to be a “necessary passage”— necessary because time and death are thought in relation to one another. But Levinas sees also the necessity of passing through, going beyond, Heidegger’s rethinking of time as being-toward-death, because death

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remains, in Heidegger, fundamentally annihilation (see MT 41), whereas, in Levinas’s words, “death does not seem to us to amount to annihilation” (MT 37). Heidegger does not distance himself enough from the opposition that Levinas sees as characteristic of the tradition, where the idea of death occurs either as annihilation, negation, nothingness, or as pure being, as in a vision of an afterlife, eternal life.11 In understanding death as Dasein’s mode of being, it might seem that Heidegger avoids falling into the trap of equating death with nothingness, where “Death appears as a passage from being to no-longer-being understood as the result of a logical operation: negation” (MT 10); but, as Levinas reads him, he does so only at the expense of reinscribing death in terms of being. Levinas says, “the relation with my death is described as anxiety and returns to the comprehension of nothingness. And therefore the structure of comprehension is preserved concerning the question of my relation to my death” (MT 16). Heidegger, Levinas says, is fascinated by the way in which death seems to make nothingness accessible, but it is anxiety that gives us access to death (MT 77), and death remains unthought in anxiety, even in the lived experience of anxiety (MT 79). The negativity of death is thereby canceled out in Heidegger, who not only returns death to experience in the privileged role he accords to anxiety, but also rejoins a tradition unable to sustain the thought of nothingness. Levinas tells us, “Nothingness has defied western thought” (MT 79) from Aristotle to Bergson. Bergson calls the idea of absolute nothingness “destructive” and a “pseudo-idea,” and dismisses it as absurd (MT 76), and Aristotle seems to have refused to think nothingness in itself (MT 78). It is always a matter of the way in which one being becomes another being (MT 81). The situation is similar for Hegel in The Science of Logic: “there is a nothingness, but a nothingness which awaits being, which wants to be, which will pass into being. Therefore one can ask if in this way beings are already presupposed” (MT 82). For Aristotle, becoming is movement, and it is impossible to think death on this model (MT 78). The notion of metabolê (transition, movement, change) might seem to admit the turning of being into nothingness, may seem to admit the separation of nothingness from being, but corruption, in his analyses, is always thought as closely related to generation. (MT 78). Although Aris-

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totle distinguishes corruption and generation from alteration (MT 78), “metabolê conserves the style of alteration where being subsists in nothingness in such a way that nothingness is not thought as pure nothingness” (MT 80). Hegel said, from the very beginning, that it is impossible to think the nothingness of death in all its purity. While Levinas sees Hegel’s interpretation of nothingness as adhering to the logic of being in The Science of Logic, in the Phenomenology “death is not only a moment playing its role in the thought of being” (MT 91), even if it is finally rendered “intelligible,” ultimately reduced to a moment of self-overcoming, and, as such, it claims its place “in the world” (MT 103). If in the Phenomenology the meaning of death is prevented from entirely collapsing into the play of being that nothingness exhibits in the Logic, where “Pure being and pure nothingness are the same thing” (MT 85), it is because of the ethical significance it attains. As Levinas says about Kant, “it is not by accident that this way of thinking a meaning beyond being is the corollary of an ethics” (MT 73). It is the family as immediate substance that takes on the task of burying the dead, and, in doing so, it transforms death from a natural event, in which the dead are subject to irrational material forces, into an act that honors the dead and confers on death the universality that the act of burial alone can confer. A symbolic act by a blood relation that takes on the natural element of death, the burial of a family member achieves a unique bond between the living and the dead. Levinas says, “In the act of burial there is an exceptional relation of the living to the dead” (MT 98– 99). The singular act of burial takes on a universal significance since it has nothing of the contingency of other acts that can be performed for another in life, as in acts of service, education, or love. “It must be a relation with a singularity and, for it to be ethical, it must have the contents of a universal relation” (MT 95). As Hegel says, in the passage to which Levinas directs our attention, “This action no longer concerns the living, but the dead” (MT 97). If Hegel provokes Levinas’s admiration because he manages to think death, and not simply to describe it (MT 99), death is nonetheless thought “in the world as a moment of the self grasping itself” (MT 103). In this respect, insofar as death becomes a “moment in the appearance of the world” and is rendered “intelligible” to the survivor, Hegel’s account

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suffers from the same fault as Heidegger’s, in which the death of the other is an intraworldly event (MT 54). For Levinas, on the contrary, “death is not of this world” (MT 130). Refusing the alternative offered by the tradition, Levinas asks, “Is death not something other than the dialectic of being-nothingness in the flux of time?” (MT 16) Where Heidegger finds certainty in death, Levinas sees ambiguity and enigma (MT 16); while Heidegger poses the problem of death as that which is most proper to Dasein, as the inevitable (see MT 40), Levinas sees in death the indeterminacy of a pure question (see MT 16). If, for Heidegger, death is that which is most my own—“death signifies my death,” in which Dasein’s being-there is grasped in its “authenticity and integrity” (MT 56)—Levinas’s concern is the meaning that comes from the death of the other (MT 12). As far as Heidegger is concerned, the death of others only distracts us from the real problem of death, and while on his account anxiety provides privileged access to death, Levinas asks if it is not in dread that death approaches. If death cannot be reduced to experience, Levinas asks if it is not in what he calls an “affection more passive than trauma” (MT 11) that death takes on its meaning. Levinas retrieves the sense of excess, scandal, and crisis that Socrates’ death carries in Plato’s Phaedo. (See MT 10, 16, and 20.) Levinas insists that death is inseparable from the relation to the other (MT 9), and that “My relation with death is also made of the emotional and intellectual repercussion of knowing the death of others” (MT 11). It is not death, as it is for Heidegger, that individuates Dasein, but “The other [who] individuates me in the responsibility I have for him. The death of the other who dies affects me in my identity, even in my responsibility” (MT 14–15). For “In the culpability of surviving, the death of the other is my affair” (MT 44). My infinite responsibility for the other, the impossibility of fulfilling it, is patience. Levinas contests the privilege of the death of the I. For him, not all meaning is reducible to being. The nothingness of death is not a simple negation of being. The meaning of death is not contained in finitude. For Levinas, death concerns, above all, my responsibility for the death of the other. Levinas insists that “the death of the other affects me more than my own” (MT 121). Levinas maintains this against Heidegger’s understanding of death by way of the anxiety Dasein experiences in the face of its own death. In the Heideggerian analyses it would be inauthentic to

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focus on the death of others in an attempt to understand the meaning of death. Levinas seeks a meaning in death that is not reducible to the terms of being; he stresses the alterity of death, the way in which death refuses the categories of being, the way it presents us with an excess. (See MT 10 and 20.) Death is disquieting: there is in death a surplus of meaning (MT 41)—a meaning that is uncontainable, that goes beyond the everyday. “Is it possible that he can be dead?” signifies something other than the idle talk of curiosity. Death is a pure question mark, an enigma. The death of the other puts me in question. It poses the question of my response to the death of the other, a response that consists of my responsibility for the death of the other (MT 91). Levinas approaches death as a scandal, as if it were murder, as always premature. He approaches death as my taking on the responsibility of being a survivor (MT 81). The question of “responsibility for others,” which includes “my responsibility for the death of the other, my responsibility as a survivor” (MT 65), is elevated above my anxiety before my own death. What concrete meaning can this have as we move beyond the twentieth century in the memory of Levinas? Levinas reminds us that:12 This is the century that in thirty years has seen two world wars, the totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. This is the century which is drawing to a close in the haunting memory of the return of everything signified by these barbaric names: suffering and evil are deliberately imposed, yet no reason sets limits to the exasperation of a reason become political and detached from all ethics. Among these events the Holocaust of the Jewish people under the reign of Hitler seems to us the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, where evil appears in its diabolical horror. . . . The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity. . . . Did not the word of Nietzsche on the death of God take on, in the extermination camps, the signification of a quasiempirical fact?

Ultimately, for Heidegger, death and time (says Levinas) are thought as “modalities of being” (MT 63). Even God is reduced to the questioning of being. Levinas asks whether the “disquietude of God does not have other significations for philosophy than the forgetting of being and the errance of ontology” (MT 65). For Heidegger, everything that is in-

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terrogated returns to the question What is being? (MT 65). For Levinas, another question arises behind the question of being, one that is irreducible to its terms. “Does the trauma of the other come from the Other [autrui]? Is the nothingness of death the very nudity of the face of the neighbor? ‘Thou shalt not commit murder’ is the nudity of the face’ ” (MT 134). Trauma returns, but it is never fully present. There is always more for it to dispense. In a sense, it is nothing but repetition. Trauma is foreignness incarnate: absolute otherness, not being oneself, being outside oneself—and therefore no longer being in any of the recognizable meanings of the term. To undergo trauma is to fail to recognize oneself in the places one usually finds oneself.13 Trauma is beyond self and other. Being moved by the other is to be affected, not by the other, but by what the other is affected by, the other’s suffering. To be traumatized—in trauma the “to be” becomes redundant. Shoah as trauma—humanity’s trauma, philosophy’s trauma—remains still, and always, to be thought. How could this have happened? How could it not have been forestalled? The standard questions—How could the unthinkable, the impossible, have occurred? How could it— How can it?—be thought? To think it is to reduce it to a theme. Not to think it is to abscond responsibility. Here is the inevitable movement of philosophy, the reduction of the saying to the said, the betrayal of the other by the same, a reduction and a betrayal that are as necessary as they are dissimulating. Without often naming it—which thematizes and reduces it to an event comparable to any other (see OB 184; AE 232)—Levinas gave his life, devoted his work, to thinking the Shoah, to a mourning of philosophy: a mourning of what philosophy had become in allowing itself to flee from the Shoah. The rhythm of philosophy’s language that Levinas discerns in the reduction and betrayal of the saying by the said is a restless rhythm, incessant and unstoppable. Breathless, it calls for renewal. It is discontinuous. The time of philosophy is diachrony. Philosophers unfold new meanings, and in doing so they produce an account that makes a said of the saying; but, says Levinas, “this account is itself without end and without continuity, that is, goes from the one to the other, is a tradition. It thereby renews itself. New meanings arise” (OB 169; AE 215). If philosophy has a tendency to fix the meaning of statements, to

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render accounts, its function is also not to allow its saying to rest in a said. For Levinas, time is not in relation to the end; it is in relation to the other. (See MT 123.) For Levinas, “Time is not the limitation of being but the relation with infinity. Death is not annihilation but the necessary question for this relation with infinity or time to be produced” (MT 21). And the relation with infinity is nothing but “the responsibility of one mortal for another” (MT 135). I want to recall two questions that Levinas poses. Both questions concern war. The first, from the opening page of the preface to Totality and Infinity (TI 21; TeI ix–x): Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war? The state of war suspends morality. . . . The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means—politics—is henceforth enjoined as the very exercise of reason. . . . Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same.

And the second, from the final chapter of Otherwise than Being (OB 177; AE 223): Does not the war perpetuate that which it is called to make disappear, and consecrate war and its virile virtues in good conscience? One has to reconsider the meaning of a certain human weakness, and no longer see in patience only the reverse side of the ontological finitude of the human. But for that one has to be patient oneself without asking patience of the others— and for that one has to admit a difference between oneself and the others.

When Levinas articulates a wariness of totalities, when he reminds us of the need to distinguish between the legitimacy of the state and the meaning of ethics, he recalls an event that was justified by a political regime and excused by countless others. He recalls an event that cannot be named. It cannot be named—in the sense that it “has never been able to remain closed up in its site” (OB 184; AE 232). What is most striking is not that this event still haunts us, but that Levinas’s response to it is not to advocate war. His response is patience. Endurance. Enduring time. Duration. The time of patience.

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What is most striking is that it is a response. Passivity. It is his response. It is not a proposal, nor a program outlined for others. As a response, it asks for nothing. It calls for no action, demands no counterresponse. Of course, Levinas leaves us the legacy of his books, his works, and these books will take on, have already taken on, a life of their own. Levinas’s radical passivity, his vigilant insistence in marking the difference between asking patience of myself and demanding it of others, will be converted into a philosophy—despite itself. In this sense there is a danger that the gift of his work, the gift of his death, will be “for nothing,” that it will be absurd, that its meaning will be pure “nonsense” (MT 135). This risk is one that Levinas’s work embraces, without forestalling. His work is open to risk. It is “a fine risk.” He acknowledges, in the distance he finds it necessary to take from Hegel, that the death of the other can lose its transcendence through the customs that organize it, in a society to which the other and I both belong, in a social body (see MT 134) where, as he says in Totality and Infinity, “The meaning of individuals . . . is derived from totality” (TI 22; TeI x). Levinas affirms the importance of justice as a relationship that will set us up, the other and I—among all the others—as equals, a relationship that will be guaranteed by a system, legal or otherwise, a totality; but above all, he reiterates (or creates a space where such iteration can take place) that justice cannot occur without the saying from which it proceeds. He says: “It is not without importance to know if the egalitarian and just state in which man is fulfilled (and which is to be set up, and especially to be maintained) proceeds from a war of all against all, or from the irreducible responsibility of the one for all, and if it can do without friendships and faces” (OB 159–60; AE 203).

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Levinas’s Language There is a profound complicity between what is said in Levinas’s Otherwise than Being and how it comes to be represented.1 For Levinas, representation plays a role subordinate to the ethical responsibility that inspires it.2 If representation is understood both as the outcome of Levinas’s own attempts to write, to communicate, to manifest or bring to light his philosophy, and as the results of others’ efforts to interpret it, a question arises as to what ought to be the aim of such interpretation. There is an intricate relationship between the way in which Levinas’s language works and what he wants to say. To take seriously Levinas’s language is not only to notice how it takes effect, but also to think about what it would mean to speak on Levinas’s behalf. What does it mean to try to explain Levinas’s philosophy, to put oneself in the position of answering for him, or to anticipate objections that might arise in the face of his philosophy? What could it mean to take up a Levinasian position, to be faithful to his philosophy—supposing that one has understood it? (And what it might mean to have understood it must itself remain in question.) Levinas says, “In the saying [le dire] of responsibility, which is an exposure to an obligation for which no one could replace me, I am unique” (OB 138–39; AE 177). Given Levinas’s persistent affirmation that I am irreplaceable, what should my response, as his reader, be? If I cannot take Levinas’s place, stand in for him, speak for him, how should I position myself in relation to his work? Whereas the tradition of Western philosophy has typically construed the ethical relationship as derivative and secondary, Levinas claims to approach my responsibility for others as “irreducible” (OB 135; AE 172).

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That is, responsibility for others is not reducible to a part in a system that would be representable, and that therefore could be parceled out, so that others could stand in for me, could be substituted for me. (See OB 136; AE 174.) Levinas emphasizes the noncoincidence of the self, its inability to gather itself up and be in control of itself as if from the beginning, as if it were only a free subject, as if it were master of itself, author of its own destiny, as if its responsibility to the other were a matter of free choice: “The I approached in responsibility is for-the-other, is a denuding, an exposure to being affected, a pure susceptiveness. It does not posit itself, possessing itself and recognizing itself; it is consumed and delivered over, dis-locates itself, loses its place, is exiled, relegates itself into itself” (OB 138; AE 176).3 One of the questions motivating this chapter is the concern that by construing ethical responsibility as asymmetrical and unequal, Levinas is violating the essence of the egalitarian or democratic ideal that many of us hold dear. What accounts for Levinas’s insistence on the inequality of my relation to others, the incommensurability of this relation, and how can this inequality be thought “in a sense absolutely opposed to oppression” (OB 177; AE 223)? Even to conceive of my responsibility to the other as a relationship is to reduce the I and the other to reciprocal terms. (See OB 138 and AE 176; OB 160 and AE 205.) Levinas prefers to describe my obligation to the other as “substitution,” where the subject is a “hostage” (OB 136; AE 136). But in emphasizing that I can never do enough for the other (OB 138; AE 175), that my commitment increases in the measure that I answer to it (OB 139–40; AE 178), does Levinas not place impossible, unreasonable, intolerable demands on the subject? Does he go too far in his insistence on the infinite responsibility I have for the other, in making me responsible even for the persecution of the one who persecutes me (OB 166; AE 212)? Levinas denies that “the alienation of the same who is ‘for the other’ ” involves “slavery” (OB 135; AE 172). I want to suggest that unless we take account of Levinas’s language—particularly the way in which the saying and the said function in his work—we will not understand how Levinas construes the difference between alienation and slavery, between inequality and oppression, between responsibility for the other and domination by the other, between bearing witness to infinity and being constrained by a superior.

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We have already begun to see, in Chapter 4, the temporal structure that subtends saying. Here I want to show how the ambivalence that characterizes the relationship between the saying and the said, according to Levinas, depends upon his understanding of time as diachrony. Consequently, I will focus on how language works in Levinas’s philosophy, how Levinas construes contradiction in relation to the temporality of the said and the saying, and then I will go on to address the relationship between contradiction and the “third party.” I take the concept of the “third party” to be fundamental for any attempt to come to terms with how Levinas construes politics and the state—the public face of morality. By elucidating first the function of language as diachronic, in order to prepare the way for a discussion of the third party as Levinas sees it, I hope to go some way toward answering the question of how Levinas’s philosophy can be understood as a philosophy that puts into question the claims of equality without endorsing the very oppression and domination that it seeks to alleviate. I will suggest that there is a necessary betrayal involved in the very attempt to do philosophy, and that this betrayal concerns the very function of language as thematization. It is the task of language to betray what it also expresses—and in the function of language as expression there lies hope. Since language is never fixed, since it constantly eludes synchrony, such hope cannot be fixed; it can only be renewed in the diachrony of discourse. The rhythmic alternation of language between the saying and the said incessantly unsettles the sedimentation of the said. To fail to pay attention to the way language is put to work in Levinas’s philosophy is also to fall short of understanding the claim that his work makes for itself—a claim that in the end is not made on its own account, but precisely for the other.4 To reduce what Levinas’s texts say to a content, a theme, or a thesis is to refuse to acknowledge the efficacy of the distinction between the said and the saying. Of course, as Levinas often reminds us, such a reduction is unavoidable—thematization is “inevitable” (OB 151; AE 193). Indeed, it is not merely inevitable; it is also necessary. The saying calls for the said. Responsibility requires justice. (See OB 45; AE 58.) Ethics needs philosophy.

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The Alternating Movement of Philosophy The role of philosophy, as Levinas understands it, is no simple one. Philosophy follows an “alternating movement” that Levinas compares to “that which leads from skepticism to the refutation that reduces it to ashes, and from its ashes to its rebirth” (OB 165; AE 210). Philosophy alternates between serving justice and reducing justice to being. Philosophy must thematize: it must convert the saying into the said, but it must also “reduce that betrayal” (OB 156; AE 198). Levinas says, “This reduction always has to be attempted, because of the trace of sincerity which the words themselves bear and which they owe to saying as witness, even when the said dissimulates the saying in the correlation set up between the saying and the said” (OB 152; AE 193). The movement of philosophy is a double movement—or rather an infinite iteration of the oscillation from saying to said and from said to saying. There is betrayal, and there is a reduction of betrayal: “The philosophical speaking that betrays in its said the proximity it conveys before us still remains, as a saying, a proximity and a responsibility” (OB 168; AE 214). Because of the alternation of betrayal and reduction—which Levinas also calls an “enigmatic ambivalence” (OB 152; AE 194)—philosophy cannot rest content in the simultaneity of consciousness, as if it could array all its ideas for appraisal, like a merchant who displays wares for purchase. Just as skepticism returns despite its refutation, so philosophy must be prepared to repeatedly ward off the tendency of the saying to congeal into the said, or of responsibility to turn into a relationship in which the face no longer appears. The subject cannot gather itself up without remainder, cannot collect everything together once and for all, cannot assemble or incorporate itself adequately under the sign of the transcendental—as if it were a free origin, as if it were a consciousness capable of recuperating everything. Such a subject—able to recall everything, able to catch up with itself, able to coincide with itself—would integrate even the responsibility for the other, whereas for Levinas the subject can never effect such an integration, can never dispense with its obligation to others. The subject “is born in the beginninglessness of an anarchy and in the endlessness of obligation” (OB 140; AE 178).

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Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Absorption The time of philosophy is diachrony: “Philosophy is called upon to conceive ambivalence, to conceive it in several times” (OB 162; AE 206). Called to thought by justice, says Levinas, philosophy “synchronizes in the said the diachrony of the difference between the one and the other, and remains the servant of the saying that signifies [this] difference” (OB 162; AE 206–7). Philosophy thus “says that of which it is but a servant, but of which it makes itself master by saying it, and then reduces its pretensions in a new said” (OB 126; AE 162). At issue here is what Levinas refers to as “the very ambiguity of every said” (OB 152; AE 194), an ambiguity which serves as the touchstone for his entire discussion of language (see OB 62; AE 78). The ambiguous nature of language consists in the tendency of the said to absorb the saying, together with the insistent reference of discourse to an outside that resists inclusion in the said. In his earlier philosophy—for example, in Time and the Other—Levinas had often seen the need to reject an alternative that he sometimes expressed in terms of an opposition between idealism and realism. He sought to articulate a relation between the same and the other in which alterity is not absorbed by sameness, and otherness does not absorb the subject.5 In either case, the possibility of radical transcendence is eliminated. In Otherwise than Being, he insists that there is a meaning that resists and goes beyond the absorption of the saying by the said. That is, despite the absorption that occurs, there is still a meaning to be found that not only escapes the fixity of the said, but breathes into the said the spirit of its meaning, giving propositions and statements their meaning in the first place. Alphonso Lingis says, “Everyone has known . . . a situation in which the rift between the saying and the said opens up. A situation in which the saying, essential and imperative, separates from the said, which somehow it no longer orders and hardly requires.”6 Although there is a certain inevitability about the turning of the saying into the said,7 and although language—insofar as it constitutes a system of signs—consists in the elements that form a structure, language bears a meaning beyond its resolution into themes, propositions, and assertions. On the one hand, there is “the nominalization of the statement, which cuts it from the proposition it makes to another” (OB 62; AE 78), and, on the other hand, a “reference to an interlocutor perma-

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nently breaks through the text that the discourse claims to weave in thematizing and enveloping all things” (OB 170; AE 217). Language would thus “exceed the limits of what is thought” (OB 169; AE 215). It admits an “indirect discourse” (OB 171; AE 217), one in which the saying remains “indifferent to the said” (OB 161; AE 205). Since “the saying is both an affirmation and a retraction of the said” (OB 44; AE 56), the philosopher must loosen the “grip of being” (OB 44; AE 56). The philosopher’s task is to reduce the said, while “retaining an echo of the reduced said in the form of ambiguity, of diachronic expression” (OB 44; AE 56). Thus Levinas comments on his own attempt to communicate in writing: “And I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens to it, and who is situated outside the said that the discourse says, outside all it includes. That is true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment” (OB 170; AE 216–17).

Interruption Derrida has noted the peculiarity of Levinas’s language, the unique demand it makes on the reader. “Nearly always with him, this is how he sets his work in the fabric: by interrupting the weaving of our language and then by weaving together the interruptions themselves, another language comes to disturb the first one. It doesn’t inhabit it,8 but haunts it” (AM 18; EM 29).9 I want to focus for a moment on the notion of interruption to which both Derrida and Levinas appeal. Levinas says (OB 169–70; AE 215–16): In relating the interruption of the discourse or my being ravished into discourse I connect its thread. . . . The said thematizes the interrupted dialogue or the dialogue delayed by silences, failure or delirium, but the intervals are not recuperated. Does not the discourse that suppresses the interruptions of discourse by relating them maintain the discontinuity under the knots with which the thread is tied again? The interruptions of the discourse found again and recounted in the immanence of the said are conserved like knots in a thread tied again, the trace of diachrony that does not enter into the present, that refuses simultaneity.

Levinas acknowledges the susceptibility of every saying to its said, the inevitability of this absorption, whereby interruptions are woven to-

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gether, related to one another, narrated in a story. His own prose, despite his constant vigilance, is not immune to the absorption of the saying into the said (see OB 62; AE 78), or to the neutralization of the interlocutor that takes place in this conversion: “The unnarratable other loses his face as a neighbor in narration” (OB 166; AE 211), and this is just as true for Levinas’s attempt to communicate the irreducibility of the ethical relationship as it is for any other philosophical enterprise. Aware of the ever-present danger that the saying be allowed to congeal into a said, and become fixed there, apparently an eternal truth that takes itself to be fully present, equal to itself, coinciding with itself, conscious of its own freedom, mastery, origin, power, Levinas asks (OB 169; AE 215): Are we not at this moment in the process of barring the issue that our whole essay attempts, and of encircling our position from all sides? The exceptional words by which the trace of the past and the extravagance of the approach are said—One, God—become terms, reenter into the vocabulary and are put at the disposition of philologists, instead of confounding philosophical language. Their very explosions are recounted. But this account is itself without end and without continuity, that is, goes from the one to the other, is a tradition. It thereby renews itself. New meanings arise in its meaning, and their exegesis is an unfolding, or history before all historiography.

Levinas sees his work not as definitive, but as provoking new interpretations, as taking up a position only to be deposed, displaced, dislocated, by other philosophers who are thereby charged with not letting his saying rest in a said, or allowing it to become a static, fixed, lifeless statement—reduced to a thesis or proposition that bears no relation to the other to which it was addressed, and by whom it was inspired. As Levinas says, books “call for other books” (OB 171; AE 217).

An Abuse of Language If we are to take our cue from Levinas, the expectation that others will interpret his work is not a command in the sense of a pure said. It “enigmatically commands me, commanding and not commanding” (OB 161; AE 205). We find here the resonance of Isaiah’s words, often quoted by Levinas, “Here I am”—a phrase from which (Levinas says)

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the “word God is still absent,” even though in this phrase “God is for the first time involved in words” (OB 149; AE 190). “Here,” says Levinas, “there is an inversion of order: the revelation is made by him that receives it” (OB 156; AE 199). The word “God” is a “said unique of its kind” (OB 151; AE 193), since it “gets its meaning from the witness borne, which thematization does betray in theology which introduces it into the system of language, in the order of the said. But this abusive statement is at once forbidden. The limits of the present in which infinity betrays itself break up. Infinity is beyond the scope of the unity of transcendental apperception, cannot be assembled into a present, and refuses being recollected” (OB 151; AE 193). Infinity can be registered only in a trace, in “proximity, in signification, in my giving of signs,” in “my saying without said, preoriginary saying which is said in the mouth of the very one that receives the witness. Its signification has let itself be betrayed in the logos only to convey itself before us” (OB 151; AE 193). Thus Levinas calls it an “abusive word” (OB 156; AE 199). The “abuse of language”10 (OB 156; AE 198) that takes place consists of the “indiscretion of said” through which subjectivity is stated “despite its foreignness to the said” (OB 156; AE 198). Levinas says (OB 156; AE 199): The revelation of the beyond being is perhaps indeed but a word, but this “perhaps” belongs to an ambiguity in which the anarchy of the Infinite resists the univocity of an originary principle. It belongs to an ambiguity or an ambivalence and an inversion which is stated in the word God, the apex of vocabulary, admission of the stronger than me in me and of the “less than nothing,” nothing but an abusive word, a beyond themes in a thought that does not yet think or thinks more than it thinks.

We have already seen that philosophy must negotiate the ambivalence of language, the ambiguity of the said, by continual alternation between betrayal and reduction. Levinas says, “Philosophy, which is consigned in the said, converts disinterestedness and its signification into essence and, by an abuse of language, to be sure, says that of which it is but a servant, but of which it makes itself master by saying it, and then reduces its pretensions in a new said” (OB 126; AE 162). The saying that is forever subject to betrayal is a bearing witness to the other in a word that is my own—God, infinity, one. Levinas says (OB 150; AE 191–92):11

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An Event That Cannot Be Named What, then, does Levinas seek to accomplish with this language that uncovers interruptions even while converting them into a said, thematizing them, stringing them together into a coherent discourse? He tells us: “This book has exposed my passivity, passivity as the-one-for-theother; it transcends essence” (OB 141; AE 179). But he well knows that “The saying is fixed in a said, is written, becomes a book, law and science” (OB 159; AE 202), that “In the writing the saying does indeed become a pure said, a simultaneousness of the saying and of its conditions” (OB 171; AE 217). And this is why philosophy is called for, why the saying calls for philosophy (see OB 44; AE 56), why philosophy must renew itself, why there is an urgent task for philosophers, and why Levinas would rather risk the charge of utopianism than allow the said to absorb the saying once and for all. This is why Otherwise than Being recalls “that what took place humanly has never been able to remain closed up in its site. There is no need to refer to an event in which the non-site, becoming a site, would have exceptionally entered into the spaces of history” (OB 184; AE 232).12 There is no need to refer to such an event, because to do so would be to reduce it to an event—to an instant in the succession of instants, to the time of continuous history, where an instant is comparable to any other cross section of time. There is no need to refer to such an event, because there is another reference from which this saying acquires its energy— not only does it refer to an event, a discrete historical moment, an act, or a period of time that can be consigned to the past in the neat phrases of historians, but also, and more important, it refers to an interlocutor. Without naming this exception to history, Levinas makes its presence felt, eliciting our response through “indirect discourse” (OB 171; AE 218). Philosophy finds itself at the service of justice, but its very strength—its systematic thematization—is also its weakness. It is a be-

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trayal of what it nonetheless conveys. The risk of being misunderstood is one that must be taken—otherwise philosophy reverts to a communication that takes itself to be equivalent to information, to knowledge, to a said: “In the writing the saying does indeed become a pure said” (OB 170–71; AE 217). The danger that Levinas’s philosophy will be reduced to a set of propositions—so many theses to be refuted by his critics—is a risk that he accepts in committing himself to paper, in writing books. For, as we saw, “books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being written and printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forewords. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said” (OB 171; AE 217). That Levinas’s saying will remain unheard is an ontological possibility, but an ethical impossibility—and thus he does not abandon hope.13

Subversion of Essence To hear in Levinas’s language only the articulation of a position— one which is to be distinguished from that of Hegel, Heidegger, or Husserl, for example—or to take it upon ourselves to defend his position would be to diminish the meaning of Levinas’s saying, to reduce it to the level of the said. To allow the saying of responsibility to echo in the system of meanings that he assigns to a series of terms— obsession, signification, substitution, proximity, diachrony, subjectivity—would be not so much to repudiate the priority of essence as to permit another meaning, a meaning that goes beyond essence. In his own writing Levinas admits to—even aspires to—philosophy in the sense that it has acquired for itself in the West: “It is not by chance, through foolishness or through usurpation that the order of truth and essence, which the present exposition itself claims to hold to, is at the first rank in Western philosophy” (OB 156–57; AE 199). But if Levinas still wishes to lay claim to philosophical exposition, he also wishes to undercut its confidence in certain truths that remain undisturbed even by some of the most apparently wayward disciples of Western philosophy. “Phenomenality,” says Levinas, “the exhibition of being’s essence in truth, is a permanent presupposition of the philosophical tradition of

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the West” (OB 132; AE 168). For Levinas, even if there is a sense in which being’s essence holds sway, this does not indicate that “all meaning proceeds from essence” (OB 176; AE 223). Precisely what Levinas puts in question is “the reference of all signification to essence” (OB 156; AE 198). What he contests is “the ultimacy or the priority of the ontological problem” (OB 140; AE 178), asking if “there is not heard a voice coming from horizons at least as vast as those in which ontology is situated” (OB 140; AE 178). Levinas’s interest lies not in refuting the primacy of ontology—which would be impossible—but in exposing the “subversion of essence” (OB 170; AE 216) that occurs despite this primacy, thereby affirming a meaning that is not circumscribed by essence, but which inverts it.

Everything Shows Itself We have seen that Levinas finds a meaning in ethical responsibility that goes beyond phenomenality. That which appears, and is represented through signification, as a being—God, for example—does not exhaust its meaning: “The statement of the beyond being, of the name of God, does not allow itself to be walled up in the conditions of its enunciation. It benefits from an ambiguity or enigma” (OB 156; AE 199). The same incapacity comes to the fore in Levinas’s articulation of goodness, which cannot be contained by essence any more than can God. Levinas says, “Goodness will indeed show itself [se montrera] in ontology metamorphosed into essence, and to be reduced; but essence cannot contain it. . . . everything shows itself [tout se montre]” (OB 137; AE 175). The phrase tout se montre is one that Levinas takes up repeatedly in Otherwise than Being, and sometimes more than once within a few sentences. In the following passage Levinas claims both that everything shows itself, and that whatever is shown is inadequate to the infinite, to saying, to responsibility. He says: “subjectivity . . . is . . . stated by an abuse of language through which in the indiscretion of the said everything is shown [tout se montre]. Everything is shown [tout se montre] by indeed betraying its meaning, but philosophy is called upon to reduce that betrayal, by an abuse that justifies proximity itself in which the Infinite comes to pass. But this remains to be shown [Mais cela reste à montrer]” (OB 156; AE 198). Everything shows itself, but what motivates this

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showing still (and always) remains to be shown. What motivates the showing of being, the appearance of phenomena—representation—is justice. Levinas says, “But it is for justice that everything shows itself [tout se montre]” (OB 161; AE 205); “But everything shows [tout se montre] itself for justice” (OB 163; AE 207); “justice . . . requires . . . phenomenality” (OB 163; AE 207); “Everything shows itself [Tout se montre] and is said in being for justice” (OB 163; AE 207).14 With the repetition of the phrase “everything shows itself for justice,” Levinas accomplishes the unsaying of the showing that is the only way for the saying to be acknowledged—even if it is also necessarily dissimulated by its inevitable conversion into a said. This insistent assertion of justice as the reason that everything is shown thus both achieves and betrays the saying—a constant oscillation that marks the very movement of philosophy as a reduction, a betrayal, and a further reduction—without end, like the infinite return of skepticism. “The return of skepticism,” says Levinas, “despite the refutation that puts its thesis into contradiction with the conditions for any thesis, would be pure nonsense if everything in time were recallable, that is, able to form a structure with the present, if the saying were rigorously contemporaneous with the said, if everything [tout] in the past could be evoked and shown [se montre]” (OB 171; AE 217).

Contradiction There is no contradiction “without reflection” (OB 156; AE 199), Levinas tells us—no contradiction without time, since reflection is “after the event” (OB 156; AE 199). Contradiction “does not break out between two simultaneous statements, but between a statement and its conditions, as though they were in the same time. The statement of the beyond being, of the name of God, does not allow itself to be walled up in the conditions of its enunciation. It benefits from an ambiguity or an enigma” (OB 156; AE 199). Levinas characterizes this situation as “a dilemma in the said, but an ambivalence in the saying” (OB 154; AE 196). “It is a dilemma or an alternative if one sticks to the phenomena, to the said, where one passes successively, without being able to stop, from the affirmation of the Infinite to its negation in me” (OB 154; AE 196). But it

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is an ambiguity or enigma that is retained in a trace if one allows the saying to reverberate throughout the succession of affirmation and negation conducted by the logic of propositional assertion. Levinas says, “the-one-for-the-other . . . shows itself [se montre] in the said, but does so only after the event, betrayed, foreign to the said of being; it shows itself in it [s’y montre] as a contradiction” (OB 135; AE 173). This is why the time of philosophy, of the saying, is diachronous, why philosophy concerns several times, and is not simply the result of the thematizing consciousness that presents all its ideas in a simultaneous present. “The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose signification before the other until then went in one direction” (OB 157; AE 200).

The Third Party The third party is introduced by Levinas as a “problem”—as the reason philosophy is necessary. If it were not for all the others, if there were only the neighbor, there would be no problem, no need for philosophy. But in fact, of course, “The others concern me from the first” (OB 157; AE 202)—and so there is a problem from the first: that of bringing responsibility to justice, introducing justice into responsibility, acknowledging the equality of the I and the other with everyone else. Levinas says, “justice can be established only if I, always evaded from the concept of the ego, always desituated and divested of being, always in nonreciprocatable relationship with the other, can become an other like the others” (OB 160–61; AE 204–5). So, while the accent of Levinas’s philosophy might seem to be on the exclusive nature of my relation to the other as that which gives rise to philosophy, to justice, he must also recognize the claim of others—of other others, of the “Other and the others” (Autrui et les Autres), as he puts it in a subheading of Totality and Infinity (TI 212; TeI 187). In doing so he admits that, in the final analysis, I am equal to all the others, and that there is a legitimate concern for myself. In rare instances we find this acknowledgment in Otherwise than Being: “My lot is important” (OB 161; AE 205). Or again: “To be sure— but this is another theme—my responsibility for all can and has to be manifest itself also in limiting itself. The ego can, in the name of this un-

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limited responsibility, be called upon to concern itself also with itself. The fact that the other, my neighbor, is also a third party with respect to another, who is also a neighbor, is the birth of thought, consciousness” (OB 128; AE 165).15 Although Levinas recognizes that my lot is important, and that concern for myself is legitimate, since I am in the end equal to all the others, he adds an important caveat: “But it is still out of my responsibility that my salvation has meaning, despite the danger in which it puts this responsibility, which it may encompass and swallow up, just as the State issued from the proximity of the neighbor is always on the verge of integrating him into a we, which congeals both me and the neighbor” (OB 161; AE 205). If I had a choice, Levinas says, I would choose myself before the other. But it is precisely the condition of not yet being free, of not having a choice, that Levinas seeks to uncover in the notion of the subject as hostage. He says that the “condition of being hostage is not chosen; if there had been a choice, the subject would have kept his asfor-me, and the exits found in inner life” (OB 136; AE 173). The third party “interrupts the face to face of a welcome” (OB 150; AE 191), as a “necessary interruption” (OB 160; AE 204). But, as Levinas warns us repeatedly, we should not imagine that the third party is an empirical other who comes to join, or to intervene in, the couple united as face-to-face. “It is not that the entry of a third party would be an empirical fact” (OB 159; AE 201); “In no way is justice a degradation of obsession, . . . a degeneration that would be produced in the measure that for empirical reasons the initial duo would become a trio” (OB 159; AE 203); “the third party does not come empirically to trouble proximity” (OB 160; AE 204). Why is this so? Because “The others concern me from the first. . . . My relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others. . . . This means concretely or empirically that justice is not a legality regulating human masses. . . Justice is impossible without the one that renders it finding himself in proximity” (OB 159; AE 202–3). Thus Levinas affirms the importance of justice as a relationship between equals, but above all he reiterates that justice cannot occur without the saying from which it proceeds. To return to a question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: How does Levinas’s philosophy eschew the confirmation of the very structures of domination that he seeks to

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put into question? The answer is paradoxical—in a sense it does not. Philosophy itself is culpable of betraying the very responsibility it seeks to illuminate. Conceptually, the distinction between the saying and the said cannot sustain itself as a permanent and indelibly clear distinction. If philosophy betrays the other, it also betrays itself inasmuch as it is the servant of the saying. The betrayal of philosophy is both a betrayal of the other accomplished by philosophy itself, and a betrayal of philosophy by its other. There is an infinite betrayal accomplished by language—a betrayal of language by language itself. The saying is betrayed by the said, and the said gives way to the saying, in a movement that cannot be captured in the synchrony of the “I think.” The movement of philosophical language is diachronous. It moves insistently, remorselessly, without stopping for breath. What is of interest here is the chiasmic turning of language into its other—despite its logic, language says other than what it means to say at the level of coherence and meaning. Ethics cuts through ontology, interrupts it, effaces itself. The diastasis, the separation, that is thereby effected, opening a space and closing it up, is a spacing that orchestrates the images on which Levinas draws—the rhythm of breathing, the tootight skin, the taut-stretched belly of maternity. Inhalation turning into exhalation, spaces without any space. There is no room to breathe, nowhere to go, no escape from the ethical call of the other. No retreat. To ask what this “means” is somehow beside to point. If we haven’t understood what it means to be responsible for the hunger of others, perhaps we haven’t understood what it means to be human beings capable of asking for meaning. Does this degenerate into unfashionable humanism? Levinas addresses the question, referring to the difficulty of conceiving of the difference between inequality and oppression “in a world where infidelity to Nietzsche . . . is . . . taken as blasphemy” (OB 177; AE 223), and he answers with a question: “Can one understand the subjectivity of the subject beyond essence?” (OB 177; AE 223). And this remains a question for us: Can we? Let me close by recalling the close association that Levinas finds between the infinite reduction and betrayal that he sees as the task of philosophy, and the process by which skepticism reasserts itself, despite its refutation. “The permanent return of skepticism does not so much sig-

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nify the possible breakup of structures as the fact that they are not the ultimate framework of meaning, that for their accord repression can already be necessary. It reminds us of the, in a very broad sense, political character of all logical rationalism, the alliance of logic with politics” (OB 171; AE 217). The event that cannot be named is nonetheless an event that informs Levinas’s most profound philosophical reflections. We can attach labels to it—we can name it the Holocaust—but language cannot contain what exceeds and defies representation. Events can be—and have been—sanctioned and justified by politics. This is why politics, allied with the reason that celebrates as its highest court of authority the logic of noncontradiction, can never have the final word. This is why ethics calls for philosophy. It is why intellectuals “can no longer leave peoples to their customs . . . nor even to their redemptive systems, which, abandoned to their own logic, are implacably inverted” (OB 184; AE 232). I do not think that the need for intellectuals to address the question of ethics indicates, on Levinas’s part, the unthinking universalism or ahistoricism with which his philosophy is sometimes confused. To be sure, the face of the other cuts across history, interrupts our conventional ethics, and this interruption not only is capable of turning into a faceless dictum—there is a sense in which it must do so. But by marking this turning of my response to the face of the other into a static principle that can take on the status of a universal, Levinas is by no means unequivocally endorsing universality. On the contrary, he is insisting on the need to bring it into question wherever and whenever there is a tendency for it to silence all other meanings. Referring us to the words of Jehuda Halevy, Levinas says, “God speaks to each man in particular” (OB 184; AE 232), and since God appears to us only through others, each appearance is irreducible to a general concept of God. A final cautionary note: there are no guarantees as far as Levinas is concerned. No one can know with certainty what might happen in the future, and no one can know how to definitively ward off evil. We cannot ascertain a full coverage of insurance against the possibility of evil. (See OB 119; AE 152.) Levinas can remind us of the face that sustains discourse, of the interlocutor that supports and motivates my language, but that is all he can do. He can write books, but he cannot guarantee that they will be understood. He must take his chances: “To require that a

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communication be sure of being heard is to confuse communication and knowledge, to efface the difference” (OB 167; AE 212). No one can know what will happen in the future. But we can try to understand what has happened in the past, why it happened, how it could have happened—and we can imagine how it might have been, and how it might be, different.

Conclusion The Lapse of Time and the Feminine

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n o n e w a y or another Levinas attempts throughout his work to give expression to a sense of the present that is not governed by ontology, being, or essence, a present that somehow signifies by exceeding, overflowing or going beyond the very thought that thematizes or presents it. A present that cannot be recuperated by memory is one that bypasses or eludes the present of representation, even as it precedes the work of identification that marks the I as a subject of knowledge. The sensibility of enjoyment is a movement in which “the represented turns into a past that had not traversed the present of representation, as an absolute past not receiving its meaning from memory” (TI 130; TeI 103). Here is an order that runs counter to the knowing subject, who constitutes the world by representing it, who exercises a mastery over the always provisional alterity it encounters, the power to convert whatever is foreign to it into the categories of the same. The phenomenal world, or the world of experience, is also the domain of objectivity, universality, and reason. The intentionality of representation is a movement that reduces the other to the same. The knowing subject experiences or comes to know the world by encompassing the otherness or exteriority it confronts, extending the boundaries of the self, identifying what lies outside as itself, and thereby establishing its totality and dominion. Levinas resists both the idea that the defining task of the subject is representation and the idea that the egoism of the “for-itself” is the ultimate meaning of subjectivity. The happiness of sensibility is brought into question by the Other who challenges my freedom and possession.

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Thus the “beyond being . . . signifies the diachrony of responsibility for another and of the ‘deep formerly,’ more ancient than all freedom, which commands it, while, in a present statement, they are synchronized” (OB 19; AE 23). While recognizing that the “exceptional presence of the other” (TI 87; TeI 59) can be only recounted, narrated or represented, and that as such “Every present in its temporal nudity tends toward the future and returns upon the past or resumes that past” (TI 122; TeI 95), he also wants to dislodge the “privilege of representation” (TI 122; TeI 95). Since the order of representation, thematization, essence, being, ontology, or the said will necessarily reassert itself, we are confronted by an ambiguity, an enigma, a betrayal: “the beyond being does and does not revert to ontology; the statement, the beyond, the infinite, becomes and does not become a meaning of being” (OB 19 and AE 23). In the effort to adhere to the sense in which the beyond does not become a meaning of being, Levinas seeks to formulate “a subjectivity irreducible to essence” (OB 17; AE 20), and in doing so, he contests Heidegger, for whom “Every overcoming as well as every revaluing of Being in the subject would still be a case of Being’s essence” (OB 17; AE 21). To challenge “the philosophical privilege of being” is also to point to the inadequacy of understanding the subject as “an articulation of ‘being’s presence to us,’ or parousia” (OB 18; AE 22). For Levinas, “Irreducible to being’s essence is the substitution in responsibility, signification or the one-for-another, . . . or goodness” (OB 18; AE 21–22).

Irreducible Diachrony How can there be a present that is anterior to the time in which it is represented or known? What kind of priority does the instant have to the time that negates it? How can the saying signify beyond the said? In what sense does the infinite interrupt the totality, and how does fecundity create a discontinuity across the continuous time of history? How can there be an immemorial or absolute past that is not susceptible to the recuperative work of reminiscence? How does the ethical interruption of the face that commands my responsibility occur, and how can its resonance signify otherwise than being? What can it mean to speak of time as “a drama, a multiplicity of acts” (TI 284; TeI 260), how is phi-

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losophy to “conceive of ambivalence . . . in several times” (OB 162; AE 206), how can an “irreducible diachrony” be thought? The problem can be specified initially with reference to the temporality of the saying and the said, and with reference to the dual register of the “lapse of time.” Time belongs to ontology, and yet, “In this said, we nonetheless surprise the echo of the saying, whose signification cannot be assembled” (OB 27; AE 34). Thus Levinas both identifies the lapse of time with being and sees it as otherwise than being. He can say both that “The work of being, essence, time, the lapse of time is exposition, truth, philosophy” (OB 30; AE 38) and that “the lapse of time is also something irrecuperable, refractory to the simultaneity of the present, something unrepresentable, immemorial, pre-historical” (OB 38; AE 48). Or again, “The exposition, the phenomenality of being, can not be separated from time” (OB 31; AE 39), but Levinas can speak also of “a temporality beyond reminiscence, in diachrony, beyond essence” (OB 30; AE 39). The saying can be uncovered, or surprised in its echo, only in what Levinas calls the “already said”: “Language has been in operation, and the saying that bore this said, but goes further, was absorbed and died in the said, was inscribed. Or, if one likes, our analysis concerned the time that marks historiography, that is, the recuperable time, the recoverable time, the lost time that can be found again” (OB 36; AE 46). There is no access to the saying except through the said. “It is only in the said, in the epos of saying, that the diachrony of time is synchronized into a time that is recallable, and becomes a theme” (OB 37; AE 48), says Levinas. The saying can be recalled only in a said, if diachrony can be only thought, assembled, or synchronized, and yet the “immemorial . . . is the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present, the insurmountable diachrony of time, a beyond the said” (OB 38; AE 49). The fact that it is only in the said that the saying resounds, and yet the saying remains incommensurable with the said, prompts Levinas to acknowledge “this problem: is not diachrony characterizable only negatively? Is it pure loss? Has it no signification?” (OB 38; AE 49). Either the saying withdraws completely, becomes unattainable and incomprehensible, retreats from all exposition and thematization, closes in on itself, or it gives itself up entirely to consciousness in its manifestation and exposition as said, becomes one with the knowledge and vision it seemed to undercut. “To expose an otherwise than being will still give an onto-

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logical said, in the measure that all monstration exposes an essence” (OB 44; AE 56). Rather than being hamstrung by this apparent dilemma— either the saying can figure only negatively and in opposition to the said, or it is completely subsumed by, contained in, and defused by the said— Levinas turns the problem around, and declares that “there is question of the said and being only because saying or responsibility require justice” (OB 45; AE 58), or that “One has to go back to that hither side, starting from the trace retained by the said, in which everything shows itself” (OB 53; AE 69). Thus the “saying has to be reached in its existence antecedent to the said, or else the said has to be reduced to it” (OB 46; AE 59).

Material Conditionality What allows Levinas to claim that the “lapse of time irrecuperable in the temporalization of time is not only negative like the immemorial” (OB 51; AE 66)? The passage from the merely negative to the positive is marked by the “very patience of corporeality, the pain of labor and ageing” (OB 51; AE 66) and the exposure of “no longer dwelling” (OB 49; AE 62). Just as in Totality and Infinity the feminine presides over the dwelling, and at the same time facilitates the break with intentional language that will be borne out in responsibility for the other, so in Otherwise than Being maternity plays a similar role. It is in “renouncing intentionality” (OB 68; AE 86) that sensibility signifies maternity (OB 71; AE 89). The “maternal body” is a trope for the “hand that gives even the bread taken from its own mouth” (OB 67; AE 85), or the “gestation of the other in the same” that is a “being torn up from oneself,” which as “bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor” (OB 75; AE 95).1 If the welcome of the feminine face in the dwelling is not yet the ethical welcome of the face-to-face, if it is a preoriginal welcome, and if enjoyment somehow precedes representation, yet discovers itself as always consequent upon the primordial status of the other, so maternity is not yet thought or consciousness, although “Maternity, vulnerability, responsibility, proximity, contact—sensibility can slip toward . . . consciousness of . . . , pure knowing” (OB 76; AE 96; emphasis added). Maternity thus prepares “the birth of thought, consciousness, justice and philosophy” (OB 128; AE 165) that Levinas iden-

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tifies with the “third party,” without itself being identified with “this concern for justice” (OB 160; AE 204 ). There is a certain exorbitance in the “corporeality” and “materiality” signified in the “obsession by the other” that Levinas names “maternity” (OB 77; AE 97), as “a body suffering for another, the body as passivity and renouncement, a pure undergoing” (OB 79; AE 100). As the “ultimate sense of . . . vulnerability” (OB 108; AE 137), maternity indicates an attachment that is “irrecuperable” (OB 104 and AE 133; OB 78 and AE 99), and therefore resists representation. In the plot of sensibility as maternity, “I am bound to others before being tied to my body” (OB 76; AE 96). Maternity both describes “responsibility for others” (OB 106; AE 135), as a “complete being ‘for the other’ ” (OB 108; AE 137), and at the same time it remains on the hither side of thought and consciousness, always preparatory. It can “slip toward” knowledge, but it is not yet knowledge. In the strategic role that is performed by maternity, which allows the textual progression to justice, to the third party, to the birth of thought (see TI 128; TeI 101), but which itself does not measure up to the demands of justice, we have begun to see that the formal problem that Levinas confronts in sustaining the claims that he wants to make about time is also reflected in his use of the language of sexual difference.

The Politics of the Feminine Before any final judgment can be made on the significance and function of the feminine in Levinas’s philosophy, the radicality that Levinas claims for alterity must be appreciated, a radicality which cannot be thought apart from his compulsion to return to Heidegger’s ontological difference. In Time and the Other he says, “One cannot ignore [Heidegger’s] distinction . . . between Sein and Sei[e]ndes, Being and being, but which for reasons of euphony I prefer to render as existing and existent” (TO 44; TA 24).2 Levinas never tires of stipulating the need to rethink Heidegger’s ontological difference, but he wants to think it as separation rather than as a distinction, or as “an amphibology” that “does not signify the ultimate” (OB 23; AE 29). To understand why and how Levinas returns to the ontological difference, if only to recast it, is also to understand the extraordinary role he accords to the feminine, as

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an exception to the categories of being, as a way of exceeding the language of ontology. As a mark of the departure from the landscape of ontology, what possibilities do Levinas’s reflections on the feminine open up for feminism, and in what sense do they foreclose the possibility of feminist theory? Is Levinas’s invocation of femininity more complicated than Simone de Beauvoir’s dismissive footnote in The Second Sex would lead us to believe?3 Even if this question is answered affirmatively, this is not to deny that Beauvoir’s skepticism about Levinas has some validity. It is only to point out that Levinas’s equation of the feminine with otherness—which in her judgment amounted to no more than the reduction of women to the inferior other of men, so characteristic of centuries of patriarchal thought—is no simple repetition of the tradition. In raising anew the question of Being, and insisting on the difference between Dasein’s way of existing and the existence of other entities, Heidegger succeeded in focusing philosophical attention on the relationship between the being that Dasein is (Levinas’s existent) and its act of Being (or in Levinas’s terms, its existence). Having posed this relationship as decisive, according to Levinas, Heidegger approached Being or existence as if it were always possessed by someone, or as if the relationship between Being and beings is always one of belonging.4 Levinas searches for a relationship or dialectic, or better still (since both these terms presuppose a subject-object relation), a dynamic or drama “which takes place in a hitherto unsuspected dimension” (EE 30; DE 42). Rather than characterizing the existent as a being who always already understands its relation to the world, albeit vaguely and in a way that is as yet unthematized—a being, that is, like Dasein, who has its Being as an issue from the start—Levinas introduces the notion of hypostasis, in order to examine the instant by which an existent takes on its existence. Heidegger’s philosophy progresses from an analysis of Dasein’s involvement in the everyday, inauthentic world, to an analysis of Dasein’s authentic, resolute and solitary anticipation of its own death in the moment of vision. There is thus a progressive clarification that consists in the movement from the world of circumspection, in which Dasein is fallen, or immersed in the opinions of the they (so that I take over views that are publicly available as if they were my own: I like the music or the art that others like, and so on), to the vision that Dasein acquires when it

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stands alone confronting its finitude. Levinas, as we have seen, objects to this picture on several levels. It overlooks enjoyment and materiality; it tends to denigrate the present as inauthentic, in favor of a future authenticity, and at the same time it tends to align being-with-others (Mitsein) with inauthenticity, while reserving authentic action for a Dasein that has divorced itself from the collectivity of the they. Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein also functions by assuming that Dasein is always already a being which essentially understands, and construing ontology as a method of drawing out explicitly that which Dasein understands implicitly by virtue of its involvement in the world. Let me briefly review how Levinas elaborates each of these points. First, Levinas doesn’t think that our involvement with the world can be reduced to equipmental relations, whereby we eat, or drink, or breathe in order to accomplish further ends. We do not eat simply because we are hungry, we do not take a drink merely because we are thirsty: we also drink in order to drink, we eat because we enjoy eating, Levinas insists. These activities are not to be dismissed as inauthentic; they are part of the fabric of life. In a telling observation, one which cannot fail to be informed by his own imprisonment in a labor camp, and the death of many members of his Jewish family during World War II, Levinas says, “It is in times of misery and privation that the shadow of an ulterior finality which threatens the world is cast behind the object of desire. When one has to eat, drink and warm oneself in order not to die, when nourishment becomes fuel, as in certain kinds of hard labor, the world also seems to be at an end, turned upside down and absurd, needing to be renewed. Time becomes unhinged” (EE 45; DE 68). It is precisely because of the horror of the Holocaust, and because Levinas is concerned to think through the implications of an ontology that failed to immunize itself against the possibility of such an event, that Levinas wants to take seriously the significance of what it means to enjoy good food and drink, to inhabit a home, and to a live a life whose meaning is irreducible to a series of means for further ends. Second, Levinas does not think that the meaning of the present is exhausted either by the legacy it inherits from the past or by the meaning it bequeaths to the future. In other words, he thinks that the impulse that led Heidegger to avoid reducing the meaning that the present has for Dasein to presence in the sense of an object that is present-at-hand

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(vorhanden) led him to assimilate too quickly any authentic meaning that the present could have to the significance of Dasein’s temporality as a whole. Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s temporality as ecstatic leads him to overlook the possibility that there might be more to the instant than its subservient role as the resolute anticipation of one’s own mortality. Levinas wants to examine the meaning of the instant outside of its function as a present that passes into a future, and he asks if the instant does not have a drama that is not immediately canceled out by virtue of its evanescence into a future. To this end he investigates phenomena such as insomnia, evasion, nausea, indolence, weariness, effort and fatigue, pain and suffering, hoping to catch sight of the moment in which anonymous existence, or what Levinas calls the there is (il y a), turns into a subject. Levinas finds that the event by which a subject is posited, the hypostasis in which an existent arises and takes charge of its existence, is not a simple passage of the present into a future, but a complex dynamic whereby a subject encounters a duality. This duality resides both in the mastery or freedom that an existent exerts over its existence, for example in the effort of labor, and the condemnation to existence that is revealed as the pain of hard work subsides into the necessity of having to be oneself. The upsurge of an instant involves both the capacity for work that a subject discovers it has by virtue of its position, its being a base, its very materiality, and the impossibility of escaping or evading the fact that it is committed to existence. At the bottom of the irremissibility of the self lies the anonymous state of existence that Levinas describes as the there is. The I—a provisional I—finds itself attached to being, unable to get away from itself, unable to jump over its own shadow, and yet not without resources, not without the freedom (again, a provisional freedom) of mastery. It is tied to itself, and yet able to provide for itself, through its own labor, and through the good fortune of having things at its disposal. It is free, but its freedom is both limited (it has to exist; its contract with existence is irrevocable) and available to exploitation by others (the very corporeal skills that facilitate the capacity of labor which can protect it can also become the basis of its servitude). Third, while Levinas acknowledges that Heidegger reserves a place for being-with-others (Mitsein) in his analysis of Dasein, he suspects that the existential significance that others have for Heidegger ultimately

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suffers from severe attenuation, and subordination to the sovereignty of a solitary Dasein. Whereas the direction in which Heidegger’s analysis tends is away from Dasein’s inauthentic and unreflective involvement in the they and toward the authentic solitude of a Dasein who has disengaged itself for the most part from its worldly entanglement, Levinas’s analysis, at least in a limited sense, could be said to proceed in the opposite direction. Levinas wants to elaborate the meaning of solitude in positive terms, such that the pleasure of eating and the curiosity of studying in order to come to know the world are neither reducible to one another, nor relegated to inauthentic experience. While the satisfaction and enjoyment of eating is not simply equivalent to the intentionality of knowledge, it does consist of converting alterity or the unknown to sameness or to the knowable. In this sense, the movement of satisfying one’s needs and of rendering objects knowable is similar. In both cases, there is a reduction of otherness to the subject. I am the one who eats; I am the subject who knows. So, Levinas can say that enjoyment is also (but not only, since it always exceeds the intentional movement of representation) knowledge and sensation. It is an encounter with alterity, but this alterity is provisional. What begins as other is incorporated into the same, and as such it follows the same movement as the light that illuminates an object, when a subject comes to know it—a reduction of alterity to sameness. Whereas ecstasis reduces the same to the other, and vision or intellect reduces the other to the same, Levinas introduces a relation from which both terms absolve themselves—the relation of the face-to-face. Here is a relation that cannot be absorbed by one term or another, a relation that overflows its terms, a relation, therefore, that cannot properly be called a relationship. It is a relationship that confers identity on its terms, rather than presupposing that they are already consolidated before entering into relationship. Finally, while Levinas concedes that there are certain points at which Heidegger attempts to think the very sense of existence without an existent that Levinas turns to, the decisive difference between Levinas’s and Heidegger’s projects that Levinas never ceases to assert is that Heidegger’s thought shies away from the alterity of the other, and consequently his ontology remains in thrall to the question of Being in a way that does not allow him to give the attention to ethics that Levinas thinks it deserves. We know that Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is based largely on

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Being and Time, and that it could be argued that certain formulations of Heidegger’s later philosophy come very close to Levinas. Levinas acknowledges this proximity in some of his later publications, but never without also resisting a complete synchrony between Heidegger’s philosophy and his own. Now that we have reviewed some of the major ways in which Levinas departs from Heidegger, let us return to the issue of the ontological difference, and its relation to Levinas’s notion of the feminine. Levinas articulates in the existence of the existent a duality, as we have seen. On the one hand there is a certain mastery, and on the other hand there is the unavoidable commitment to exist that Levinas designates the there is. At issue here is Levinas’s attempt to take up and rework Heidegger’s construal of the relation between the being that exists (Heidegger’s Dasein, Levinas’s existent) and the very work of Being. Heidegger stresses the impossibility of raising the question of Being, in this second sense, without also occluding it, since in the very attempt to distinguish between being and beings, being withdraws, or becomes a substantive. While not disputing the fact that Being or existence is concealed by the very question that tries to tease apart the meaning of Being and beings, since to thematize Being is to reduce it to something which can be grasped, Levinas asks, “Is the tie between what exists and its existing indissoluble? Can one go back to hypostasis?” (TO 44; TA 23), and in a passage that can be read as referring back to this question, he answers, with reference to the son (TO 91; TA 86): The return of the ego to itself that begins with hypostasis is thus not without remission, thanks to the perspective of the future opened by eros. Instead of obtaining this remission through the impossible dissolution of hypostasis, one accomplishes it through the son. It is thus not according to the category of cause, but according to the category of the father that freedom comes about and time is accomplished.

The sexual specificity of this passage is by no means unique to Levinas’s corpus and, far from being accidental, is in fact a structuring theme of Levinas’s discourse. The entire conceptual architecture that Levinas elaborates is permeated with a sexual metaphorics. Thus, the mastery of the subject who masters existence is described by Levinas in the language of “virility,” while death and eros are encounters with alterity

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which constitute what could be called feminized moments. Death is an encounter whereby I am “no longer able to be able,” and the feminine (eros) is described in terms of modesty, hiding, and slipping away from the light. We have seen that Levinas wants to characterize an encounter with alterity in which that alterity is not compromised, where alterity does not surrender its alterity, as it does in enjoyment, for example. In other words, alterity remains mysterious, unknowable, resistant to the power of light and illumination. So when Levinas speaks of the feminine as a mode of withdrawal, as a hiding, as modesty, and as slipping away from the light, we are already prepared for the sense in which the feminine cannot be said to be a being. The feminine, for Levinas, is a way of rendering what cannot be reduced to beings. It is, in this sense, an elaboration, or dramatization, of the ontological difference. Levinas’s claim, in the above passage, that eros opens the future that is accomplished by the father establishes that while the feminine is associated, for Levinas, with a disruption of the ontology of being, it cannot by itself bring that disruption to fruition. Paternity is required to bring to completion the movement toward alterity that the feminine opens. Bearing in mind that “the feminine” does not designate a being, but is understood by Levinas as a tendency, a way, or a regime, Levinas’s commentators—and indeed Levinas himself—have tried to minimize feminist concerns. Pointing out that “the feminine” is not intended to designate, in Levinas’s vocabulary, a being or a subject, they conclude that it would be wrongheaded to chastise Levinas for endorsing the inferiority of the feminine sex. What can be the meaning of Irigaray’s question to Levinas as to whether the feminine lacks a face, if the term “feminine” is not intended to designate women as such?5 It is true that Levinas’s understanding of the feminine as a disruption of the virile categories of mastery, domination, and self-possession opens up the possibility of another way of (non)being, a different mode of existence. The feminine functions as a critique of Heidegger, and it is under the sign of the feminine that Levinas explores sensibility, materiality, and the corporeal, which remain undeveloped in Heidegger’s analysis. One can say that the feminine, as eros, as preoriginary welcome, and as the maternal body, provides the most thoroughgoing and convincing critique of Heidegger, since—even if Levinas reads Heidegger’s discourse as operating mainly at the level of the ontological recu-

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peration of the said—Heidegger’s thinking of being’s withdrawal certainly comes close to Levinas’s saying or otherwise than being, whereas the feminine is conspicuously absent from Heidegger’s thought. For Levinas, the feminine way of being (which is not, properly speaking, a way of being, but rather a slipping away from the light) interrupts the economy of being. It is an interruption of the intentional movement of knowledge, whereby a subject who seeks to know the world ends up negating the otherness of objects, and reducing the world to itself. The suspicion remains, however, that while Levinas might well open up a space for the rethinking of the feminine, he does not follow through on this promise, but rather closes it down. Levinas’s closure of the radical possibilities he opens up for feminism can be specified in a number of ways. Although it is clear by now that Levinas does not intend his use of the term “feminine” to designate in any straightforward way empirical women, and thus can hardly be taken to be subordinating one sex to another in any simple way, it remains the case that Levinas sometimes drops his guard, and resorts to language that invokes the actual empirical women that at other places in his texts he assures us he does not have in mind. So while Levinas cannot be accused of definitively or intentionally marking the inferiority of the feminine sex, there are ways in which this inferiority is marked in his texts, despite his best intentions. If there is no sense in which paternity, the father, and the son are accorded a certain priority, why are they marked in sexual rather than neutral terms? Even if “the feminine” designates a tendency, and not a being, and even if paternity and fecundity are taken to refer beyond the biological, the question remains as to what significance these terms acquire. Even if— perhaps especially if, given the importance of the symbolic register of language, not to mention the care, precision, and poetic quality of Levinas’s own attentive relation to language—we were to grant that Levinas always and only intends to employ these terms as metaphors, this does not mean that the resonance of these sexualized terms is not felt in the world. If Derrida is right to say that Levinas is a poet despite himself, if Levinas’s almost obsessive relationship with language is not to be disregarded, and if we are to take his notion of the saying at its—and not his—word, as a notion that signifies beyond and despite his said, then the metaphorical overtones of “the feminine” cannot be trivialized. To give a charitable reading of how Levinas’s rigorously sexualized

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language functions would be to credit him with having seen the radical potentiality of the feminine to break up the categories of being, and to create the possibility of ethics. A less generous reading would consist in recalling that Levinas reiterates the most traditional stereotypes when he characterizes the feminine as a dimension of silence, mystery, hiding, modesty, withdrawal, domesticity, and maternity. As we saw, in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida identifies these two different readings in his discussion of Levinas’s understanding of the feminine as “the welcoming one par excellence” (TI 157; TeI 131). One could, says Derrida, “raise concerns about a classical androcentrism,” an approach he identifies with his earlier essay “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” or one could “make of this text a sort of feminist manifesto” since it defines “welcome par excellence, . . . the pre-ethical origin of ethics, on the basis of femininity” (Adieu 44).6 If, in his early work, notably in “Time and the Other” (1947), Levinas seems to acknowledge the feminine as excessive, referring to it as the other “par excellence,” his characterization of femininity in Totality and Infinity (1961) as inhabiting the dwelling, as welcoming, discreet, and silent, appears to recoup the potentially transgressive aspect of women’s alterity uncovered in the 1940’s. Deprived of language, women are afforded a place in Totality and Infinity either as hovering in the wings of habitation—making homes habitable—or as embodying the erotic. Whatever disclaimers Levinas makes to obviate the necessity of the empirical presence of women, the figure of the feminine remains on the margins of the central ethical relation that dominates the text, the faceto-face. Neither the relationship with the discreet, welcoming feminine presence nor that of eros fulfills the requirements of the face-to-face: neither qualifies as a relation to the absolutely other without return. For that, paternity, which accomplishes goodness, is required. It is not the feminine, but “the inevitable reference of the erotic to the future in fecundity [that] reveals a radically different structure,” says Levinas (TI 272; TeI 249). Why is the reference to fecundity “inevitable,” and why does it constitute “paternity” (TI 272; TeI 250)? By 1974 we find Levinas in Otherwise than Being championing maternity as a trope for the obsessive relation to the other, or substitution, that now describes the ethical relation previously cast in terms of the face-to-face—my unqualified response to be answerable for faults I have

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not committed against the other. What do we make of the apparent usurpation of the paternal by the maternal, and is it only apparent? How can we read Levinas’s early acknowledgment of the feminine as excess— as the other par excellence—or his subsequent apparent retraction of any transgressive aspects of feminine alterity, and finally his apparent elevation of maternity to the apex of ethicality? We saw above that while maternity does indeed play a role of some significance in Otherwise than Being, it is associated primarily with sensibility and vulnerability, and not with consciousness or thought. Is there discernible in his acknowledgment of feminine absolute alterity or excess a saying which retracts in Totality and Infinity into a said, only to betray the said again in Otherwise than Being, in a movement which undoes or unsays the thematization of women as silent, discreet, marginal presences, and portrays maternity as a resource for an ethic of infinite demands? No doubt such a suggestion is too schematic, since if the vacillation of the saying and the said could indeed describe the alteration of Levinas’s lexicon of feminine modes, it would invade the text of Totality and Infinity, which could be read not as if it presented an internally consistent monotype vision, but rather as offering the feminine as a radical resource even as it also undermined or recuperated this very radicality. The problem of the feminine comes into play at three different levels, which are necessarily interrelated, but also bear following out independently of one another, so far as this can be achieved. First there is the textual movement facilitated or set in motion by the feminine, and brought to a resolution, completion, or closure by paternity. Thus the feminine is associated with the first (preoriginal) welcome, in the dwelling, a welcome that breaks with the constituting intentionality of thought, and to this extent anticipates the welcome of the face-to-face, but which remains within the economy of the same, and in this sense does not approximate to the transcendence of welcoming the absolutely other. Similarly, eros prefigures the radical discontinuity of an infinite time that finds its fulfillment in the relations between the father and the son. As a relation with mystery, the erotic relation with the feminine heralds the time of fecundity, in which the father presides over the birth of a son. Paternity is needed to complete the movement toward alterity that the feminine had begun. Second, there is the formal or structural function of the feminine as

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it is invoked as an exception to being, as a breakdown of the systematicity of thought, as an interruption of totality. Thus the feminine is the withdrawal from being: a delightful lapse in being, unthinkable in terms of light, it is modesty and hiding. The face of the feminine is silent, without language; its presence is discreet. The sensibility of enjoyment, over which the feminine presides in the dwelling, cannot be adequately captured in the language of intentionality or phenomena. Structurally consonant with the infinite or the beyond of ethics, insofar as it cannot be contained by the language of thought and representation that nevertheless comes to represent it, the feminine is also that which defies comprehension. Finally, there is the paradigmatic role that the feminine plays as preliminary, as a first sketch of the ethical, as a kind of prolegomenon. The feminine seems to provide an implicit model for the break with totality that ethical command of the other effects. Always preparatory, it never quite advances to the pure transcendence of absolute alterity, but remains indispensable as a kind of stepping stone, on the way to the infinite. Yet this preparatory role cannot be acknowledged as such, since to do so would be to lessen the radicality of the ethics it announces. The problem that “the feminine” names in Levinas’s work can be stated more generally by referring back to the difficulty Levinas confronts in claiming that the present can signify outside representation, or that diachrony is irreducible to the synchronization of thematization, or that the saying goes beyond the said, is otherwise than essence. As irrecuperable by ontology, the feminine would seem to retreat into the inaccessible, capable of only negative signification. Yet to subject the ineffable mystery of the feminine to the light of day, to render it accessible through thematizing it or representing it, would be to destroy its mystery. The feminine must both remain inexpressible, and somehow communicate its energy to language, being, and the said. Perhaps this indetermination, ambiguity, equivocation, this diachrony, should not be resolved. But to leave the feminine forever unthought, to condemn it to the impossibility of ever being thematized, is to allow it to do its work in the absence of recognition. Levinas’s use of the feminine, particularly its presiding over the dwelling, risks maintaining it as a safe haven for the masculine thought which would arise up out of it. In this sense, it gives time to the separated being, a time of the feminine that is never

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fully elaborated by Levinas. Here the feminine finds a parallel with the role that death plays for Heidegger in Being and Time—and it is perhaps not insignificant that the thought of death and the structures of finitude desert Heidegger in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. This retreat or withdrawal of what had been a decisive theme for Dasein’s authentic self-understanding finds an echo in Levinas’s denial to the feminine of the status of the absolute other in Totality and Infinity, after he had designated it alterity “par excellence” in Time and the Other. If the feminine conditions reflection—by way of a conditioning that exceeds the thought that thinks it after the fact—then who or what will provide a safe place for the feminine? Feminism cannot claim a safe place, free of challenge, nor should it. It must take responsibility, however, for thinking about which others it exploits in making a claim for itself. Invoking “alternation and diachrony as the time of philosophy” (OB 167; AE 213), Levinas proposes that “Truth is in several times” (OB 183; AE 231). A feminism that takes account of Levinas’s diachronic notion of temporality should recognize both the need to maintain a disruptive effect in the refusal of the feminine to accommodate the categories of being, totality, or ontology, of never simply being a subject of knowledge, mastery, and recognition, and the need to assert that women must be recognized and thematized as subjects in the register of the said, taken account of by a history that, while covering over alterity, has also afforded its subjects the privilege of recognition. Levinas’s wariness of political identities grounded on identity, whether defined ethnically or otherwise, is more than understandable given the Nazis’ reduction of people to their identities as a basis for their exclusion from the nation-state. Feminist theory has also grown wary of identity politics. To reduce an Asian-American woman to her identity as such only replicates the problem it attempts to combat. In trying to acknowledge diversity, such a move merely encloses individuals in new boxes that assume all ethnic minorities share essentially the same experience. Clearly this is to be avoided. Yet the need to avoid reducing individuals to their ethnic identity does not amount to a license to ignore ethnicity altogether. The danger of Levinas’s philosophy is that in opposing not only the reduction of individuals to political labels, but the political labels themselves, it deprives itself of the means to take seriously the powerful political forces that structure systematic political oppres-

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sion of groups identified on the basis of their identity as members of a particular group. Its appeal is to the humanity of man, not to the particularism of a particular group. But what if the very appeal to goodness that constitutes Levinas’s central insight already validates an oppression, yet from a position that defines itself, by fiat, as incapable of sanctioning? If women have been institutionally and constitutionally expected to give up their rights in favor of putting others first, how can Levinas’s philosophy, even if we put aside the question of the addressee, be distinguished from a naive endorsement of women’s exclusion from their full recognition as subjects? And if we take Levinas’s rhetoric of sexual difference to signify beyond a merely rhetorical strategy, how is the conditionality of the feminine to be thought in relation to an ethics that claims to be prior to and exclusive of its politics? To think the preoriginal or the feminine both with and against Levinas—and already so many qualifications have to be made, since this is to think what cannot be thought, what surpasses or evades thought—is to take up a responsibility that Levinas insistently announces while also putting it out of bounds. Because Levinas speaks in his own name, and not in the name of others, and yet speaks in the name of the father in a way that so often goes unremarked by his own discourse, because sexual difference invades his language at every turn but remains unthematized, it is impossible to properly raise the question of a feminist politics by remaining entirely within his framework. This does not prevent us from pointing out the limits of his framework. The question we are confronting here cannot be divorced from the question of how the political stands in relation to Levinas’s philosophy in general. Can the question of politics ever be responsibly raised for Levinas, or does it always degenerate into an assertion of the privilege of egoism that Levinas stridently denounces? More polemically, it could be asked whether ethics and politics are as discontinuous from one another as Levinas assumes. As Derrida suggests, the “border between the ethical and the political . . . was never pure, and it never will be” (Adieu 99). If this is indeed the case, then it follows that we must regard with suspicion the distinction to which Levinas implicitly appeals when, having subordinated politics to ethics, he invokes another politics, a messianic politics.7 This politics is supposed to be beyond politics as usual, beyond the politics of nationalism and universalism, and it allows Levinas to affirm Zionism, with-

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out appearing to make a gesture that can be reduced to the merely political (in the usual and, according to Levinas, nonethical sense of “the political”).8 On the question of how to think Levinas’s philosophy in relation to the political, Derrida suggests: “It might be asked, for example, whether the ethics of hospitality . . . in Levinas’s thought would be able to found a law and a politics, beyond the familial dwelling, within a society, nation, State, or Nation-State” (Adieu 20). It should be noted that this formulation already brackets certain pertinent questions about a feminist politics insofar as it eschews comment about how far the dwelling already contains the feminine. Derrida goes on: “This question is no doubt serious, difficult, and necessary, but it is already canonical.” Not wanting to assume that a politics can be deduced from “Levinas’s ethical discourse on hospitality,” Derrida prefers to read the “hiatus” between politics and Levinas’s ethics more positively, asking whether their disjunction opens “the possibility of another speech . . . where decisions must be made and responsibility, as we say, taken, without the assurance of ontological foundation” (Adieu 21). Following up on this question, Derrida says: “without the hiatus, which is not the absence of rules but the necessity of a leap at the moment of ethical, political, or juridical decision, we could simply unfold knowledge into a program or course of action. Nothing could make us more irresponsible; nothing could be more totalitarian” (Adieu 117). Derrida also specifies the responsibility that Levinas calls for as one “where I alone must respond” (ibid.). If I am right to suggest that in the masculine privilege Levinas assumes, and which plays itself out conceptually in the fecundity of paternity, the scrupulous care that Levinas takes to speak in his own name, and not as a subject of any universal law, deserts him, and if the feminine pays the cost and bears the burden of this desertion, the responsibility that Derrida points to suffers a relapse, of which women are often the casualty. By allowing women to signify otherness, Levinas continues a long tradition of male-authored texts which figure the feminine as unknowable, mysterious, ineffable, unrepresentable, and intractable. Does he thereby repeat, however unwittingly or unwillingly, the same exclusionary gesture that denies women language, and confines them to a gestural, corporeal, asocial psychosis? Or does his insistent privileging of alterity over sameness, even when it suffers a relapse at certain strategically pre-

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dictable points, open up a space for the radical rewriting of the feminine? Certainly there are moments in Levinas’s texts in which the virile economy of philosophical logic reverts to an affection and exposure of passivity to alterity, as in eros, or in the caress. And certainly there are moments at which the most traditional edifices assert themselves, as when the subversion of the caress is recouped by a maternal trope whose telos is invariably played out in the birth of a son. As we have seen, the duality of this certainty can be read more or less generously. One could read this generously—as the achievement of the saying despite the said—in terms of the feminine’s exceeding the paternal logic of Levinas’s texts, so that his texts catch sight of, or benefit from, an inspirational source that cannot quite be contained or disarmed even by the recuperation of its excess at the level of the said. Or one could read Levinas less generously, as consigning women to the most traditional of roles, even as he privileges—or precisely in this gesture—maternity as an ethical relationship in which I am beholden to the other to the point of substitution. Perhaps, in keeping with the vacillation of the saying and the said, a more ambivalent reading is called for, one that is both too generous, perhaps infinitely so, and one that is less than generous, perhaps necessarily so. An infinitely generous reading of the trope of the feminine in Levinas would take its cue from the sense in which maternity hesitates between the saying and the said, as sensibility and vulnerability on the one hand, and as an irrecusable responsibility that is already an ethical response to the face, and which as such already opens onto the political through the third party. One could perhaps read Levinas’s notion of paternity as a model of generosity, although I am less willing to do so, because this possibility seems to depend upon leaving aside not only the context of the ultimately traditional significance Levinas attaches to the feminine, but also Levinas’s attachment to a Zionist politics that passes for a politics of peace which would be nonpartisan. I have also suggested, less generously, that the feminine as such remains captive to its preparatory role in Levinas’s work, and in this way Levinas repeats the gesture of confining women to the hearth, the home, the private realm, and excluding them from the public, political domain, which is reserved for the seriousness of masculine affairs. Thus the upright straightforwardness of the face-to-face is specified as the paternal

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relation to the son, and the discontinuity across generations is accomplished as fecundity, which, while requiring the feminine, still keeps the feminine in its subordinate place to the father and the son who complete the diachronous relationship. The feminine is entrusted with an initial interruption of the rhythms of the continuous time of history or totality, but only for the higher purpose of the properly transcendent masculine relationship that it initiates.

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Notes

Preface 1. Jacques Derrida has recognized this in “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 79–153; “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” trans. R. Berezdevin, in Re-reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11–48; Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. P.-A. Brault and M. Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 2. Representative of this tendency is Alain Finkielkraut, The Wisdom of Love, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).

Introduction 1. See Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, trans. J. S. Churchill (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), originally published in German as Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979). I am not suggesting that these are the only texts by Heidegger and Husserl relevant to time—far from it. My point is that although there are essays—for example, “Time and the Other,” “Diachrony and Representation,” and “Dying for . . .”—there are no works by Emmanuel Levinas thematically devoted to the question of time. “Time and the Other,” originally published in 1947, has now been published as a small book, Time and the Other, and Other Essays, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), originally published in French as Temps et l’autre (St. Clement: Fata Morgana, 1979). The English translation contains the later essays “Diachrony and Representation” (originally published as “Diachronie et représentation,” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 55.4 [1985]: 85–98) and “The Old and the New” (originally published as “L’ancien et le nouveau,” in L’ancien et le nouveau, ed. J. Doré et al. [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1982], pp. 23–37). “Dying for . . .” appears (as “Mourir pour . . .”) in Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), pp. 219–30; pub-

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lished in English as Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 207–17. Although I consulted this translation before this book went to press, translations are my own, since the chapter in which I discuss this essay was written prior to its publication. 2. See, for example, Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1998). 3. Heidegger’s relatively late (1962) essay “Time and Being” (in On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh [New York: Harper & Row, 1969], pp. 1–24) should be read not (as it sometimes is) as an anomaly, or as constituting a return to his earlier interest in time, but rather as an explicit confrontation of the temporal thematic that can be traced not only through the 1920’s, but also through key texts of the intervening years. See, for example, What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. G. Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). 4. See Heidegger’s comments on circularity at BT 27; SZ 7–8. 5. See recent issues of The Nation. 6. See Chantal Mouffe, “Decision, Deliberation, and Democratic Ethos,” Philosophy Today 41.1 (Spring 1997): 24–30. 7. Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. P. Burrell and G. R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). See also Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 8. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 3. Bourdieu goes on to define his position when he says, “Heidegger is close to the spokesmen of the ‘conservative revolution,’ many of whose words and theses he consecrates philosophically, but he distances himself from it by imposing a form which sublimates the ‘crudest’ borrowings by inserting them in the network of phonetic and semantic resonance which characterizes the Hölderlin-style Begriffsdichtung of the academic prophet” (p. 54). Bourdieu adds that “a purely logical analysis is not more able than a purely political analysis to give an explanation of this dual discourse whose truth resides in the relation between the declared, official system indicated by the formal patterning, and the repressed system, which, in its own way, also provides coherent support for the whole symbolic edifice. Those who try to insist on sticking to the ‘proper’ meaning of the text, that is, a properly philosophical meaning, thereby granting this emphatic, accentuated meaning the power to eclipse the other meanings suggested by words which are in themselves vague and equivocal, and especially the value judgments or the emotional connotations which their ordinary usage entails, are in fact insisting that there is only one legitimate mode of reading, that is their own” (p. 104). Johannes Fritsche follows Bourdieu’s judgment of Heidegger’s conservatism insofar as he regards Heidegger’s Being and Time, in particular Section 74, as “a brilliant summary of the revolutionary right” (Historical Destiny and National Socialism

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in Heidegger’s Being and Time [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999], p. 181). 9. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. A. Michel and M. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 51. 10. Maurice Blanchot, “Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David,” trans. Paula Wissig, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 475–80, esp. 479. 11. Jürgen Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective,” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 431–56, esp. 434. Hereafter cited in the text as WW. 12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Back from Syracuse?” trans. John McCumber, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 427–30, esp. p. 430. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, “As Is Consenting to Horror,” trans. Paula Wissig, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 485–88, esp. p. 485; originally published in French as “Comme un consentement à l’horrible,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 22–28 janvier 1988. 14. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), esp. p. 40; originally published in French as Éthique et infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Arthème Fayard et Radio France, 1982), esp. p. 37. 15. Richard Wolin, ed., “Over the Line: Reflections on Heidegger and National Socialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 15. 16. Ibid., pp. 12–15. 17. Ibid., p. 12. 18. Ibid., p. 4. 19. Emmanuel Levinas, De l’évasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982), p. 99. 20. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. S. Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 62–71 (with a prefatory note added in 1990), esp. pp. 62–63; originally published in French as “Quelques réflexions sur la philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” Esprit 2, 26 (1934): 199–208. 21. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Neither an Accident nor a Mistake,” trans. Paula Wissig, Critical Inquiry 15 (Winter 1989): 481–84; originally appearing in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1988. 22. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990): 291–312, esp. p. 294. 23. Heidegger says, “Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being. Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological. . . . ‘Beingontological’ is to be designated as something ‘pre-ontological’ . . . ‘being in such a way that one has an understanding of being’” (BT 32; SZ 12). 24. bel hooks, “Loving Blackness as Political Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), pp. 13 and 20.

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25. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995), pp. 20–27. 26. Appiah (above, n. 25), p. 45. 27. Robert Gooding-Williams, “Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois’s ‘The Conservation of Races,’” in W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 39–56, esp. p. 51. 28. Lucius Outlaw, “‘Conserve’ Races? In Defense of W. E. B. Du Bois,” ibid., pp. 15–37, esp. p. 21. 29. Appiah (above, n. 25), p. 35. 30. Outlaw (above, n. 28), p. 22. 31. Ibid., pp. 34–35. 32. Tommy L. Lott, “Du Bois on the Invention of Race,” in African-American Perspectives and Philosophical Traditions, ed. John P. Pittman (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 166–87, esp. p. 166. 33. See Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 20–40. 34. Heidegger says, “Aristotle’s treatment of the problem” represents a standard beyond which no one managed to get, with the “few exceptions in Augustine and Kant, who nevertheless retain in principle the Aristotelian concept of time” (BP 327; GP 336). 35. Heidegger reiterates a number of times that no one, including Bergson, departs in any significant way from Aristotle’s conception of time. (See BT 39 and SZ 17–18; BT 473 and SZ 421.) In his earlier lectures, Heidegger also maintains that Aristotle’s concept of time is retained throughout the tradition, including Bergson. Although Heidegger concedes that “Bergson in fact makes an attempt to go beyond this concept to a more original one,” he insists that Bergson makes no fundamental advance: “Basically, when we consider the categorial fundaments which he presupposes, namely, quality and succession, Bergson does not advance the matters at issue and so remains traditional” (History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], p. 9). 36. Later Levinas will take up Bergson’s notions of duration and intuition as providing an alternative to the traditional model that has celebrated permanence over duration or change. See ON, pp. 128–33. 37. Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 48–59, esp. p. 51; originally published in French as “La philosophie et l’idée de l’infini,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), pp. 165–78, esp. p. 161. 38. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. A.

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Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), p. 89; originally published in French as Totalité et infini (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 61. 39. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), pp. 182–83; originally published in French as Autrement qu’être, ou Au-delà de l’essence, 2d ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 230. 40. Emmanuel Levinas, La mort et le temps (Paris: l’Herne, 1991). Translations are my own, although just prior to submitting the final manuscript Bettina Bergo was kind enough to let me review her translation of these lectures, which are included in God, Death and Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 41. Patience is not a new idea in Levinas—it plays an important role in the 1947 text Time and the Other, for example, but the formulation that this idea finds in “La mort et le temps” is original. Levinas returns to the idea as a structuring theme in later texts. See, for example, “The Old and the New,” in Time and the Other (above, n. 1), pp. 121–38. 42. Here Levinas draws on the work of Ernst Bloch. 43. Levinas, “Diachronie” (above, n. 1). 44. Levinas says, “In thought understood as vision, knowledge, and intentionality, intelligibility thus signifies the reduction of the other [Autre] to the Same, synchrony as being in its egological gathering. The known expresses the unity of the transcendental apperception of the cogito, or the Kantian I think, the egology of presence affirmed from Descartes to Husserl, and up to Heidegger where, in paragraph 9 of Being and Time, Dasein’s ‘to be’ is the source of Jemeinigkeit and thus of the Ego” (DR 99 [translation amended]; DRE 86). 45. Perhaps Levinas manages to avoid the problems Derrida finds in Heidegger’s attempt to uncover a more original and authentic temporality by construing it not as another concept of time, but as preconceptual, as a time of the saying, and not a time of the said, or ontology. See Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme¯: A Note on a Note from Being and Time,” In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 63. 46. There is a similar appropriation and rejection of certain aspects of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl. If Levinas seeks to displace the authority of the cogito, the Cartesian idea of the infinite is a constant source of reference for Levinas’s notion of irreducible alterity: while Levinas distances himself from the unifying force of transcendental apperception, he appeals to the face of the other as a “categorical imperative” (DR 113; DRE 94); while he puts into question the reduction of alterity he sees at work in the correlation of a noema to a noesis (ON 133–34; AN 34), he finds evidence of “absolute novelty” in Husserl’s “protoimpression” (ON 131 n. 6; AN 32 n. 3). See also OB 33–34; AE 42–43. 47. Françoise Dastur, “The Ekstatico-horizonal Constitution of Temporality,” in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 158–70, esp. p. 165.

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48. Dennis King Keenan notes that Levinas employs the phrase “dead time” to designate “a third notion between being and nothingness, between act and potency” (Death and Responsibility: The “Work” of Levinas [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], p. 12). He goes on to argue that dead time is “articulated by the irreducibly ambiguous body” (p. 44).

Chapter 1: Ontological Difference, Sexual Difference, and Time 1. Levinas says, for example: “Being before the existent, ontology before metaphysics, is freedom (be it the freedom of theory) before justice. It is a movement within the same before obligation to the other. The terms must be reversed” (TI 47; TeI 17). 2. Emmanuel Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant, 2d ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984), preface. 3. Levinas refers to Marion’s L’Idole et la Distance: Cinq études (Paris: Grasset, 1989), and Marion responds in “A Note Concerning the Ontological Indifference,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 20.2–21.1 (1998): 25–40, esp. 26. This essay first appeared as “Note sur l’indifférence ontologique,” in Emmanuel Levinas: L’éthique comme philosophie première. Actes du Colloque de Cerisy-laSalle 23 août–2 septembre 1986, ed. Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1993), pp. 47–62. 4. Marion, “A Note Concerning the Ontological Indifference” (above, n. 3), 26. 5. Ibid., 27. 6. Ibid., 28. 7. Ibid., 31. 8. See Jacques Rolland’s essay in the 1982 edition of Levinas’s De l’évasion (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1982), p. 49; and Jacques Derrida, “A Word of Welcome,” in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Galilée, 1997), p. 136 n. 10. Derrida already raises the question of how to think the relation between ethics and ontology in his earlier work, “Violence and Metaphysics” (in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978], pp. 79–153) and “At This Moment in This Very Work Here I Am” (trans. R. Berezdevin, in Rereading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991], pp. 11–48). See also Jean Greisch, “Ethics and Ontology: Some ‘Hypocritical’ Considerations,” trans. Leonard Lawlor, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 20.2–21.1 (1998): 41–69; Robert Bernasconi, “Fundamental Ontology, Metontology, and the Ethics of Ethics,” Irish Philosophical Journal 4.1– 2 (1987): 76–93; John Llewelyn, The Genealogy of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 29–30, 176. 9. Recent exceptions include Brain Schroeder, Altared Ground: Levinas, History, and Violence (New York: Routledge, 1996). Schroeder sees that Levinas’s attempt to go beyond conceptuality involves a turn back toward the corporeal, a movement he describes as “(un)grounding itself” (p. 131).

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10. See Levinas’s comments on solitude, for example, in his interview with François Poiré, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), pp. 62, 105; to appear in English as “Interview with François Poiré,” trans. J. Robbins and M. Coelen, with Thomas Loebel, in Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). 11. By aligning Heidegger with the Platonic impulse to subordinate multiplicity to the one (see TO 92; TA 88), Levinas articulates an association that has been taken up by other thinkers. Hannah Arendt also criticizes Heidegger for elevating Dasein’s self-individuation through its confrontation with its own death over the plurality of community, and she does so, in part, by showing that Heidegger remained committed to the Platonic celebration of the contemplation of life (bios theôrêtikos) over practical affairs (vita activa). Perhaps unsurprisingly—given that both thinkers were profoundly influenced by Heidegger, and both were forced to rethink their attachment to his thinking in confronting his Nazism—this is not the only parallel between Levinas’s and Arendt’s critiques of Heidegger. Arendt emphasizes the need to make nativity more central than being-toward-the-end, just as Levinas emphasizes evanescence, and the importance of new beginnings. Both of them criticize Heidegger for denigrating the world of work, and both of them provide accounts of the private, domestic sphere of habitation that are intended to correct Heidegger’s neglect of these themes. For a valuable discussion of Arendt’s critical interrogation of Heidegger (and one which shows signs of being influenced by Levinas), see Jacques Taminiaux, The Thracian Mind and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). Julia Kristeva, in a presentation informed by Taminiaux’s work, recently took up the relation between Arendt and Heidegger, in a paper presented at the 1999 IAPL to which I had the privilege of being asked to respond. 12. Taminiaux (above, n. 11: 5), points out that Heidegger’s notion of “productive activity,” which “reaches its accomplishment” in “the work itself,” is a reworking of Aristotle’s energeia, and so, in turn, Levinas’s understanding of accomplishment might be read as a reassessment of productive activity—that is, of technê and poiêsis. 13. Levinas says that the alterity of death is “not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light” (TO 75; TA 63). 14. As Taminiaux says, quoting from Levinas’s Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978): “whereas the Heideggerian ekstasis is grounded in a process of temporalisation which is focused upon the future of the end and deprives the present of all privilege, the point in Levinas is to grasp the hypostasis as an event which occurs thanks to ‘the very stance of an instant’ (17), an instant which is the ‘polarization of Being in general’ (18). In this context, whereas Heidegger puts the emphasis on the end, Levinas claims that ‘beginning, origin and birth present a dialectic in which this event in the heart of the instant becomes visible’ (18)” (“The Early Levinas’s Reply to Hei-

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degger’s Fundamental Ontology,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 23.6 (1997): 29– 49, esp. 34. 15. By using the term “forsakenness” but qualifying it as “peculiar,” Levinas leaves open the question of whether this is something that Heidegger saw or not. 16. Levinas says: “An identity in diastasis, where coinciding is wanting. I am a self in the identifying recurrence in which I find myself cast back to the hither side of my point of departure! This self is out of phase with itself, forgetful of itself, forgetful in biting in upon itself, in the reference to itself which is the gnawing away at oneself in remorse” (OB 115; AE 147). 17. On the relation between freedom and slavery, see also TI 116–17; TeI 89– 90. 18. Just as Levinas declines to posit either the subject or the Other as initially free, yet nevertheless admits freedom in a diminished form, in the sense of a freedom of the I as beginning, so he refuses to characterize the existent initially in terms of possession, but can still say that the I consists in an “original possession of being, in which the I nevertheless reverts ineluctably to itself” (EE 80; DE 136). 19. Taminiaux (above, n. 14: 46), quoting from EE, says that “the hypostasis has a threefold character. Thanks to hypostasis ‘anonymous being loses its there is character.’ Moreover, ‘an entity . . . is a subject of the verb to be, and thus exercises a mastery over the fatality of Being, which has become its attribute’ (83). But, on the other hand, in this emergence of a subject, ‘we can discern the return of the there is. The hypostasis, in participating in the there is, finds itself again to be a solitude, in the definitiveness of the bond with which the ego is chained to itself’ (84).” 20. I suggest that we can also see these two different senses of freedom in Totality and Infinity. In the section entitled “The Subjectivity in Eros,” Levinas says: “The subject is imposed upon itself, drags itself along like a possession. The freedom of the subject that posits itself is not like the freedom of a being as free as the wind. It implies responsibility—which should surprise, nothing being more opposed to freedom than the non-freedom of responsibility. The coinciding of freedom with responsibility constitutes the I, doubled with itself, encumbered with itself” (TI 271; TeI 271). Compare Levinas’s discussion of freedom under the heading “Freedom Invested,” where he makes clear, in one of his more programmatic statements, that he contests “the primacy of freedom,” which means not that he is “against freedom” but that he “seeks for it a justification” (TI 302; TeI 279). He explains his conviction that “Freedom must justify itself” (TI 303; TeI 280) by referring to the “the presence of the Other,” who puts in question “the naive legitimacy of freedom” (TI 303; TeI 280). Here, freedom appears to itself “as a shame for itself” (TI 303; TeI 280). 21. See also EE 79 and DE 135; TI 271 and TeI 249; TI 303 and TeI 280. Freedom must justify itself, according to Levinas. 22. One could also ask, In what sense is this responsibility already ethical? It would seem that responsibility is a term that already assumes the relation with

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the other, just as freedom, in the full sense of the word, already requires the other. And indeed, this will prove to be the case, for the feminine is already assumed by the dwelling, and the dwelling is Levinas’s attempt to rework the corporeity and solitude of this provisional I that has a provisional freedom. By inhabiting the home, the I has also been exposed to another. 23. See TI 270–73; TeI 247–51. 24. It is not enough to say that “the ‘feminine’ presence by which a building becomes a home is a metaphor . . . for . . . a climate of intimacy indispensable for a dwelling” (Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993], p. 158). 25. Sonya Sikka, “The Delightful Other: Portraits of the Feminine in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Levinas,” in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, ed. T. Chanter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming). 26. Insofar as it is the call of conscience that summons us, which “resolves upon Being-guilty” (BT 353; SZ 305), Heidegger’s understanding of death seems very close to Levinas’s exposure to the other; but to the extent that wanting to have a conscience is still ultimately interpreted as “an understanding of oneself,” Levinas wants to depart from its fundamental structure. 27. For a reading that emphasizes the positive aspects of Levinas’s notion of paternal election, see Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 211–14. 28. Ewa Ziarek, “The Ethical Passions of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Chanter, ed. (above, n. 25). 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. While critics have noted that one aspect of Levinas’s notion of the feminine is its disruptive effect on Heideggerian ontology, the full dimensions of this have not been appreciated. See, for example, Alison Ainley, “Levinas and Kant: Maternal and Illegitimate Creation,” ibid. 32. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1952), p. xix. 33. Kelly Oliver, “Paternal Election and the Absent Father,” in Chanter, ed. (above, n. 25). 34. Donna Brody, “Levinas’s Maternal Method from ‘Time and the Other’ through Otherwise than Being: No Woman’s Land,” in Chanter, ed. (above, n. 25). 35. While aspects of Levinas’s discourse gesture beyond the biological, the consistent assignation of the birth of the child and parenthood to male lineage indicate a foundational essentialism. See Brody (above, n. 34). See also Stella Sandford, “Masculine Mothers? Maternity in Levinas and Plato,” in Chanter, ed. (above, n. 25). 36. Oliver (above, n. 33).

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37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. Although paternity involves transubstantiation (see TI 269; TeI 246), its significance and meaning lie in its goodness. The body is ultimately subordinate to the ethical relation, and the ethical relation is a masculine preserve. 41. Levinas says that in the fecundity that involves “the alterity of the Beloved . . . Being is produced as multiple and as split into same and other; this is its ultimate structure. It is society, and hence it is time” (TI 269; TeI 246). The term l’aimée, as Luce Irigaray has noted, marks the beloved as feminine: see “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 185–217, esp. 190. 42. See Derrida, “Violence” (above, n. 8); see also Sikka (above, n. 25). 43. If there is a parallel structure in Heidegger, perhaps we can find it in the experience of uncanniness that returns Dasein to itself from the depths of the disquietude of one who loses his bearings, and for whom “Authentic ‘thinking about death’ is wanting-to-have-a-conscience” (BT 357; SZ 309). Or perhaps, it falls to the work of art, insofar as the experience of the artwork takes us out of ourselves, “where we believe we are at home,” and confronts us with the uncanny, so that the truth of the work of art resides in some kind of challenge that disrupts “[t]hat which is familiar, reliable, ordinary” (PLT 54), rendering it unfamiliar and extraordinary. The work of art thereby gives us back to ourselves, not as unchanged, but precisely in a way that allows us to see the world, and ourselves, differently. 44. See Catherine Chalier, Figures du féminin: Lecture d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: La Nuit Surveillée, 1982). 45. See Sikka (above, n. 25). 46. This translation differs slightly from Lingis’s translation at TI 157; TeI 131. 47. But, like Heidegger’s equipmental world, for Levinas “the intellectualist conception of a world as a spectacle given to impassive contemplation likewise fails to recognize the recollection of the dwelling” (TI 163; TeI 137). 48. Levinas says, “Representation is a pure present” (TI 125; TeI 98). 49. The issue that I am trying to think through here is also what I think is at stake for Fabio Ciaramelli when he writes: “Through the notions of separation and recurrence, Levinas alludes to the paradoxical past of subjectivity, which is the necessary condition or the presupposition of its constitutive activity. The transcendental power of subjective constitution is thus conditioned by this prior presupposition which, itself always already constituted, only afterwards turns out to be constituting” (“The Posteriority of the Anterior,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 20.2–21.1[1998]: 410). While I agree with Ciaramelli, I also want to emphasize the fact that Levinas does not want to think recurrence simply as a transcendental condition, which would reduce it to a presupposition that can be entirely contained in thought; he also wants to claim the material

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excess of the anterior posterior. In this sense, Levinas finds the language of the “constituted” and “constituting” inadequate to that which does nevertheless become constituted, and thus comes to function as a condition (and thus is also constitutive), but this process of becoming part of the movement of constitution is not without loss. Sensibility remains excessive to representation in a way that representation is never adequate to conceptualize or contain, even if it must be called upon to acknowledge even its own inadequacy. 50. Although Levinas describes dwelling in “the intimacy of a home” as “the first concretization” (TI 153; TeI 126), it is not strictly accurate to regard dwelling as providing our concrete situation, insofar as Levinas thinks that “concrete man” is already in relation to the Other. He says, “In reality man has already the idea of infinity, that is, lives in society and represents things to himself” (TI 139; TeI 112). It is precisely the complex network of conditionality that informs the relationship between representation and enjoyment that I am concerned to articulate here. 51. Heidegger’s overcoming of the Cartesian split is addressed more fully in Chapter 2. 52. Although Levinas refers to the “pure passivity” of the “recollected being” (TI 165; TeI 139), this must be understood as preceding the distinction between activity and passivity. 53. See Ainley (above, n. 31). 54. To sense is not a thought unaware of itself, but it is implicit, from the perspective of the philosopher who explicates its contentment, after the encounter with the other. (See TI 138; TeI 112.) “To reflect on each of one’s acts is, to be sure, to situate them with respect to infinity, but the unreflected and naïve consciousness constitutes the originality of enjoyment” (TI 139; TeI 112). Thus “in the eyes of reason the contentment of sensibility is ridiculous. But sensibility is not a blind reason and folly. It is prior to reason” (TI 138; TeI 111). 55. Levinas adds, “To be sure, representation is the seat of truth: the movement proper to truth consists in the thinker being determined by the object presented to him. But it determines him without touching him, without weighing on him—such that the thinker who submits to what is thought does so ‘gracefully,’ as though the object, even in the surprises it has in store for cognition, had been anticipated by the subject” (TI 124; TeI 97).

Chapter 2: Heidegger and Feminism 1. See Elizabeth V. Spelman’s discussion of somatophobia in Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), pp. 126–27. 2. See BT 93; SZ 65. All references are to the translation of Macquarrie and Robinson, and to Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979). 3. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 15–16.

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4. See, for example, Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 5. To take oneself as present-at-hand is not necessarily to theorize one’s being as present-at-hand, but is more likely to consist in precisely the failure to theorize Dasein’s specific way of being. 6. As Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann says, “primary understanding . . . takes shape in projection. . . . Projection can only disclose projectively what it is thrown into. For the hermeneutics of Dasein this means that explicit projection projects Dasein unto its Existenz, i.e., understanding being—and Existenz given in advance to projection by thrownness, as what is explicitly projectable,” “Way and Method: Hermeneutic Phenomenology in Thinking the History of Being,” in Critical Heidegger, ed. C. Macann (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 171–90, esp. p. 177. For a more detailed discussion of the relation between temporality, understanding, and projection than I provide here, see my “Heidegger’s Understanding of the Aristotelian Concept of Time,” in Interrogating the Tradition: Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott and John Sallis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), pp. 131–57. 7. Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre have provided phenomenological accounts of the lived body that go some way toward supplementing Heidegger’s disembodied account of Dasein’s experience, but they all reproduce, in some measure, Heidegger’s failure to take gendered experience seriously. 8. See, for example, BT 235 and SZ 191; BT 376 and SZ 328. 9. Jacques Taminiaux, “The Early Levinas’s Reply to Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 23.6 (1997): 29–49, esp. 45. 10. See also Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. S. Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 62–71; originally published in French as “Quelques réflexions sur le philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” Esprit 2.26 (1934): 199–208. 11. Heidegger suggests that Dasein mistakes itself for a thing when it takes itself as equivalent to those things with which it is constantly in relation in the ready-to-hand. Dasein’s mistake does not amount to a conceptual error, precisely insofar as it does not amount to a well-considered, reflective, ontologically clarified, conceptual judgment. In this sense, Dasein’s inauthenticity can be compared to the worker’s ideological mystification in Marxian theory. It is precisely Dasein’s lack of conceptual clarity that makes its mistaken view of itself akin to ideology. 12. Levinas says: “The upsurge of the self beginning in enjoyment, where the substantiality of the I is apperceived not as the subject of the verb to be, but as implicated in happiness (not belonging to ontology, but to axiology), is the exaltation of the existent as such. . . . One becomes a subject of being not by assuming being but in enjoying happiness, by the interiorization of enjoyment which is also an exaltation, an ‘above being.’ . . .

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“To be I is to exist in such a way as to be already beyond being, in happiness” (TI 119–20; TeI 91–92). 13. Strictly speaking it is not that the subject is discovered in its materiality “before” or “behind” the world of its engagements, since this would suggest that chronologically the subject is first endowed with a material essence which only subsequently becomes complicated when it encounters the ethical demand of an other. Empirically one is never alone in the world, and hence others contest my place in the world by enjoyment of things, my very material existence by placing a claim on me and on the things from which I live. Levinas sometimes expresses himself in terms that suggest that the relation he seeks to uncover is one that happens prior to the relation between subjects and objects, as when he says, “To take up existence is not to enter into the world” (EE 100; DE 173), or “in the theater of the world . . . there are places already to receive existents. The event which we have been inquiring after is antecedent to that placing” (EE 101; DE 174). Because time has the capacity to unravel the knot of presence that makes the present definitive for the I (see EE 93; DE 159), the dynamic of time must be thought in terms of its relation to the instant, and not as an afterthought. 14. See the preface to Levinas, De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984). 15. In Totality and Infinity, pp. 122–42, Levinas will distinguish between the movement of representation and that of enjoyment. 16. It is worth noting that Levinas will say in 1975, “As long as there is no other, one cannot speak of freedom or of nonfreedom” (Of God Who Comes to Mind, 2d ed., with new preface, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 92; originally published in French as De Dieu qui vient a l’idée (Paris: J. Vrin, 1982), p. 147. At this period of his work Levinas identifies “the uniqueness of the I” as “the impossibility of slipping away from the other” (GWC 92; DQV 147). A fuller explication of Levinas’s conception of time will need to be provided in order to better understand Levinas’s apparent shift away from the discovery of the self as reflexively related to itself in the dynamic of hypostasis, and toward such later formulations, where the impossibility of evasion does not concern one’s relation to oneself, but precisely one’s relation to the other—one is unable “to evade the other” (GWC 92; DQV 147). This will be the task of the section “Temporality and History” below in this chapter. 17. In a note to Otherwise than Being Levinas reaffirms his admiration for “the bold intellectual move in Cartesianism: the body as source of the sensible has no longer anything in common with the knowing of ideas. Even if one does not follow Descartes as to the bond he affirms between sensibility and action and the rank he assigns to the sensible, from now on the union between soul and body is not only an obstacle encountered by thought” (OB 191 n.11; AE 99). 18. The formal answer to the question of how Dasein can be authentic can be provided by pointing to the work that Heidegger’s concept of anxiety does. See Marion, “A Note Concerning the Ontological Indifference.” The function of

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anxiety will be taken up in the section “Temporality and History” below in this chapter. 19. The associations of Heidegger’s notion of the Augenblick, or “moment of vision,” with Kierkegaard’s “moment,” and with Aristotle’s kairos, are explored by Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989). See also Hans Ruin, Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity through Heidegger’s Works, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 15 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1994); and William McNeill, The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). 20. Christopher Fynsk makes a similar point when he suggests that although “Heidegger argues in Being and Time that being-with (Mitsein) is constitutive for Dasein . . . his analysis of Dasein . . . leads back insistently to the solitary self” (Heidegger: Thought and Historicity [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986], p. 28). 21. The two characteristics that Heidegger takes up as “clues . . . for answering the question” of “who” Dasein is “formally indicat[e] the constitution of Dasein’s Being” (BT 152; SZ 117). They are “the priority of ‘existentia’ over essentia, and the fact that Dasein is in each case mine [die Jemeinigkeit]” (BT 68; SZ 43). 22. Heidegger develops the notion of “constancy” in relation to Dasein’s authenticity. 23. Otto Pöggeler, “Destruction and Moment,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 137–56, esp. p. 148. 24. Michel Haar, “The Enigma of Everydayness,” trans. M. B. Naas and P.-A. Brault, in Reading Heidegger, ed. John Sallis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 20–28, esp. p. 21. 25. Taminiaux (above, n. 9), p. 49. In one register, I am in complete agreement with Taminiaux, and this is indeed what I have emphasized so far. However, in unpacking Heidegger’s notion of historicity, it will be necessary to complicate the view that Heidegger “merely expands” solitude, since while Dasein’s solitary vision is certainly emphasized in Heidegger’s account of authentically confronting death, such confrontation does not take place merely as oriented to the future, but the future as having been. To be sure, in facing mortality, Dasein looks to the future, but this future is not one that is decontextualized from the past. In the moment of vision, Dasein must have divorced itself from the inauthentic they, in which it unthinkingly inherits tradition, and find a way of retrieving the past so that it is obedient to the authentic past. The figures that populate this authentic past, which Dasein must bring into the future, shadowy though they may be, bear an uncanny resemblance to those public officials of National Socialism whom Nazis recognized as heroic.

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26. Strictly speaking, this judgment is a little too harsh, as Levinas acknowledges when he says, “To broach an existent from Being is simultaneously to let it be and to comprehend it,” but then goes on to point out that “Being is inseparable from the comprehension of Being (which unfolds as time); Being is already an appeal to subjectivity” (TI 45; TeI 15). If Levinas is right to criticize Heidegger for totalizing time, then ultimately the critique of Heidegger as according too much importance to the comprehension of subjectivity is tenable. 27. François Poiré, Emmanuel Levinas: Qui êtes-vous? (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), p. 96. 28. Levinas refers the concept of “holiness” to the “order of being-for-theother” (GWC ix). 29. In order to see the full significance of the feminine in Levinas’s work, we will have to get to the point of understanding how Levinas can accuse the later Heidegger of a “faint materialism” (TI 299; TeI 275), in what sense he is critical of Heidegger for exalting a “philosophy of neuter” which presents the we as anterior to the I, and in what sense Levinas’s understanding of separation is intended to avoid both idealism and materialism. (See TI 298; TeI 275.) 30. Levinas opposes the transitive relationships of touching and seeing to the intransitive fact of my existing. 31. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “La panique politique,” trans. C. Surprenant, in Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 18. 32. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 33. John Llewelyn, The Genealogy of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 45. 34. Ibid. 35. See translators’ note 1 to BT 47. 36. By “undifferentiated,” Heidegger means the general character of the future, past, or present, without regard to authenticity or inauthenticity. 37. See BT 377; SZ 328. 38. William D. Blattner criticizes Charles Guignon (Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983]) and Otto Pöggeler (Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking [above, n. 19]) for their “erroneous” close “identification” of temporality with historicality, and cites Heidegger’s claim at BT 428 (= SZ 376, in a translation that differs slightly but not significantly from Macquarrie and Robinson’s) that “The analysis of the historicality of Dasein aims to show that this entity is not ‘temporal’ because it ‘stands in history,’ but rather the opposite, that it does and can exist historically only because it is temporal in the ground of its being” (Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism. Modern European Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], p. 29). Other commentators suggest that although Heidegger does indeed appear to ground his variegated analysis of history in temporality, in fact the issue is a good deal

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more complex than a straightforward grounding relationship. Hans Ruin says that “historicity should have a clear position within the totality, as a derivative aspect of temporality. However, the relation between these levels is not as clear as Heidegger’s formal structuring of the work may at first suggest” (Enigmatic Origins [above, n. 19], p. 164). He goes on to suggest that “the idea of Dasein’s historicity . . . mark[s] a breach in SZ, signaling the transgression of its own themes through a deepened historical critique, and also through a deepened articulation of the meaning of historical belonging” (p. 175). See also Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger & the Political: Dystopias (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 11–31; Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1990), pp. 53–69. 39. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 62–64. 40. Pöggeler (above, n. 23), p. 145. 41. Ibid., pp. 145–46. 42. As Bourdieu says, “Heidegger’s perspective on historical tradition tends towards a restoration of origins” (above, n. 39: p. 123 n. 10). 43. Pöggeler (above, n. 23), p. 148. 44. Ibid. Pöggeler refers in n. 12 to BT 422 (= SZ 371) and BT 444 (= SZ 391). 45. Pöggeler (above, n. 23), pp. 148–49. 46. Pöggeler (above, n. 19), p. 272. 47. Haar (above, n. 24), p. 27. 48. See also Emmanuel Levinas, La mort et le temps (Paris: l’Herne, 1991), p. 16. 49. Taminiaux explains further: “Whereas Heidegger defines the present in ekstatic terms by integrating it into the temporalizing movement of the Self, Levinas refuses to define the present in terms of the transcending process of temporalization. . . . “When Levinas writes [in Existence and Existents] ‘that it is really the instant that is the accomplishment of existence’ and specifies that ‘of itself an instant is a relationship, a conquest, although this relationship does not refer to any future or past, nor to any being or event situated in the future’ (76), he deliberately objects to Heidegger’s definition of the existential present as the intersection of a retrieval and of an anticipating project” (above, n. 9: pp. 44–45). It needs to be added that Levinas will affirm ecstasis as a movement characteristic of enjoyment, but by doing so he also significantly alters the ultimate meaning of ecstasis. Like Heidegger’s ecstatic temporality, in enjoyment there is a going beyond, and a return, but for Levinas this movement describes the materiality of the subject. Rather than being the ultimate structure of subjectivity, in a way that parallels Heidegger’s Dasein, it is precisely what the subject must

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come to understand as merely provisional to the ultimate ethical demand of the Other. 50. See also TI 218; TeI 194. For a more sympathetic portrayal of the parochialism of Levinas’s thought, see Robert Bernasconi. “‘Only the Persecuted . . .’: Language of the Oppressor, Language of the Oppressed” in Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 77–86. 51. Pöggeler (above, n. 23), p. 148.

Chapter 3: Heidegger’s Critique of Metaphysical Presence 1. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 9. 2. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 3. Heidegger introduces this distinction in Being and Time, but does not fully negotiate it until BP, Sections 20–22. 4. In Being and Time Heidegger says that Aristotle’s understanding of time “moves in the direction of the ‘natural’ [natürlichen] way of understanding Being” (BT 473; SZ 421). In Being and Time he also refers to Aristotle’s ontology as “scientific” (BT 48; SZ 26), but in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology he says that “What Aristotle presents as time corresponds to the common prescientific understanding of time” (BP 257; GP 362). 5. In Being and Time, vorhanden and its derivatives are translated as “present-at-hand,” “presence-at-hand,” etc., but in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, vorhanden is rendered as “extant.” 6. See BP 303 (= GP 421) and BP 305–6 (= GP 354). 7. Aristotle, Physics, Books I–IV, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), vol. 4. 8. For a lucid and instructive discussion of Augustine and Aristotle (among other topics), see Genevieve Lloyd, Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 22–26. 9. See Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 146–47. 10. Dasein is chosen as the vehicle for raising the question of Being because of its ontico-ontological priority. Dasein is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. In its Being, Dasein has a relationship toward Being—a relationship which is itself one of Being. Further, Dasein understands itself in its Being, to some degree explicitly. Heidegger says, “Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein’s Being” (BT 32; SZ 12). The question of Being is posed by Heidegger as a radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself—the preontological understanding of Being.

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Dasein’s priority is both ontical and ontological. Ontically, Dasein has the determinate character of existence. Ontologically, not only is Dasein’s existence determinative, but it is also constitutive for its understanding of the Being of other entities. As such, Dasein provides the ontico-ontological condition for other ontologies. Fundamental ontology must therefore be sought in the existential analytic of Dasein. (See BT 34; SZ 13.) By “existential,” Heidegger means the analysis of the structure of existence, as distinct from existentiell, which is an understanding of oneself in terms of existence, at the ontical level of involvement in the world. (See BT 33; SZ 12.) Dasein’s understanding of Being is an understanding of “world” and of the Being of entities accessible within the world. 11. Note that while here Heidegger seems to distinguish the common understanding of time from Aristotle’s by qualifying the latter interpretation as one that specifies time as an “irreversible” succession, in Being and Time he attributes the thesis of irreversibility not only to Aristotle, but also to the common understanding of time (BT 478; SZ 426). This indicates a more extensive ambiguity that pervades Heidegger’s discussion of Aristotle and time, one that can be detailed by a careful reading of Being and Time and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Heidegger vacillates as to how far he conflates Aristotle’s view with the common understanding of time, and this vacillation has an impact on how far Heidegger’s own, allegedly more original interpretation, of time can be ultimately distinguished from what Aristotle had already seen—despite Heidegger’s claim that Aristotle could never formulate the question properly without clarifying the question of the meaning of being, and the inherent relation between time and being. 12. In Being and Time, the term Gegenwärtigen is translated as “makingpresent,” while Gewärtigen is translated as “awaiting.” 13. One might want to argue that the English translation “anticipation” (for Vorlaufen) is misleading in that it implies a mental attitude, whereas in fact Heidegger intends a sense of Dasein running-ahead-of itself, a much more physical connotation. Johannes Fritsche suggests such a reading in Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 2–3. Notwithstanding this, because the anticipation of death ultimately plays itself in Dasein’s reorientation, and because of Heidegger’s general avoidance of embodiment, my view is that in its final significance, anticipatory resoluteness is indeed more abstract than Fritsche maintains. 14. Jacques Taminiaux, “The Early Levinas’s Reply to Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 23.6 (1997): 29–49, esp. p. 46. 15. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39–40. 16. Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 64–65. 17. Derrida (above, n. 15), p. 17.

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18. Françoise Dastur, “The Ekstatico-horizonal Constitution of Temporality,” in Critical Heidegger, ed. Christopher Macann (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 158–70, esp. pp. 164–65.

Chapter 4: The Temporality of Saying 1. Having stipulated that Heidegger’s conception of disclosing is inadequate to the “welcoming of the face and the work of justice—which condition the birth of truth itself” (TI 28; TeI xvi), Levinas also rejects the Husserlian terms that describe events as “noeses aiming at noemata” (TI 28 n.2: TeI xvi n.1), since “not every transcendent intention has the noesis-noema structure” (TI 29; TeI xvii ). While Levinas wants to retain a version of the “phenomenological deduction” (TI 28–29; TeI xvii ), he wants to move away from the idea of intentionality, “where thought remains an adequation with the object,” and which “does not define consciousness at its fundamental level. All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently non-adequation” (TI 27; TeI xv). In claiming that not even revelation adequately describes the relation of the same to the other, Levinas wants to avoid the discourse of light that this term still evokes. 2. Levinas’s view that the very identity of the I is bound up with the Other could be compared in some ways to the Lacanian mirror stage, although of course the implications Levinas draws from the idea that subjectivity is constituted in and through the encounter with the Other diverge significantly from psychoanalytic claims. To follow up the relation between Levinas and Lacan is beyond the scope of this project, but as a first attempt to explore this relationship, see my article “Reading Hegel as a Mediating Master: Lacan and Levinas,” in Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, ed. S. Harasym (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), pp. 1–21. 3. Whether Heidegger’s conception of the Augenblick, or “moment of vision,” manages to resist dissipation into a totalizing conception of time is a question that Levinas does not directly engage. 4. I am suspicious of the idea that ontology can be purified of politics, or, to put the matter in more Heideggerian terms, that ontological claims can be purified of ontic biases. Similarly, I wonder whether Levinas’s insistence on divorcing ethics from politics, or on seeing the two as operating at different levels (the saying and the said), isn’t just another way of allowing his philosophy to masquerade as neutral and disinterested, while invisibly maintaining the specific interests of the usual suspects. At the same time, I want to follow Levinas as far as I can in maintaining that there might be a sense in which ethics cuts through politics, a way in which politics is always liable to be dogmatic, to solidify its claims in ways that subvert what might initially have been its ethical interests. Unless there is a way to distinguish ethics from politics, it is hard to account for how individuals could resist the policies of a Nazi state. It is hard to see how to position oneself in principled opposition to the regime of National Socialism,

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under which the state had become effectively synonymous with eradicating Jews because they were Jews, gays and lesbians because they were homosexual, the differently abled because they were disabled, blacks because they were black—in eliminating people because they did not represent an allegedly Aryan race, because their existence differed from an ideal that was embraced by Hitler. 5. To a limited extent a parallel could be drawn between Levinas’s notions of the saying and the said and Kristeva’s semiotic and symbolic. 6. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Jacques Derrida: Wholly Otherwise,” in Proper Names, trans. M. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–62, esp. p. 60. 7. See EE 71 and DE 121–22; EE 73 and DE 125; TO 52 and TA 32. 8. Levinas relies on Being and Time in his 1947 texts. Heidegger will later differentiate between thinking the difference between Being and beings and positing it as a distinction. 9. See Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” trans. A. Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. M. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 345–59; originally published as “La trace de l’autre,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1982), pp. 187–202. 10. Levinas had already referred to fecundity in his earlier texts, but in Totality and Infinity this structure is elaborated. 11. Most readers have retreated from acknowledging the radical implications of Levinas’s notion of diachrony by retaining a Heidegger-inspired model in their explication of Levinas’s understanding of time. For example, Robert John Sheffler Manning preserves the triadic conception of time in his presentation of Levinas, organizing it under the headings present, past, and future, an interpretive schema that fails to do justice to diachrony (Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993], pp. 62–87). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, “Mourir pour . . . ,” in Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991), pp. 204–14, esp. p. 226. 13. Heidegger apologists will no doubt insist that to ask about how the claims of others directly impact Dasein’s life, decisions, or thought processes is to illegitimately introduce ontic concerns into the orbit reserved for ontological considerations. Levinas’s critique operates at a level that questions the legitimacy or possibility of neatly separating the ontic from the ontological realm. His concern is whether Heidegger prejudices the case against Dasein’s taking seriously the claims of others by grounding all ontic claims on an ontological level that posits the priority of Dasein as unquestionable. I would suggest, further, that the notion of Dasein that Heidegger employs purports to be neutral with regard to gender, race, class, and ethnicity, but in fact assumes the invisible privilege of male, white, middle-class, Western conceptions of subjectivity, and that Levinas’s conception of subjectivity does little to challenge such privilege.

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14. I follow up this suggestion in my reading of “Dying for . . .” below in Chapter 5. 15. As Sheehan has pointed out, there is a discrepancy between commentators as to precisely the status granted by Heidegger to the existentialia, and how these correspond to the temporal ecstases. Sheehan criticizes the “received tradition” in which he includes Pöggeler, and with which he associates Kisiel, for claiming that Befindlichkeit, Verstehen, and Rede constitute the triadic structure as “components,” insisting that this perverts the meaning of Heidegger’s claim that they are “equiprimordial” (Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s New Aspect: On In-Sein, Zeitlichket, and The Genesis of Being and Time,” Research in Phenomenology, 1997,). See also idem, “Das Gewesen,” in Proceedings of the 29th Annual Heidegger Conference, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., May 19–21, 1995, p. 19 n. 2. 16. See BT 395; SZ 344. 17. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Also see Jacques Derrida’s remarks on chôra in On the Name, ed. T. Dutoit, trans. D. Wood et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89–127. 18. Insofar as the semiotic operates in a pre-Oedipal climate, and depends upon a mother-child dyad, in which the distinction between self and other is not yet accomplished, Kristeva’s “semiotic” cannot be seen as wholly identified with an absolute other in the sense that Levinas’s “saying” is. However, there is a sense in which the semiotic registers an excess, or alterity, that is foreign to the symbolic, even if it is also the symbolic that, for the first time, provides access to the semiotic. There is also a sense in which the analyst plays the role of the other for the analysand in psychoanalytic discourse. The analyst could not be said to parallel the role of Levinas’s Other—there is too much dissonance (which Levinas is quick to point out) between psychoanalysis and Levinas’s discourse for any such unproblematic similarity to be asserted. Nonetheless, the extent to which Levinas’s discourse is pervaded with the language of trauma, obsession, and persecution indicates that there is more work to be done on the possible overlaps between the two discourses. 19. Translation amended. 20. As I suggested in previous chapters (following Bourdieu), while Heidegger’s philosophy appears to point toward historicism, he also draws back from the relativism this would entail by imposing the authority of his own discourse on Being in a way that makes it absolute.

Chapter 5: Giving Time and Death 1. This chapter has benefited from the opportunities I had to present it as a paper in earlier versions in February 1997 at the philosophy departments of Miami University, Ohio, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and at the New School for Social Research. I would like to thank Emily Zakin, Ed-

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ward Casey, and Richard Bernstein for arranging these occasions, and the audiences for their comments, criticisms, and questions, which helped me think through and revise the paper. In particular, I would like to thank David L. Smith, and the board of directors of The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University, for inviting me to participate in their symposium in memory of Levinas in March 1997. This was the occasion for which the paper was originally conceived. 2. It would be redundant to document exhaustively all the changes that Levinas makes between the two versions—or indeed the points that Levinas leaves more or less unchanged in the later version. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that in addition to Heidegger’s accomplishment in catching sight of the verbalness of Being (a point that Levinas often singles out, and which I discuss further below), Levinas remarks upon his success in making philosophy concrete. This latter point is one that many of Heidegger’s students comment upon. (See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. David E. Linge [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976], pp. 138–39.) Both versions of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” share as common points of reference an emphasis on the nontheoretical nature of Dasein’s understanding of Being, as indeed does “Dying for . . .” (MH 16; MO 403; DEHH 57; MP 222). The formulation Levinas uses to make this point harks back to his opening discussion of the basically Cartesian subject, who seeks clarity in place of confused ideas. “For Heidegger,” says Levinas, “the understanding of being is not a purely theoretical act but . . . a fundamental event where one’s entire destiny is at issue; and, consequently, the difference between these modes of explicit and implicit understanding is not simply that between clear and obscure knowledge, but is a difference which reaches unto the very being of man” (MH 16; MO 403: there are only minor changes in the 1949 version). In contrast to the epistemological concern to verify the truth of knowledge, Heidegger brings to the fore an ontological concern where the central problem is not how to gain access to truth but how to understand Dasein’s way of being, an ontology in which “it is concrete man who appears at the center of philosophy” (MH 24; MO 416), whose existence—unlike the contemplative reflection of philosophers of consciousness, preoccupied with verifying the truth of ideas—is inseparable from his “destiny and history” (ibid.). 3. Jacques Taminiaux has a similar reading: “The Early Levinas’s Reply to Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 23.6 (1997): 29–49, esp. pp. 29–30. 4. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme¯: A Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 63. 5. One of Heidegger’s decisive contributions, according to Levinas, is his conception of Dasein in terms of the verbal sense of Being. What Dasein is—its whatness or quiddity—is its very way or mode of existence. Dasein’s under-

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standing of Being, which is also its way of existing, or the fact that it has its existence at issue, is not merely an attribute or property of being human, but the very essence of being-there. To exist is precisely the defining characteristic of Dasein, and as such, to use the well-known Heideggerian phrase, “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (BT 67; SZ 42). This distinguishing characteristic of Dasein is also what sets it apart from other objects, giving the term “existence” (Existenz) the particular meaning that Heidegger reserves for it, as distinct from vorhandenheit, which designates the mode of existence that objects have. Thus the sense in which objects are present and the mode of Dasein’s presence are fundamentally divergent. In “Dying for . . . ,” Levinas refers again to what he calls Heidegger’s “new approach,” one that he not only considers to be of “primary importance” (MP 223), but which he even invokes as the contribution that allows him to move in a direction not taken by Heidegger himself—a going beyond being. He recalls the way in which Heidegger suspends “the quiddity in the essence of man” in order to “conceive of this essence as existence, as the adverbial modality of event of being” (MP 223). We know that Levinas had already isolated this point as “fundamental to Heideggerian philosophy” (MH 12; MO 405) in the 1932 version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology”: “man’s essence is simultaneously his existence. That which man is is at the very same time his way of being, his way of beingthere” (ibid.). But whereas in 1932 he adds that “the possibility of this relation”—between essence and existence (as he clarifies in the 1949 version)—“is precisely the fundamental mark of being in man” (MH 17; MO 405), by 1949 Levinas sees fit to remove this observation. The reason, in the light of the work we know from the intervening years, and as suggested by the later comment in “Dying for . . . ,” seems clear enough. Levinas no longer wants to assert that the relation between essence and existence is the fundamental mark of being, because he wants instead to see this relationship not as the basic event of being but as derivative of what he calls in “Dying for . . .” “a going-beyond-being” (MP 223). Looking ahead, if I am right to see Levinas’s preference for the term au-delà over au-devant in the 1949 version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” as anticipating the idea of death that he expresses in 1987 as a going beyond being, this would also account for Levinas’s wish to omit his discussion of inauthentic relations with others. For Heidegger, authenticity is ultimately grounded on Dasein’s own authentic anticipation of death. And it is here that Levinas locates, in 1987, his difference from Heidegger. For Heidegger, death is solitary: in authentically facing death, all Dasein’s relations with others are dissolved. But for Levinas, death is not primarily my death: death comes from the other. 6. Changes in the 1949 version are in square brackets, but are stylistic rather than substantive. 7. Some changes between the two versions of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology” can be attributed simply to the desire to make stylistic improvements that have little substantive effect, as when Levinas changes the clause “the mode of

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everyday existence is not something that happens to Dasein from without” (MH 25; MO 419) to “the mode of everyday existence does not happen to Dasein from without” (DEHH 70). While such alterations are clearly often for economy or simplicity of style, others can be put down to the wish to increase clarity, and still others are the product of Levinas’s increased maturity and greater sensitivity to the meaning that Heidegger specifies for certain terms—as when in place of the clause “Dasein does not understand itself in its true personality [Il ne se comprehend pas dans sa personnalité véritable]” (MH 25; MO 418) he substitutes, “Dasein does not understand itself in its authentic [authentique] personality” (DEHH 70). Clearly Levinas is taking account of the need to distinguish truth from authenticity, in order to remain faithful to Heidegger’s insistence that the distinction between authentic and inauthentic not be collapsed into an ethical or religious distinction. If many of the changes are made for mundane reasons, some of the them are, however, less innocuous and more significant: for example, the systematic excising of phrases that align or identify Levinas with the exegesis he provides. Thus he cuts phrases such as “we have just established [nous venons d’établir]” and “we thus return to [Nous rejoindrons ainsi]” (MH 22; MO 413); “which we translate as [que nous traduisons par]” and “[which] allows us to emphasize [nous permet de souligner]” (MH 25; MO 418). Of course it is not every instance of the pronoun nous that Levinas omits in the revised version of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” and while some cases may be explained by the fact that Levinas is altering the text so that it reads as an independent essay, and no longer as part of a projected longer work—as when he substitutes simply “for Heidegger [pour Heidegger]” (DEHH: 70) in place of “we will demonstrate later [nous montrerons plus loin]” (MH 25; MO 419)—there remain a number of cases that do not follow this rationale. These instances seem to be too numerous to be accidental. 8. As it stands in the 1932 version, the passage is part of Levinas’s explication of the Heideggerian notion of fallenness, in which Dasein’s relations with others are inauthentic. As such, it leaves open the possibility—although Levinas does not address it explicitly—that this relation could be authentic; for Levinas goes on to say that “the fall is an inner possibility of authentic existence. Dasein must [on the other hand (this phrase is added for purposes of clarification in 1949)] authentically possess itself in order that it may be lost” (MH 25; MO 419; DEHH 70). Authenticity, then, is presupposed by inauthenticity. 9. Toward the beginning of “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” in keeping with the puzzling exclusion of the other passage on everyday being with others, we find a similar omission. In the 1932 version, immediately following his praise for Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein, Levinas says, “We are limited to brief remarks on the personality of Dasein lost in ‘the one,’ on the word becoming chatter, to degraded coexistence, etc. We will need to become more explicit in the remainder, when it will be a question of working back from structures,

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which we have just established, to time” (MH 26; MO 420). In 1949, Levinas abbreviates this statement, reducing it merely to the words “We are limited to brief remarks” (DEHH 71). Not only does this corroborate Levinas’s reluctance to discuss everyday being with others as he revises “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” it also serves to underline the fact that Levinas’s undertaking in this essay cannot be dismissed as the exegetical work of an overzealous pupil. Rather it represents a valuable record of Levinas’s first attempt to disentangle the difficulties of Heidegger’s thought. 10. There is, in fact, a series of substitutions that Levinas effects with regard to the words “concern” (souci), “care” (soin) and “solicitude” (sollicitude). In the 1949 version, Levinas replaces the terminology of “taking care of” (prendre soin de) and “solicitude” (sollicitude) with “being concerned with” (se soucier de) and its derivatives. (See, for example, MH 18; MO 408; DEHH 61.) Although these changes are not completely systematic (see, for example, MH 18; MO 407; DEHH 61), the substitution of souci for sollicitude does become systematic in the last few pages of the essay (see MH 30–32; MO 428–31; DEHH 74–76). Whereas in 1932 Levinas is content to use the terms almost interchangeably (see MH 18; MO 408), in 1949 he is more careful to attribute specific and distinct meanings to each term. In the 1987 essay “Mourir Pour . . . ,” he is careful, nonetheless, to emphasize that the mode of existence of others is “always distinct from that of things” (MP 225), and he reserves the term sollicitude for the former, and souci for the latter. Acknowledging that solicitude is “assured” in Heidegger’s analysis, Levinas makes clear that its assurance rests upon a priority that he seeks to contest. For Heidegger, solicitude is conditioned by being-in-the-world (see MP 227), and it is this conditioning that holds Heidegger back from granting a radical status to the other. For Heidegger, Levinas says, the “approach of the other starts from the world, without recognizing faces” (MP 227). In connection with this, note that Taminiaux (above, n. 3: p. 35) suggests Levinas “blurs the contrast that Heidegger sets up between preoccupation (Bersognis) and concern (Sorge).”

Chapter 6: Impossible Possibility 1. See Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel Levinas, trans. A. Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 127–51, esp. p. 128; originally published as “Humanisme et ananarchie,” in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972), pp. 67– 82, esp. p. 68. 2. I borrow this image of the historiographer from Levinas, who refers to it throughout Otherwise than Being. 3. Geoffrey Hartman. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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4. See Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of PostHolocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989). 5. Ibid., p. 28. 6. In his article “God and Philosophy,” Levinas finds in testimony “a witness borne of the Infinite” (CPP 169). The importance of testimony for Levinas lies in his understanding it as a modality of saying: “Saying as testimony precedes all the said. Saying, the saying of the said, as an approach to the other, is a responsibility for him. Saying is therefore a way of signifying prior to all experience. A pure testimony, it is a martyr’s truth which does not depend on any disclosure or any ‘religious’ experience; it is an obedience that precedes the hearing of any order. A pure testimony, it does not testify to a prior experience, but to the infinite which is not accessible to the unity of apperception, non-appearing and disproportionate to the present. Saying could neither include nor comprehend the Infinite; the Infinite concerns and closes in on me while speaking through my mouth. And the only pure testimony is that of the Infinite. “. . . I am a testimony, or a trace, or the glory of the Infinite” (CPP 170). This article was originally published as “Dieu et la philosophie,” Le Nouveau Commerce 30–31 (1975): 97–128, esp. pp. 122–24. 7. See Levinas’s comment on testimony in “Franz Rosenzweig: A Modern Jewish Thinker,” In Outside the Subject, trans. M. B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 49–66, esp. p. 62; originally published as “Franz Rosenzweig: Une pensée juive moderne,” in Hors sujet (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1987), pp. 71–96, esp. p. 90. these works will hereafter be cited in the text and notes as OS and HS. 8. See CPP 168; DP 120. 9. Levinas says, “‘The good Lord did not create religion, he created the world,’ Rosenzweig was fond of saying, and the word religion does not appear in The Star of Redemption” (OS 55; HS 80). 10. Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption was “conceived by 1917 on the Balkan front” (OS 51; HS 75). 11. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 12. 12. In his answer to this question, Levinas appeals to a fundamental distinction between what he calls the “propagation of an idea” and the “expansion of a force” (“Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 [Autumn 1990]: 62–71, esp. 70; originally published as “Quelques réflexions sur le philosophie de l’Hitlérisme,” Esprit 2.26 (1934): 199–208, esp. 207). By transforming the idea of universality—“the formal nature of truth” which it does not want to renounce (RP 70; QR 207)—racism replaces the anonymity of the propagated idea with the specificity of the expansion of a force. The former “detaches itself essentially from its point of departure” and becomes “anonymous,” creating a “community of ‘masters,’” by equalizing its adherents,

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making them peers, on a par with the originator of the idea. By contrast, “The person who exerts force does not abandon” force, which thus enlarges the “person or society while subordinating the rest” (RP 70; QR 208). Here it is not ideology that establishes universality; it is expansion itself that “constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves” (RP 70–71; QR 208). 13. The sense in which Revelation calls for Redemption can be understood in terms of ecstasy. Redemption begins in Revelation, since, as Levinas says, “The Revelation, which is love, awaits man’s response” (OS 58; HS 84). The response, the love of one’s neighbor, is unique, singular, and unavoidable. My singularity is also my mortality. 14. Michel Haar, Heidegger and the Essence of Man, trans. W. McNeill (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 3. 15. See Levinas, CPP 167 n. 19; DP 120 n. 1. 16. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 27; originally published as “Aporie: Mourir-s’attendre aux limites de la vérité,” in Le passage des frontières: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1993), pp. 309–38. 17. See, for example, Levinas’s TI 41 n. 4; TeI 11 n. 4. 18. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 96. This work will hereafter be cited in the text as SL. 19. See Jacques Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme¯: A Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 63. 20. Heidegger says, “Anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s demise” (BT 295; SZ 251). See also Heidegger’s observations about the they’s inability to know the situation, and the misunderstanding of death that consists of sustaining the illusion that the they always has more time (BT 346 and SZ 300; BT 477 and SZ 425). 21. See BT 292; SZ 248. Levinas says, “In death I am exposed to absolute violence, to murder in the night” (TI 233; TeI 210). The formulation is telling. The night is also what faces the insomniac; the night is what invades my consciousness, disturbs me, obsesses me, refusing to coagulate into forms or objects, swarming, inexhaustible, threatening, without horizon (see TI 233; TeI 210), outside categories. “Death threatens me from beyond” (TI 234; TeI 210), unforeseeable. Levinas says: “One does not know when death will come. What will come? With what does it threaten me? With nothingness or with recommencement? I do not know” (TI 234; TeI 211). The impossibility of death is an “impossibility of knowing” (TI 234; TeI 211), “the impossibility of every possibility” (TI 235; TeI 212). Contrary to Heidegger, Levinas suggests that “There is horror of being and not anxiety over nothingness, fear of being and not fear for being. . . . While

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anxiety, in Heidegger, brings about ‘being toward death,’ grasped and somehow understood, the horror of the night . . . is an irremissible existence” (EE 62–63; DE 102). 22. Also see Heidegger’s comments on the relation between thrownness, disclosedness, and state-of-mind (BT 321; SZ 276). 23. Jill Robbins, “Visage, Figure: Speech and Murder in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity,” in Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, ed. C. Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 275–98, esp. p. 286. See also Jill Robbins, Altared Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 24. Robbins, “Visage” (above, n. 23), p. 287. 25. Ibid. Robbins is quoting from Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. S. Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 62. 26. Fackenheim (above, n. 4), p. 150. 27. At the beginning of the I, on Levinas’s account, we do not find the self, the ego, the epistemological bearer of traits, the investigator capable of analyzing the ontological structures of the world. We do not find Dasein always already thrown into the world, immersed in projects, orchestrating its own world, in anxiety anticipating death. What we find inaugurating the I, prior to any projection, is precisely the other. At its origin, the I is subverted before it has got under way. The I is already a soi, a oneself, “from the first in the accusative” (CPP 165; DP 116), a me voici, already answering for the other. 28. See Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon Books, 1969), pp. 52, 122. 29. Fackenheim (above, n. 4), p. 200. 30. Elie Wiesel (above, n. 28: 79) says: “This day I had ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy. I had ceased to be anything but ashes.” Fackenheim (above, n. 4: 153) suggests that with Heidegger, “Rosenzweig’s ‘Man’s-Being-With-God-in-the-World’ reduces itself at once to ‘Man’s-Being-in-the-world’” and asks if this “historicist reduction” does not “dispose of the Star’s ‘Man’ and ‘World’ just as surely as of its ‘God’?” 31. For a more thorough discussion of Rosenzweig’s relation to Levinas than I can provide in this context, see Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

Chapter 7: A Mourning of Philosophy 1. Emmanuel Levinas, La mort et le temps (Paris: l’Herne, 1991). All translations are my own. 2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Dieu et l’onto-théo-logie,” in Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993). The latter work will hereafter be cited in the text as DMT, followed by page numbers. Translations are my own. 3. Written in 1932 and revised in 1949, “Martin Heidegger and Ontology”

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gives us some insight into Levinas’s postwar view of Heidegger, as I suggested in Chapter 5; but since Levinas’s own philosophy is not fully developed until the publication of Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, it is only a preliminary insight. 4. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1926 [1911]; originally published as L’evolution créatrice [Paris: Félix Alcan, 1920]); idem, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1949 [1935]; originally published as Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion [Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932]). 5. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); originally published as “Donner la mort,” in L’éthique du don (Paris: Transition, 1992), pp. 11–108. 6. One could of course say plenty about the subordination of the feminine realm to the masculine in Hegel’s metaphysics and politics in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. For further discussion, see my “Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics,” Differences 10.1 (1998): 75–97. Also see my Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995), esp. chapter 3, pp. 80–126. 7. I take up the notion of the third party in Chapter 8. 8. Levinas marks the transition from Moi to moi by substituting the lowercase m for the uppercase M throughout Otherwise than Being, and elsewhere. 9. Patience is not a new idea in Levinas—it plays an important role in the 1947 text Time and the Other, for example—but the formulation that this idea finds in “La mort et le temps” is original. 10. Here Levinas draws on the work of Ernst Bloch. See, for example, E. Bloch, Traces, trans. Hans Hildenbrand and Pierre Quillet (Paris: Gallimard, 1968). 11. See Levinas’s comments on Plato’s Phaedo, where he pursues the idea of death in terms of “pure being” (see MT 16–17). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” trans. R. Cohen, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 156–67, esp. p. 162; originally published as “La souffrance inutile,” Giornale di Metafisica 4, n.s. 1 (Jan.–Apr. 1982): 13–26; reprinted in Les cahiers de la Nuit Surveillée, vol. 3, Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Jacques Rolland (Paris: Verdier, Lagrasse, 1984), pp. 329–38. 13. Levinas assigns this role to violence. (See TI 21; TeI ix.) Cathy Caruth discusses the paradox of trauma, namely “that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it” (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996], pp. 91–92).

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Chapter 8: The Betrayal of Philosophy 1. I am indebted to the graduate students at the University of Memphis for their challenging and astute reception of Levinas in the courses I taught on his texts, which has helped me to formulate my thoughts here. I would also like to thank my colleague Robert Bernasconi for reading and commenting on this chapter. 2. The word “representation” carries a particular weight for Levinas. He says, for example, “The assembling of being in the present, its synchronization by retention, memory and history, reminiscence, is representation; it does not integrate the responsibility for the separated entity” (OB 140; AE 179). 3. The words dénudation and perd sa place are italicized in Levinas’s original text. 4. Levinas says, “The sign is not posited for itself” (OB 153; AE 195). 5. See, for example, TO 41 and TA 20 TO 67 and TA 52; TO 77 and TA 65. 6. Alphonso Lingis, “The Elemental That Faces,” in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 109. 7. As Adriaan Peperzak says, “as soon as we speak about the Saying, it turns into a theme, a said” (Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991], p. 93). 8. See Levinas’s reference to inhabitation at OB 138; AE 176. 9. Jacques Derrida, “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” trans. R. Berezdevin, in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. R. Bernasconi and S. Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 11–48; originally published as “En ce moment même dans cet ouvrage me voici,” in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Françoise Laruelle (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1980), pp. 21–60. 10. This phrase recurs throughout the text of Otherwise than Being, appearing first in the preface (OB 9; AE 10) and subsequently at key moments (for example, OB 56 and AE 72; OB 126 and AE 162). D. H. Brody also notices the importance of what Levinas calls “abusive language” at OB 44 (= AE 57) and raises some of the themes I discuss here about how to read Levinas, and how to write about him: “The Logic of Ethical Ambiguity in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence,” Research in Phenomenology 25 (1995): 177–203, esp. 184. 11. Levinas quotes the phrase at the end of this passage from Isaiah 65:24. 12. In the original text, these words are italicized: “what took place [lieu] humanly has never been able to remain closed up in its site [son lieu].” 13. I am using the phrase “ethical impossibility” in the sense that I take Levinas to use it in note 2 to chapter 5 (OB 198; AE 173). 14. There are variations on this theme elsewhere in Otherwise than Being: for example, “nothing would ever have shown itself” (OB 175; AE 221). 15. Levinas makes a similar point in the preface: “The act of consciousness is motivated by the presence of a third party alongside of the neighbor ap-

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proached. A third party is also approached; and the relationship between the neighbor and the third party cannot be indifferent to me when I approach. There must be justice between incomparables and a synopsis, a togetherness and contemporaneousness; there must be thematization, thought, history, and inscription. But being must be understood on the basis of being’s other” (OB 16; AE 20).

Conclusion 1. See also OB 75; AE 95. 2. See also EE 16–17; DE 15–17. 3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, tr. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. xxii, note 2. 4. While Levinas sometimes qualifies his judgment, acknowledging, for example, that Heidegger’s notion of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) admits that there is a meaning of existence that is irreducible to the one who does the existing, he usually assumes that existence is always possessed in some sense (however nuanced this possession might be rendered). The overall critique that Levinas issues to Heidegger therefore remains unchanged. Insofar as Heidegger’s philosophy is circumscribed by his inquiry into Being, it fails to move beyond conceiving of philosophy in terms of our relationship to Being. 5. Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 185–217, esp. pp. 191–92. 6. In a footnote Derrida refers to remarks Levinas made in 1985 in the Zurich weekly Construire that indicate a shift in his thinking about the feminine. Levinas says that he “thought that femininity was a modality of alterity” in Time and the Other, but “today I think that it is necessary to go back even further and that the exposure, the nakedness, and the ‘imperative request’ of the face of the Other constitute a modality that the feminine already presupposes: the proximity of the neighbor is non-formal alterity” (Adieu 139 n. 37). Derrida takes this as evidence for the reading that he gives in Adieu, which he prefers to his earlier, more critical reading. But what does it mean to say that the feminine “presupposes” proximity, if not that the ethical relation is more original than the preethical feminine welcome? Even if Derrida’s reading can be sustained here, one can point to other, later, remarks, for example those recorded in 1994, which reveal a pronounced suspicion and defensiveness against “the feminists” (Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Que dirait Eurydice? What Would Eurydice Say? Conversation avec/with Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger [Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997], p. 22). Also in evidence is a series of assertions that remain profoundly disturbing, Levinas’s disclaimers notwithstanding. Woman is identified as the “category of the future,” and the feminine is understood at the “deepest” level as “dying in giving life, in bringing life into the world” (p. 27). Although Levinas tries to ward off the objections he knows his comments will provoke when he says, “it is

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not the ‘dying’; for me, the ‘dying’ of a woman is certainly unacceptable. . . . I am not emphasizing dying but, on the contrary, future” (p. 27), one must ask, Whose future? Levinas’s equation of the feminine and the woman here (both are the “future”), his identification of the woman with maternity, his emphasis of the maternal as the ultimate sacrifice, where “the death of the other is more important to me than my own death” (p. 27), and his understanding of this ethicality as saintliness (p. 28) are enough to convince me of the need for extreme vigilance and skepticism about uncritical feminist appropriations of Levinas. One simply cannot ignore the fact that throughout history women have been systematically forced to sacrifice themselves, literally and metaphorically, for men, as if this social context were immaterial or irrelevant to Levinas’s claims. The history of the systematic oppression of women makes his identification of the supreme ethical relation with dying in childbirth dangerous and unacceptable. This does not mean that I find nothing that is potentially valuable for feminism in his work, only that feminists cannot afford to be completely uncritical. 7. As Robert Bernasoni points out, this phrase is very rare, if not unique, in Levinas’s texts: “Different Styles of Eschatology: Derrida’s Take on Levinas’ Political Messianism,” Research in Phenomenology 28, In Memoriam: Emmanuel Levinas (1998): 3–19. 8. See, for example, Levinas, “Politics After!” in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 188–95.