Abstract
Events which are staggered out according to time and reach consciousness in a series of acts and states also ordered according to time acquire, across this mulitiplicity, a unity of meaning in narration. Signs which signify by their place in a system and by their divergency from other signs (and the words of historically constituted languages do present this formal aspect) are able to confer an identity of meaning to the temporal dispersion of events and thoughts, to synchronize them in the undephasable simultaneity of a story.
“Language and Proximity” was published in French in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 2e éd., pp. 217–36.
Notes not marked “Author’s Note” are by the translator.
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Notes
E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), §24.
E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), Vol. II, pp. 741–42.
M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 189–92.
R. Descartes, Discourse on Method, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 117.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Levinas, E. (1987). Language and Proximity. In: Collected Philosophical Papers. Phaenomenologica, vol 100. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3_7
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