Abstract
The Fourth Section of TI, “Beyond the Face,” merits separate treatment for several reasons. In the first place, it purports to show how a subject’s experience of time may extend well beyond the limits of his own life. An indefinite temporal horizon is here evinced by way of a description of the paradigmatic, human experiences of eros, paternity and filiality. If these experiences are rooted in our factical and biological condition, Levinas insists that they point beyond these precisely because they are also symbolic structures of the ethical life. I will have more to say concerning these structures below. Let us first examine the specificity of this Section of TI.
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Reference
Recalling again Levinas’ enigmatic references to the judgement of God above—as though, by virtue of their imperceptible quality, their invisibility, the judgements of the Other and of God were strictly analogous—we note that Levinas defines the will as “under the judgement of God” precisely when its own fear of death turns toward a fear for the other. This fear for the other is not a fear of the other, it is a fear steeped in shame for it is a fear of the will before itself. The turn therefore comes to pass out of a fear of death into a fear that I might cause death, or harm the other (TI, p. 222, 244).
TI, p. 231, 253.
These expressions—really, allegories—and the apanage of metaphors, parataxis and metalepsis (“sleeping somewhere beyond the future”) that support them receive a curious qualification by Levinas in this section. The philosopher writes, concerning the ‘exorbitant ultramateriality’ of eras, “These superlatives, better than metaphors, translate something like a paroxysm of materiality.” [“Ces superlatifs, mieux que des métaphores, traduisent comme un paroxysme de matérialité.”l TI, pp. 233–234, 256–7, emphasis added, English translation modified.
hese titles are: “The Ambiguity of Love,” “Phenomenology of Eros,” “Fecundity,” “Subjectivity in Eros, ” “Transcendence and Fecundity,” “Filiality and Fraternity,” “The Infinity of Time,” respectively.
T1,pp. 128–29, 155–6, translation modified.
Ibid, p. 129, 156, emphasis added.
Ibid, pp. 168–195, 194–220 “The Face and Ethics” (“Visage et Éthique”) is Section III, part 2. 8 T/, p. 189, 214.
Ibid, p. 188, 213, emphasis added and translation modified.
“The third regards me in the eyes of the other (autrui)Chwr(133). The epiphany of the face as face, opens humanity. The face in its nudity of a visage presents to me the nakedness of the poor one and of the stranger; but this poverty and this exile which call to my powers,Chwr(133) remain the expression of the face. The poor one, the stranger, is presents as equal. His equality in this essential poverty consists in referring to the third party [tiers], thus present to the encounter, and he joins me to him to serve [the others], he commands me as a Master.Chwr(133) The you poses itself before a we Between us is not to ‘jostle’ one another or get together around a common task. The presence of the face—the infinity of the Other [l’ Autrel—is destituteness, presence of the third party (that is to say of all humanity that regards us).” TI, p. 188, 213.
TI, p ix ff., 21 ff
T1,p. 189, 214. Note that the theme of fraternity continues to appear in OBBE, albeit without an elaborate dialectical description accompanying and justifying its use. Fraternity there appears in an attenuated form, as one figure—of which the same paradoxical claim as that in TI is made, that it is both part of being and without origin in being—in a constellation of nearly synonymous figures, including responsibility, subjectivity, etc. Note that in OBBE,it is as though Levinas responded to a question posed to TI; viz., must we not think of brothers as united in responsibility and in the irresponsibility of a profound jealousy. The theme of les frères ennemis, the names of whom, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Remus and Romulus, and so many others, punctuate our thinking of fraternity. The `answer’ Levinas suggests in OBBE, resonates in his statement. “But the relation with a past within/on the hither side of any present and any re-presentableChwr(133) is included in the extraordinary and quotidian event of my responsibility for the errors and the unhappiness of others, in my responsibility responding for the freedom of the other Id’autrui]; in the astonishing human fraternity wherein fraternity by itself—thought with sober, Cain-like, coldness—should not yet explain the responsibility between separated beings that it [fraternity] claims” (OBBE,p. 12 (Fr.), 10 (Eng.). Thus it is the problematic and many-sided notion of fraternity that must, itself, be developed; and this—by way of its reduction, from biological and meta-biological events to the curious breaking of experience to which Levinas bears witness in his phenomenology of responsibility, as it were from one side of the fraternal duality.
TI, p. 129, 155. “The I-thou wherein Buber perceives the category of the inter-human relation is not the relationship with the interlocutor, but with feminine alterity.”
Ibid, p. 232, 254
These events include the emergence of the `hypostasis,’ or separated self, from the elemental; the development of the capacity for “recueillement” (translated as “recollection” which loses the introspectiveness of the French term, which also denotes meditation, oration) in the habitation, the event of velleity before the indeterminate being of the it y a; that of opening time in the wake of death’s imminence, the event of the encounter with the other, the moments of erotic love and paternity. These events, like so many autonomous crystallizations of being, each comport an affective tonality from enjoyment to serenity, to horror and so forth. Because each event is a moment both within and beneath the threshold of the experience of a consciousness, each has a specific temporal structure—or rather, each event structures a specific experience of time as becoming or unfolding. On the other hand, these events are not mastered or encompassed by an overarching consciousness, except post facto They are thus not readily dialectisable; they do not constitute a single evolution of a subject. This is because consciousness, construed as the triune process of representation-retention, recollection and protention is neither present as such at the origin of these events, nor is it the master of their outcome. In the event that is the emergence of the subject of enjoyment, the intentionality of enjoyment itself is not comparable to an intellectual intention with its unified, dual poles of noesis and noema: no thing is intuited in enjoyment, and there does not seem to inhere in enjoyment any structure of self-apperception. Finally, enjoyment is always threatened with a trop plein; the consciousness that is sensation can be overwhelmed by the very thing that characterizes it, the non-objective forces that constitute the sensation.
Hence both the onset of enjoyment and that figurative atopos in which it unfolds are beyond the mastery of a subject or consciousness. The same is true of non-agapaic love in Levinas. As an event, it comes to pass in a clandestinity of a `nocturnal life’—which ties it to the night-like indeterminacy of the it y a, it unfolds `physically’ in a register of sensation that is its own, exemplified by the caress. However, comparable to the objectless enjoyment of the elemental, the caress touches no thing, envisions and intends no entity; the caress is a stranger to its own, contentless intentionality. The searching quality of the caress, according to Levinas, has to do with what could be called eu-poria: the ends of the caress are a goodness, a ‘good way’ beyond the possibilities of the individual, in fecundity.
Profanation is defined by Levinas as the simultaneity of the clandestine and the uncovered in eros The feminine face, and body, is characterized by modesty and weakness retreating from view—indeed by an “insurmountable prudery” which renders them “pathetic”. This same face/body—in eros face and body together signify without language, they seduce, promising more than they are or can properly give— express and share tenderness or extreme vulnerability, i.e., an unguarded openness to the other. Levinas writes, “The epiphany of the Beloved [l’Aimée—now feminized], is one with its regimen of tenderness [du tendre]. The manner [of self-production] of the tender consists in an extreme fragility, in a vulnerability. It manifests itself on the limit between being and non-being, like a soft warmth wherein being is dissipated in radianceChwr(133)” TI, p. 233, 256.
It is interesting that Levinas has chosen the term “profanation” to describe this encounter and this way of being of the feminine face. Profanation, because of the equivocal ‘action’ of the feminine face described above, is the contrary of any act or process of sanctification, or sacralization. Having no immediate connection with the Greek roots phain orphan, which bespeak a glimmering or a coming to light and to vision, pro fanare, comes from the Latin fanum or temple. The pro-fane is that which comes to pass before, and by extension outside of, the temple. Thus the profane is outside of the space of the holy. There is not room here to discuss the important distinction Levinas draws in his 1977 Talmudic essays entitled, Du sacré au saint, between the sacred, limited to a sort of polytheistic and pagan logic of transcendence, and the holy or “saint,” which is the transcendence of ‘religion’ as defined in TI,the transcendence of the absent Other whose trace is revealed in the face of the human other.
TI, p. 233, 256, translation modified. These hyperbolic terms, which Levinas deems “better than metaphors,” make a claim about their subject that is different than that established by metaphors. A metaphor follows a logic of resemblance transposed; these “superlatives” are used to denote the (non) thing itself.
lbid, p. 235, 258. It is not for me to say, here, that such a characterization of the caress and of tenderness borrows its rhetorical efficacity from the very thing that also weakens it, hyperbole. Within the logic of his argument, Levinas would have little difficulty disqualifying any contestation of the caress so understood. It remains true that, if eros is not dialogue, is not pedagogy or `nom-agogy’, if the caress is incapable of speaking its love, love nevertheless is not entirely beyond speech. Moreover eros,itself, need not be characterized as punctual, singularized events of jouissance In its ‘crudest’, physical dimension, the erotic relation entails reciprocity and a certain symmetry of which Levinas speaks little; although his own language belies this when he employs nouns and verbs such as complaisance, compassion,complaire (TI, p. 234 ff., 257 ff.). Given this reciprocity, and this symmetry of non-identicals, what would not become of the claims Levinas makes about love, were he to point out, further, that in tenderness (and perhaps in seduction to some extent), eros does speak. If it does not speak without suffering, it also does not speak without humor and a certain stammering intrinsic to the apology that is self-irony and self-revelation. Following the insights of Luce Irigaray here, must we not ask whether eros gives birth to something other than the son, to something other than offspring? Is it not eras itself that transforms the face of seduction such as Levinas typified it? Is not the face of the loved one—lover or beloved—other than the face of modesty or of seduction? Is not the first born of eros a reciprocal openness to one another; an openness whose affective mode of being is, as Irigaray puts it, “notChwr(133) disguise [but] wonder?” Cf. Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress” in Richard A. Cohen, ed. And tr., Face to Face with Levinas and Additional Essays (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 231–256. My purpose, in questioning Levinas’ reading of eros expressed as the caress, is not firstly to oppose some alternate, possibly highly particular, phenomenology of love, nor to propose a different but equally essentialist construction of the feminine. I am interested in underlining a tendentious benefit that accrues to an identification of love with an autistic eros As true as it is that eros is under no necessity to articulate itself, such a characterization of it removes love from the domain of the ethical and posits it, like a derivative, upon the foundation of the ethical without compromising the asymmetry and verticality of the ethical relationship.
T1, p. 235, 258.
T1, p. xi (Fr.), 23 (Eng.).
In my suggestion of a (quasi-)dialectic of eros and fecundity, I am in fact following remarks made by Levinas in the lectures he gave in 1948, published as Time and the Other In this early work, Levinas also treats of eros and fecundity. There is considerable similarity between the perspectives of Time and the Other (hereafter cited as T&O) and that of TI as concerns these themes. One difference, not insignificant, is to be found in the nature of feminine alterity, however. In T&O,feminine otherness is absolute otherness, “the absolutely contrary, whose contrariety is in no way affected by the relationship that can be established between it and its correlativeChwr(133)” (p. 85).
Thus the schema that would ultimately become that of ethical alterity in TI is here firstly that of the relationship between the masculine and the feminine. It is this relationship that allows Levinas to argue against much of Western ontology, that being is processual but above all plural and in its plurality unassimilable, unfusionable. This claim passes directly into TI
Now, in the lectures of T&O, Levinas already argues that the duality of gendered existence is not simply a biological and psychological datum or category. This duality has implications for the way in which we understand being. Moreover, toward the end of his discussion of fecundity, he adds, “I began with the notions of death and the feminine, and have ended with that of the son. I have not proceeded in a phenomenological way. The continuity of development is that of a dialectic starting with the identity of hypostasis, the enchainment of the ego to the self, moving toward the maintenance of this identity, toward the maintenance of the existent, but in a liberation of the ego with regard to self. The concrete situations that have been analyzed represent the accomplishment of this dialecticChwr(133).” in Richard A. Cohen, ed. and tr. Time and the Other, and Additional Essays (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 92, emphasis added.
Here meant in the sense of the ‘aesthetics’ or sensuous experience of eras to fecundity and finally, to paternity and filiality.
T1,p. 250, 272-3. 24 TI, p. 250, 272–3. “Ibid, p. 234, 257.
T/, p. 235, 258.
Without attempting to answer the question of `how it comes to pass’ that the feminine can move effortlessly into the inhumanity of seduction, Levinas appears to recognize that this dimension of femininity (if it is indeed a dimension of femininity alone!) is necessary to the event of erotic love. Now the question of seduction, (i.e., whether or not it is the ambiguous but necessary mechanism of erotic attraction) is a terrible one. It is all the more allusive and difficult that Levinas never treats explicitly of power in his construction of ethical intersubjectivity. Certainly the Other exercises a power over the same in the face to face encounter. But the same is immediately, spontaneously complicit with that power or violence. The I places itself under the judgement of the Other. Without time for questioning. On the other hand seduction, and perhaps also then eroticism, exercises its power over the seduced by promising its own capitulation, in and as jouissance It obtains a certain power by mimicking powerlessness and enacting a deep complicity with the one its sets up as the powerful.
Having laid seduction in the figurative hands of an essential femininity, Levinas has established sexual love as heterosexual. One wonders whether he is not placing the cart before the horse here. If we suppose that there is an aspect of seduction in all forms of erotic intimacy, then is the equivocation, the profanation of the feminine face not sooner the profanation of sexuality tout court, its very source? Is not the face of seduction a floating mode of self-presentation, even a remarkable mask, integral to the sort of contest or superchérie that is sexual voluptuousness in its purest state? If this is so, the one-sidedness and essentialism evident in Levinas’ characterization of the feminine would need to be reexamined. Further, if one dispenses with this notion of the feminine, what happens to the exhibitionism that “solicits pity and disrespect” for any desired woman (p. 240, 262)? Obviously sexuality will not be thereby purged of exhibitionism. What interests me, here, is a speculation on the other dimensions of ‘love’ revealed when lasciviousness and indecency are taken out of the sole domain of the feminine and generalized to erotic love as (a part of) its mechanism of seduction.
In all that which precedes, we have attempted to expose the epiphany of the face as the origin of exteriority. The primary phenomenon of signification coincides with exteriority. Exteriority is significance itself. And alone the face is exterior in its morality.Chwr(133) One may say this still otherwise: exteriority defines the being qua being30and the signification of the face is due to an essential coincidence of the being and the signifier.
At the heart of being, structured as a plurality of `events’ and processes, the truest being is the being that summons us, and gives itself over to dialogue. In another
T/, p. 237, 259. 29 T/, p. 237, 260. 30/bid
TI, p. 241, 264. 12 77, p. 241, 264. “”bid, p. 243, 265. The masculinization is due, presumably, to a desire to maintain all talk of the other in a general, masculine form. It rings curiously since, in the preceding paragraph, Levinas has written, “The feminine is the other refractory to society.” Yet this glissement is made in the French text, itself, a few lines later, when Levinas speaks of the possession of the freedom of the other. “In the possession of the Other, I possess the other insofar as he possesses meChwr(133)” (p. 243, 265). For another perspective on the freedom of the other see ORBE, p. 12 ff., 10 ff.
Ibid, p. 218, 241. “Interiority cannot replace universality. Liberty is not realized outside the social and political institutions which open it access to the fresh air necessary to its unfolding, to its respiration and even, perhaps to its spontaneous generation” (my translation).
In justice, which puts into question my arbitrary and partial freedom,Chwr(133)“ I am summoned ”to go beyond the straight line of justice, and from then on nothing can mark the end of this marchChwr(133)“ TI, pp. 222–223.245.
Ibid, pp. 222–223. “In justice, which puts into question my arbitrary and partial freedom,”Chwr(133) I am summoned “to go beyond the straight line of justice, and from then on nothing can mark the end of this march
The question of the freedom of the Stranger, if it is understood as a sort of causality: that `foundation’ upon which the other approaches me at all, becomes necessarily, for Levinas, a surd—a debate or strategy that has no place in his first philosophy or in his phenomenology. As little as I may constitute the other as a subject (of enjoyment, of representation), I can hardly speculate upon that in which his subjectivity participates, or upon what limits his subjectivity.
In fact Levinas’ understanding of freedom contributes, I believe, just as much as does the logic of his first philosophy to the rethinking of the meaning of freedom, both as it regards the subject and the other(s). Levinas’ depiction of freedom is invariably structured as a freedom of willing, and his willing takes forms akin to Sartrean projects of existence. Even the Levinasian freedom which opens ever diminishing space before the imminence of one’s demise does not depart from this schema, except in being an opening that is, sometimes, for the other. Generally, however, this description resembles Sartre’s subject in illness, condemned to take upon itself a condition it could not will in order to transcend the determinism intrinsic to illness, or one might say, finitude itself. Thus it is that Levinas’ rather classical conception of freedom, which offers only an intermediary transcendence and not an ethical one, actually determines in obliquo his logic of ethics.
It is interesting to note that a critique of Sartre’s conception of freedom offers food for thought about Levinasian freedom. Such a critique may be found in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Experience of Freedom, B. McDonald tr., (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. § 9 “Freedom as Thing, Force, and Gaze,” pp. 96–105. Moreover the structure of freedom-in-reciprocity to be found in Levinas’ discussion of eros appears to invite further reflection upon his notion of freedom as the spontaneous causality (and self-causality) of a subject.
TI, p. 243, 265.
Time and the Other, p. 87. 39 /bid
/bid, Levinas adds to this, “The relationship between master and slave can be grasped at the level of struggle, but then it becomes reciprocal Hegel has shown precisely how the master becomes the slave of the slave and the slave becomes master of the master.”
TI, p. 242, 265. 42 Ibid
Ibid
/bid, p. 244, 266.
Although not its proper death TI, p. 246, 268. For discussion of the necessity that an other have its proper, non-assimilable temporality, see “Separation and Discourse”, pp. 26 ff., 56 ff.
As Levinas writes in the beginning of Tl, infinite time, or “immortality is not the objective of the first movement of desire, but the Other, the StrangerChwr(133). The great force of the idea of creation, such as monotheism has delivered it, consists in that this creation is ex nihiloChwr(133) because, thereby the separated and created being has not simply issued from the father, but is absolutely other than he. Filiality itself shall not be able to appear as essential to the destiny of the I except if man maintains this memory of the creation ex nihilo, without which the son is not a true other.”
Religion, then, “is DesireChwr(133) the surplus of responsibility and of the sacrifice.” TI, p. 35, 64. The notion of the sacrifice does not come up with any frequency in Levinas’ work. Perhaps because sacrifice (as sacer-facio, the making or doing of the sacred) is an aspect of religious practice and of ethical life that Levinas opposes. The sacred is too material, too present among us: sites are designated as sacred, so also anonymous forces. Against this creation of humans Levinas counterpoises the holiness of the wholly absent Other. An “adult religion”, like an adult ethics, understands that “[tlhe distance between me and God, [is] radical and necessary.” TI, p. 19, 48. Yet the only meaning for humans, of this distance, lies in our answering to another, whose distance is not an omni-absence. This is the religion “in which God is freedom from the Sacred,” this too is the Judaism of the Pharisees in the time of the Second Temple. (cf. “The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel” in Difficult Freedom [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990] sections of which appear in Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 249–266, esp. pp. 259–263.)
The questions of gift and sacrifice are of great importance however. Perhaps it is not too much to claim that the section entitled “Substitution” in OBBE, concerns precisely an unchosen, unwilled self-sacrifice termed expiation, or indeed, substitution. Note also, the following definition of religion as “Desire and not at all a struggle for recognition.” TI, p. 35, 64.
Ibid, p. 247, 270. Here Levinas writes, fecundity engendering fecundity accomplishes goodness. Here we have a transcendence defined not as ethical but as temporal, as the infinite time of the same that is truly the other in the son. Why, if transcendence is likenable to time, is not history also legitimately transcendence? The beginning of an answer to this question would recall the indifference of history to the single self. Fecundity engenders an other in his singularity and does so with the possibility of repetition. That is, it is in fecundity that we must first seek the notion of fraternity. Finally, in fraternity we find an elucidation of Levinas’ discussions of a being that is `created.’
/bid
/bid, p. 246, 269. Note also Levinas’ remark about transcendence in fecundity, now brought back to eros because, it seems, Levinas can not quite decide what is the site of absolute transcendence: eros or fecundity. (Note that following his discussion of fecundity, it is as if Levinas must reopen, in this now elaborated context, the question of subjectivity and eros, so he inserts a sub-section entitled, “Subjectivity in Eros,” pp. 247–251, 270–4. Here the distinction between eros and fecundity, which appeared clear in the foregoing subsections, becomes ambiguous. He writes now, “In eros the I launches itself without return.” It finds itself in the self of an other, which I suspect must be the son and not the lover since we do return to ourselves from the erotic moment.
Note on p. 35, (63 Eng.), Levinas states very clearly, “Filiality itself shall not be able to appear as essential to the destiny of an I unless man maintains this memory of creation ex nihilo, without which the son is not a true other.” Here, then, the face to face relation is propædeutic to the realization of the meaning of filiality. It is more than propædeutic, of course, but it fulfills the sense of paternity. As we will see in the discussion of fraternity, the possibility of the ethical, or face to face, encounter does not seem to be separable from the experience of `being created’ and being a chosen son among chosen sons. But what is the memory of creation ex nihilo, if not the essential meaning of religion? Religion, indeed, as sociality.
Moreover, in his discussion of filiality, Levinas counterposes a new and distinct notion of love that could well stand for the relation to the Other. This is a love utterly unlike the love between man and woman. It is a love that makes the son unique and chosen, just as the son has given the father a time beyond his time. “Each son of the father is the unique son, the chosen son,” Levinas writes. “The love of the father for the son fulfills the sole relation possible with the very unicity of an other and, in this sense, all love must approach paternal love” (TI, 256, 279, emphasis added).
Structurally homologous, the father elects the son and the lover elects the beloved. Furthermore, the relationship called ‘eros’—like all those relations with being (e.g., the elemental, the habitation) that simply contribute to the welcome of the Other in ethics-religion—loses its raison d’être in fecundity. The fecundity of eras gives rise to the birth of the son, whom the father chooses as he had, the beloved. This is not like the structure of the relation between the Same and the Other. It is the reverse of that structure. Perhaps this is why Levinas adds unexpectedly, that the “strange conjuncture of the family” makes possible “the position of an elected being and his ipseity [i.e., what is utterly proper to him] as the elected one” TI, p. 256, 279.
emphasize this ambiguity in the text for this reason. If there is any possibility, in Levinas’ logic, that for the father at least, the experience of having been a son and having bore, by a woman, a son, amounts to creation ex nihilo and a love unlike any other; if, that is, there is any priority of meaning in the experience of being and having a son,then we must not look to the ethical experience alone as the paradigmatic structure of the ethical and the social!
If this is so, then election, or proximity, proceeds d double sens The ethical Other elects the I, but the father elects the son. The French expression for “two directions” here, is highly appropriate, given its play on the term “sens” as a direction and as meaning.
See TI, p. 28, 57. “The non-correspondence of death to an end of which a survivor takes note, does not signify therefore that mortal existenceChwr(133) should still be present after my death, that mortal being survives the death that rings on the clock common to men. And one would be wrong to situate internal time in objective time, as does Husserl, and so to prove thereby the eternity of the soul.”
T1, p. 256, 279, emphasis added. 55 lbid, p. 256, 279.
lbid
Politics tends to reciprocal recognition, that is to say to equality; it assures happiness. And the political law fulfills and consecrates the struggle for recognition.“ p. 35, 64.
Ibid, p. 35, 64. 57 TI, p. 255, 278.
Ibid,p. xi, 22.
TI, respectively, pp. 244–247 and 255–257 (Fr.); 267–70, 278–81 (Eng.).
See The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 380.
I shall not here attempt to demonstrate that Sections D and E fail to explain this transition. It suffices for the present to note their titles, “Subjectivity in Eros” (which recapitulates the experience of eros and its resolution in paternity against structuralist and psychoanalytic theories of the subject) and “Transcendence and Fecundity” (in which the meaning of fecundity is opposed to Heideggerian ontology, to structuralist anthropology and to the psychology of Freud).
Levinas writes, “The reciprocity of paternity-fililality, the relation father-son, indicates at once a relation of rupture and of recourse. Rupture, denial of the father, beginning, filiality accomplishesChwr(133) the paradox of a created liberty.”, p. 255, 278, emphasis added.
See the quotation in note 55.
Note that when describing paternity, Levinas writes. “The fecundity of the I is neither cause, nor domination. I do not have my child, I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger who, while being the other [autrui]—”then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who path begotten me these, seeing that 1 have lost my children, and am desolate“—is me.” At the heart of this complex sentence is a citation from the prophet Isaiah (49:21). It comes out of the call of God to Israel, and the prophecy of the release of Israel from captivity. Preceding it is an example of election of one people, held captive by the non-elect. “For thy [Israel’s] waste and thy desolate placesChwr(133) shall even now be too narrow by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.” (Isaiah 49:19). Citation taken from the King James Edition of the Bible. Cf. TI, p. 254, 277.
Levinas uses the Isaiah passage to exemplify the experience of creation and election. Given the provenance ascribed to the quotation, a remarkable connection is drawn between the fatherhood of God for Israel, his sons, and the experience of paternity tout court If such a move is possible, it must be so qua parallel phenomenology of the experience of Israel. I say `parallel’ here, since the prophecy in question is one of the few instances where a biblical reference is explicitly used by Levinas as an illustration of the hermeneutic phenomenology of the Same and the Other.
T1, p. 256, 279.
Levinas writes of the necessity of a subject, as it emerges from continuous being in enjoyment, to exist in an atheist attitude, or to perceive its existence a-theistically. “One may call atheism this separation [from the elements] so complete that the separated being maintains itself alone in existence without participating in the Being from which it is separatedChwr(133) One lives outside of God, with oneself, one is I, egoism.”, p. 29, 58.
Ibid, p. 256, 279.
/bid, pp. 256–57, 279–80.
Levinas writes, “And it is because the son owes his uniqueness to paternal election that he may be raised, commanded, and may obeyChwr(133)”, p. 256, 279.
This remarkable French term is defined as making great efforts, struggling toward an end. Levinas is also playing upon its components, é or ex, vertu or courage, virtue, activity. A. Lingis translates it as “effectuated.”
TI, p. 257, 280.
T1, p. 257, 280. Lingis’ translation has preserved the French term for political party (“the parti”), probably because of the significance of Marxist parties in France at that time.
Ibid, p. 260, 283.
“Time adds something new to being, something absolutely newChwr(133). The profound work of time delivers with regard to [the] past in a subject who breaks with his father. Time isChwr(133) alterity of the fulfilled that is always beginning again.” Cf. p. 260, 283.
The question of the anointed one, or messiah, for the prophets of Israel is of extraordinary richness. And, as we know from the beginning chapters of TI, Levinas locates the genius of religious/theological categories such as creation, eschatology, transcendence, kenosis [in OBBE], the anointed or chosen son, in the complex experience of the ethical. Through this insight—which powerfully surpasses analogous strategies in the sociological thought of men such as Durkheim for whom the religious was a transposition of the social—Levinas is able to enrich these categories with an existential content. In light of this, it is not without interest to regard the ‘phases’ of prophets’ preoccupation with messianism and messianic time. The philosopher, E. Voeglin divides the “messianic problem” into four phases, each of which represents an effort of thinking to conceive of historic time and change, and of a time in which the vagaries of history are overcome and the relationship of Israel with its God somehow fulfilled.
Thus, if the question of a time of peace under an anointed ruler and the infusion of human nature with the glory [kabhod] of God stood as an absolute future in the great prophecies of Isaiah, this time of reconciliation and peace was carried into the present in the visions of Jeremiah. It is in Jeremiah that the rather fixed form of prophecy is maintained, while the experience of the witness and the symbols became individualized. “The great motive that had animated the prophetic criticism of conduct and the commendation of the virtues had at last been traced to its source in the concern with the order of personal existence under God,” writes Voeglin. What is significant for us here is that messianic time and meaning need not be understood in an Isaianic or a Pauline fashion, any more than eschatology. Moreover, when Levinas writes of the eschatological event passing through the order of history, he is not proposing a radical rereading of religious eschatologies. He is continuing, philosophically and perhaps by way of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, one of the tendencies found in prophetic witness. (See Eric Voeglin, Order and History,Volume One: Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), esp. pp. 483–91.)
This is equally true for his mentions of messianic time. If Levinas is compelled to ask of the eternity of the son, at the end of the section “Beyond the Face,” whether this is “a new structure of time or an extreme
vigilance of messianic consciousness,“ then we must not be too quick to presume to know what is this ”messianic consciousness.“ However, given Levinas’ exploration of eschatology, as ‘revelation’ in history, we must not suppose that the answer to this question is negative.
T1,p. 261, 285, translation modified.
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Bergo, B. (1999). Election from ‘Beyond the Face’ in Totality and Infinity: Intersubjectivity Grounded in a Figurative Biology. In: Levinas between Ethics and Politics. Phaenomenologica, vol 152. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2077-9_6
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