## 1. Life and Career


* 1905: Born January 12 in Kaunas (Kovno, in Russian), Lithuania.
Lithuania is a part of pre-Revolutionary Russia and the surrounding
culture 'tolerates' Jews. He is the eldest child in a
middle class family and has two brothers, Boris and Aminadab.
* 1914: In the wake of the War, Levinas' family emigrates to
Karkhov, in the Ukraine. The family returns to Lithuania in 1920, two
years after the country obtains independence from the Revolutionary
government.
* 1923: Goes to study philosophy in Strasbourg (France). Levinas
studies philosophy with Maurice Pradines, psychology with Charles
Blondel, and sociology with Maurice Halbwachs. Meets Maurice Blanchot
who will become a close friend.
* 1928-29: Levinas travels to Freiburg to study with Edmund
Husserl; he attends Heidegger's seminar.
* 1930: Publishes his thesis in French, *La theorie de
l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl*
[*The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's
Phenomenology*].
* 1931: French translation, by Levinas, of Husserl's Sorbonne
lectures, *Cartesian Meditations*, in collaboration with
Gabrielle Peiffer.
* 1932: Marries Raissa Levi, whom he had known since
childhood.
* 1934: Levinas publishes a philosophical analysis of
"Hitlerism", *Quelques reflexions sur la
philosophie de l'hitlerisme* [*Reflections on the
Philosophy of Hitlerism*].
* 1935: Levinas publishes an original essay in hermeneutic ontology,
*De l'evasion* [*On Escape*], in
Emile Brehier's journal *Recherches
philosophiques* (reprinted in 1982).
* 1939: Naturalized French; enlists in the French officer
corps.
* 1940: Captured by the Nazis; imprisoned in *Fallingbostel*,
a labor camp for officers. His Lithuanian family is murdered. His wife
Raissa, and daughter Simone are hidden by religious nuns in
Orleans.
* 1947: Following the publication of *De l'existence
a l'existent* [*Existence and Existents*]
(which Levinas began writing in captivity), *Le temps et
l'autre* [*Time and the Other*], four lectures given
at the College Philosophique (founded by Jean Wahl). Levinas
becomes Director of the Ecole Normale Israelite
Orientale, Paris.
* 1949: After the death of their second daughter, Andree
Eliane, Levinas and his wife have a son, Michael, who becomes a
pianist and a composer.
  

Levinas publishes *En decouvrant l'existence avec
Husserl et Heidegger* (selections appear in *Discovering
Existence with Husserl*, 1998).
* 1957: He delivers his first Talmudic readings at the Colloque des
Intellectuels Juifs de Langue francaise. A colloquium attended
by Vladimir Jankelevitch, Andre Neher, and Jean
Halperin, among others.
* 1961: Publishes his doctorate (*es Lettres*),
*Totalite et infini: essai sur
l'exteriorite* [*Totality and Infinity: An
Essay on Exteriority*. Position at the Universite de
Poitiers.
* 1963: Publishes *Difficile liberte: essais sur le
judaisme* [*Difficult Freedom: Essays on
Judaism*].
* 1967: Professor at the Universite de Paris, Nanterre, with
Paul Ricoeur.
* 1968: Publishes *Quatre lectures talmudiques* (English
translation in *Nine Talmudic Readings*).
* 1972: *L'humanisme de l'autre homme*
[*Humanism of the Other*].
* 1973: Professorship at the Universite de Paris IV-Sorbonne.
The 1973-1974 lectures will be published as *Dieu, la mort et
le temps* [*God, Death and Time*].
* 1974: *Autrement qu'etre ou au-dela de
l'essence* [*Otherwise than Being or Beyond
Essence*], the second *magnum opus*.
* 1975: *Sur Maurice Blanchot* (English translation appended
to *Proper Names*).
* 1976: *Noms propres* [*Proper Names*].
* 1977: *Du sacre au saint* (English translation in
*Nine Talmudic Readings*).
* 1982: *De Dieu qui vient a l'idee*
[*Of God Who Comes to Mind*], *L'au-dela du
verset* [*Beyond the Verse*] and his radio conversations
with Philippe Nemo, *Ethique et infini* [*Ethics and
Infinity*].
* 1984: *Transcendance et Intelligibilite*
[*Transcendence and Intelligibility*] (English translation in
*Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings*)
  

*Ethique comme philosophie premiere* [*Ethics
as first philosophy*]
* 1987: *Hors sujet* [*Outside the Subject*], a
collection of texts, old and new on philosophers, language, and
politics.
* 1988: *A l'heure des nations* [*In the Time
of the Nations*].
* 1990: *De l'obliteration: Entretien avec
Francoise Armengaud [On Obliteration: An Interview with
Francoise Armengaud Concerning the Work of Sasha Sosno].*
* 1991: *Entre Nous: Essais sur le
penser-a-l'autre* [*Entre Nous: Essays on
Thinking-of-the-Other*]. An issue of the prestigious *Les
Cahiers de L'Herne* is dedicated to Levinas'
work.
* 1993: Sorbonne lectures, published as *Dieu, la mort et le
temps* [*God, Death and Time*]. The annual colloquium at
Cerisy-la-Salle publishes a volume devoted to him.
* 1994: His wife Raissa Levinas dies in September. Levinas
publishes a collection of essays, *Liberte et
commandement* (two essays, "Freedom and Command" and
"Transcendence and Height", published respectively in
*Collected Philosophical Papers* and *Basic Philosophical
Writings)* and *Les imprevus de l'histoire*
[*Unforeseen History*], edited by Pierre Hayat.
* 1995: *Alterite et transcendance*
[*Alterity and Transcendence*].
  

Emmanuel Levinas dies in Paris, December 25.



Books published posthumously:


* 1996: *Nouvelles lectures talmudiques* [*New Talmudic
Readings*].
* 1998: *Ethique comme philosophie premiere*
[*Ethics as First Philosophy*; first published as an article in
1984]


## 2. Thematic Exposition of Levinas' Philosophy



This entry will follow Levinas' career chronologically, as his
concepts evolve. In what follows, we will emphasize the following
arguments and themes: (1) why Levinas' is a unique first
philosophy; (2) how he developed his investigation of the lived
conditions of possibility of our concern with ethical reasoning; and
(3) the originality of his adaptation of phenomenology and his
existentialist hermeneutics of pre-intentional embodied
intersubjectivity. In this entry, attention is focused throughout to
the contribution of commentators, with a view to providing a gateway
to recent secondary literature.


### 2.1 Philosophical Beginnings: On Escape (1935) or Transcendence as the Need to Escape



Levinas published his thesis, *The Theory of Intuition in
Husserl's Phenomenology*, in 1930. It was the first
book-length introduction to Husserl's thought in French. By
focusing on the theme of intuition, Levinas established what
philosophical readers find notably in Husserl's *Ideas* I
and II (published in 1913 and, for *Ideas* II, partially in
1930): every human experience is open to phenomenological description;
every human experience carries meaning from the outset, and can be
examined as a mode of intentionality (Ideas II: SS56 h and
SSSS57-61). The following year, he published his
co-translation of Husserl's *Cartesian Meditations*, in
which Husserl had laid out a systematic presentation of transcendental
phenomenology. In the 1930s, Levinas continued to publish studies of
the thought of his two principal teachers, Husserl and Heidegger.
These included the essays "Martin Heidegger and Ontology"
(EDE: 53-76) and the extensive "The Work of Edmund
Husserl" (DEH: 47-89). In the 1930s and 1940s, his
philosophical project was influenced by Husserl's
phenomenological *method*, whose foundation arguably lay in the
centrality of the "transcendental ego" (Ideas I:
SS49). However, suspicious of the intellectualism of
Husserl's approach to essences (phenomenological
"eidetics"), Levinas gravitated toward Heidegger's
more worldly approach to existence in *Being and
 Time*.[3]
 Between 1930 and 1935, he will nevertheless turn away from
Heidegger's approach to being and transcendence and develop the
outlines of a new ontology. As we shall see, he will reconceive
transcendence as a need for escape from existence, and work out a
different analysis of lived time in that project.



Levinas' first original essay, *On Escape* (*De
l'evasion*, 1935), examined the relationship between
the embodied (sentient) self and the intentional
 ego[4]
 from the perspectives of physical and affective states including
need, pleasure, shame, and nausea. In this succinct philosophical
work, Levinas was less concerned than was Heidegger with the question
of existence as it opens up before us when we experience the
dissolving of things in the world in anxiety (he-BT:
 SS40).[5]
 Levinas' question was not: "Why is there being instead of
simply nothing?" His concern was to approach existence
differently, through the (human) being as Heidegger had also done, but
in light of more embodied experiences like the above-mentioned ones
(OE: SS6). Enlarging Heidegger's hermeneutics of
being-in-the-world, Levinas gave priority to lived moods and physical
states that revealed existence as oppressive and indeterminate.
Indeed, in escapism and its various aesthetic expressions, we discover
humans' failed attempts to get away from the being that they
themselves are. "Escape", he wrote, 



> 
> 
> is the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical
> and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I [*moi*]
> is oneself [*soi-meme*]. (OE: SS1) 
> 
> 
> 



In the two imbricated dimensions of human life, sentient-affective and
intentional, our experience of being comes to pass, in the
relationship between body and egoic consciousness.



Levinas' youthful project approached transcendence secularly, in
light of humans' irreducible urge to get past the limits of
their physical and social circumstances. His transcendence is less a
question of cognition reaching reality or humans seeking to pass
'beyond' themselves (respectively he-BT: SSSS43,
10) than transcendence attempted through sensuous evasions. This quite
materialist approach to transcendence is nevertheless motivated by the
question of our mortality and finite being, but unlike Heidegger, it
also examines the enigma called infinity.



Levinas thus accepted Heidegger's arguments that a human being
experiences itself as if thrown into its world (he-BT: SS38),
without cognitive mastery over its birth and death. Heidegger's
human being, or *Da-sein* (being-there), lives out its time
projecting itself toward its diverse possibilities. It flees its
uncanny thrownness by distracting itself in social pursuits, a
position that Levinas will not adopt. On the other hand, the
projective element of transcendence, which Heidegger described in
*The Basic Problems of Phenomenology*
 (he-BPP)[6]
 as merely a "stepping over to ... as such", was of
great interest to Levinas. But he would enquire: to what and from what
are we 'stepping over'? Levinas then observed: 



> 
> 
> [M]odern sensibility wrestles with problems that indicate ... the
> abandonment of this concern with transcendence. As if it had the
> certainty that the idea of the *limit* could not apply to the
> *existence* of what is ... and as if modern sensibility
> perceived in *being* a defect still more profound. (OE:
> SS1, emph. added)
> 
> 
> 



His argument here concerns a conceit of our 'modern'
sensibility (and philosophy); namely, that we presume we could
thoughtfully frame a better conception of being, wherein existence was
in some sense self-sufficient. What Levinas calls the
"insufficiency of the human condition" (OE: SS1)
simply denotes the limitation of our existence, whose transcendence,
when understood as escape, promises that we might somehow surpass it,
as if through an infinite experience. When transcendence is removed
from theological or metaphysical frameworks (i.e., secularized as
Heidegger's "stepping over"), then we grasp it in
its historical context-dependency, as the illusions of a finite being
pondering pure self-sufficiency. Reconceived in this way, the entire
question of transcendence changes, revealing the struggle to get out
of our all too finite existence. That is why Levinas asks: "[Is]
the need for escape not the exclusive matter of a finite
being? ... Would an infinite being have the need to take leave of
itself" (OE: SS2)? In short, is our first response to
mortality not the urge to take leave of our existence, if
periodically? This question is not so different from Heidegger's
conception of inauthenticity. But unlike Heidegger, true authenticity
does not lie in securing our freedom for our most personal
possibility, death. Levinas argued that we can approach death as
possibility only through that of others and that we grasp being as
finite by way of their mortality. On the other hand, when secularized,
the idea of infinity refers to something absolute in human
consciousness (OE: SS1), which motivates our repeated efforts at
escaping ourselves into various ecstasies. This is clearly a
conception of being different from Heidegger's. Later, of
course, Levinas will attribute infinity to a different experience,
that of the unbounded quality of the face of the other. However,
intersubjectivity is little discussed in the 1935 essay. The encounter
with the other first comes into view as a theme in his 1940s works (TO
and EE). Significant here, nevertheless, are the following two points:
(1) Levinas' argument that Heidegger's conception of
existence is specific to a history, that of German thought and that of
hermeneutics; (2) to be an embodied psyche is to struggle with the
limits of one's facticity or existential situation, and it is
there that the question of being as *our* existence initially
arises.



Heidegger's *Da-sein* confronted the question of being
when it found itself brought before itself in anxiety (he-BT:
SS40). In contrast, Levinas proposed other ways by which the gap
narrows between being itself and the beings that we are. Following his
*leitmotif* of our recurrent urge to escape, Levinas examined
the invariable disappointments following our attempts at transcending
our existence: the aforementioned states of need and pleasure give way
to a sobering up or disillusionment. In affective and physical states
like shame and nausea, the bodily self is experienced as a substance
trapped in its stifling existence and desperate for a way out.
Commentator Jacques Rolland has explored Levinas' return to the
body, to concreteness, escape, and the way in which he deformalized
even Heidegger's hermeneutics (OE: 29-32). Rolland adds
that this approach was inspired by Levinas' critical meditation,
published one year earlier (1934), on the materialist "blood and
soil" philosophy popular with National Socialism (RPH). As
regards stifling existence, when Levinas refers to being, it is as
ongoing presence, rather than the event of disclosure that Heidegger
described. It remains a matter of debate whether this interpretation
of being constitutes a step back to an older metaphysics prior to
Heidegger's innovations, or not (Franck 2008: 31).



Whether we choose to take Levinas' approach to being as
deformalizing Heidegger or as inspired by him, commentators often
underscore its fresh empiricism. Megan Craig compares the early works
of Levinas with the "radical empiricism" of William James
(Craig 2010: xv). Lisa Guenther, in turn, has examined embodiment and
the experience of maternity in the later Levinas (2006: 119-136,
see SS3.4.5). From the outset, the "fact of existing"
refers to philosophically unexplored phenomena of our embodiment, our
aforementioned I-self (*moi-soi*) dualism.



Polemically, Levinas urged that the most extreme state he described,
nausea, amounts to being-there, what Husserl's phenomenology
called "self-positing": "... nausea posits
itself not only as something absolute, but as the very act of
self-positing: it is the affirmation itself of being" (OE:
SS6). Other forms of self-positing occur, of course, as this event
refers to the experience of unity between the embodied self and the
ego of intentions, or indeed between what Raoul Moati compared with
the "first-" and the "third-person"
perspectives (2012 [2017: 38-71]). Thus, in immediate
experience, I *am* my joy or my pain, provisionally, just as I
may observe myself joyful, like a third person. Nevertheless, our
various efforts to get out of our concrete situations are not the same
as what Heidegger deemed projections toward new possibilities, wherein
our death lies at the end of all the others, as the ultimate limit, or
"possibility of impossibility" (he-BT: SS50). For
Levinas, by contrast, escape represents a positive, dynamic need. In
this youthful work, he also rethinks need as fullness rather than as
mere privation. As we indicated, he is working toward a different
understanding of existence itself. Whether it is characterized by
pleasure or suffering, need is the very ground of that existence. A
secular transcendence responds to need, promising a path toward
"something other than ourselves" (OE: SS3), which is
why the deep motivation of need is to get out of our finite condition.
Already by 1935, Levinas' ontology has displaced
Heidegger's being in light of the dynamic relation between the
sentient self and the intentional 'I'; it has refocused
attention on the present over Heidegger's emphasis on the
future, and explored new modes by which we experience the being that
we are.



Reconceived as need, pleasure, and nausea, our attempts at
transcendence open access to an experience of time different from both
Aristotle's "measure of motion", and the fullness of
awaiting (the anticipated moment or *khairos* that Heidegger
developed in his early work). Pleasure and pain are intensities:
"something like abysses, ever deeper, into which our
existence ... hurls itself" (OE: SS4). The priority of
present-time, concentrated into an extended now-moment is opened up
through sensibility and affectivity. In pleasure as in pain, we
*need*--not out of lack--but *in desire or in
hope*. "Pleasure is ... nothing less than a concentration
in the instant" (OE: SS4). Over Heidegger's ongoing
openness to possibility (he-BT: SS31), the present of embodiment
here receives existential priority. Levinas' emphasis on the
present is a theme he never
 abandons.[7]
 Moreover, though he adapts it from Husserl's phenomenology of
"psychic reality", he will also enrich
 it.[8]




In sum, Levinas' early essay is structured around his
reconceptualization of fundamental existential categories. If
Husserl's transcendental ego returns as the "I" of
intentions in Levinas, it remains that the embodied *self* has
great importance as the locus or situation from which egoic
transcendence arises (i.e., we wake up as if out of our sleeping body,
our *soi*). If the self and "I" duality is where
the weight of being shows itself most clearly, most affectively, then
the precedence Heidegger accorded to the world and to being qua call
are decisively displaced. As indicated earlier, the latter's
focus on being, as the event of disclosure and withdrawal, is
interpreted by Levinas in a pre-Heideggerian fashion, as the constant
presence which Heidegger had characterized skeptically as
metaphysical. Levinas approaches that presence through modalizations
provided by sensations and affects that were unexplored by either
Heidegger or Husserl.



In 1935, Levinas was convinced that through sensation and states of
mind we also discover the futility of getting out of existence. In the
physical torment of nausea, we experience being in its simplest, most
burdensome neutrality. To this, Levinas adds three provocative themes.
First, if being is disclosed only through the being that we are, then
any being that seeks to escape itself because it feels trapped in its
own facticity, is a "creature", carrying "the
stigmatum of [finite] existence" (OE: SS8). Second, nausea
is not simply a physiological event. It shows us dramatically how
existence can encircle us on all sides, to the point of submerging us.
As Rolland observes, in that case social and political life may also
nauseate us. Third, if being is experienced in its pure form as
weighty indeterminacy, then we can neither bypass it (following the
"aspirations of Idealism" [OE: SS8]), nor even simply
accept it as passive subjects. Being is existence, and it is firstly
*our* existence. The mark of creaturely existence is need and,
by extension, a struggle with being. Levinas concludes polemically,




> 
> 
> [e]very civilization that accepts being--with the tragic despair
> it contains and the crimes it justifies--merits the name
> "barbarian". (OE: SS8) 
> 
> 
> 



The question remains: how shall we best think through the sensuous
need to transcend being? Embodied need is not an illusion; is
transcendence one? Levinas will answer this question fully in
1961.


### 2.2 Middle Writings: Existence and Existents (1947) and Time and the Other (1947) or Inflections of Transcendence and Variations on Being



The 1940s writings extend Levinas' innovations in ontology,
always with recourse to interpretations of embodiment and against
Heidegger's philosophy of existence which, for Levinas, entails
engagement with being as "participation" without
 alterity.[9]
 These writings inflect his notion of transcendence, away from the
imagined transcendence of evasion and pleasure, toward *eros*
and the promise of the birth of a
 child.[10]
 This requires he explore alterity, understood as the feminine other
(EE: 86).



In *Existence and Existents* (1947) and *Time and the
Other* (1947), being now has a dual aspect, of light and of dark
indeterminacy. It is as though being were divided between the being of
a created world and the darkness out of which light was
 brought.[11]
 This shifts phenomenological focus onto being as light and
visibility, in which we constitute objects, and being as the dark
turmoil that we experience in insomnia. Levinas' attempt to
expand the sense of the embodied *Da-sein*, and reconsider the
distinction between being and *Da-sein* (existence and the
perceptual open that we are) has also changed. Following
Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, in which a multi-layered
"I" directs intentional focus like a center from which our
attention radiates, Levinas' embodied ego is neither preceded
nor outstripped by its world. The corporeal self [*soi*],
henceforth called the "hypostasis", is its own ground;
i.e., we awaken out of ourselves, into light; we proceed with our
projects (EE: 61-86; TO: 51-55). We fall asleep, curled
about ourselves, thereby exiting our conscious existence. Embodied
consciousness thus begins and ends with itself. As such, it is both
dependent on and independent from its environment, and Levinas will
urge that the subject, upon awakening, uses and masters being.



In the middle period essays, the partial transcendences of pleasure
and desire, already sketched in 1935, receive fuller development and
variations. The meaning of transcendence focuses on a new temporality
promised by desire and "fecundity", or the birth of the
son (EE: 100; TO: 91-92). The son incarnates alterity in a
curious way. He is, in a sense, his father and *not* his
father. However, his birth opens a focus on the future. No longer
conceived as one of open possibilities, as Heidegger had argued, the
time opened by the son responds to two basic limitations on our
understanding and representation: death and the other person. While
not denying Heidegger's intuition about death as the
"possibility of impossibility", Levinas repeats his
earlier argument that we witness death only in the death of the other.
But even as such it escapes everyday understanding. Hence Levinas will
qualify death as an alterity as radical as that of the other human
being who confronts me. 



> 
> 
> In death the existing of the existent is alienated. To be sure, the
> other that is announced does not possess this existing as the subject
> possesses it; its hold over my existing is mysterious. It is not
> unknown but unknowable. (TO: 75) 
> 
> 
> 



Of course, we can and do constitute the other an *alter ego*.
Yet such constitution by phenomenological analogy never exhausts his
fundamental difference (TO: 78-79). In so arguing, Levinas
proposes to radicalize Husserl's "other", of whom
the latter said that he or she is "an *analogon* of
myself, [yet also] *not* an *analogon* in the habitual
sense" (hu-CM SS44: 92-96).



Two reversals should be noted, here, relative to 1935. First, against
Hegel's conception of work as the dialectic of spirit
transforming nature, Levinas describes labor phenomenologically as
effort and
 fatigue,[12]
 again highlighting his distinction between the embodied, working self
and the cognitive ego. The second reversal concerns moods themselves.
In Heidegger, anxiety, joy, and boredom were states of mind, with
anxiety as the privileged mood by which humans are confronted with
themselves, their lack of ground, and with the question of their
existence. In his middle period, Levinas will expand the experience of
being to moods now including horror. Nighttime being reveals an
indeterminate dark presence that is not pure nothing. "The
horror of the night, as an experience of the there-is, does not then
reveal to us a danger of death, nor even a danger of pain" (EE:
57). Therefore pure being can never be just Heidegger's lighted
clearing. And our existence in the world requires stronger embodiment
than an eye and a hand that reaches to grasp objects
"ready-to-hand" (Heidegger). Once again, Levinas recurs to
bodily states, this time including fatigue, indolence, insomnia, and
awakening. In the first three, the aforementioned gap between the
embodied self and the intentional I increases. Upon awakening, the
embodied ego (*soi-moi*) reasserts its mastery over things and
even its own bodily torpor. But for Levinas being in the world is less
a matter of utility and Heidegger's phenomenon of
"falling" into distraction, than one of love of life and
sheer enjoyment (he-BT:
 179).[13]
 This, too, is part of Levinas' critique of Heidegger, for whom
our concern for the world often coexists with instrumentalist
relationships with things. In search of variations on being as a call
or a revelation, and in privileging the basic subjectivity (or
"hypostasis") capable of raising itself above being (now
understood as the neutral "there is"), Levinas is *en
route* to his secular philosophy of alterity and
transcendence.



It bears recalling that, in phenomenology, light plays figurative and
literal roles, from Husserl's daylight as the condition for
optimal perception (Ideas II SS18) to his metaphor for the
intentional "ray" directed like a spotlight upon an
object, to Heidegger's lighted opening that is *Da-sein*
itself (he-BT: 171). Levinas in turn underscores the
'work' of light as able to suspend, phenomenologically,
the traditional distinction between subjective and objective:
"due to the light an object, while coming from without, is
already ours in the horizon which precedes it" (EE: 41).
Consequently, intelligibility is well figured by light.
Phenomenological evidence is guaranteed by lighted
circumstances--albeit *for* someone. Whereas Heidegger
defined *Da-sein* almost operationally ("by its very
nature, *Dasein* brings its 'there' along with
it" [he-BT: 171]), Levinas returns to the Moderns'
principle "every object presupposes a *subject*".
Moreover, while the being of *Da-sein* is itself light and
"disclosedness" (he-BT: 171), the being of Levinas'
hypostasis is characterized by its living cycle of drowsing, sleeping,
waking, and acting. Thus, if being is equated with illumination, for
Levinas it must also include the dark anonymity of night (EE: 54). It
is both gift (Heidegger's *es gibt*) and "there
is" (Blanchot's *il y a*, as taken up by Levinas).
Consequently, the question that inaugurates fundamental ontology: Why
is there being instead of simply nothing? is not Levinas'
primary concern. Nothingness, understood as pure absence, may be
thinkable, but it cannot be experienced. Indeterminate, nocturnal
being remains 'something'. As the "there is",
being fills in all spatial and temporal intervals, whereas
consciousness arises out of it thanks to its self-originating
awakening and focus. This is Levinas' first
*comprehensive* sketch of being as a totality, in which the
self-ego dyad appears as the limited transcendence of neutral being.
Over the course of his analyses, this self-ego will hearken to a call.
However, the call comes not from being but from an alterity that
Levinas compares with death itself. "Just as with death, I am
not concerned with an existent, but with the *event* of
alterity" (TO: 87, emph. added). With "the event of
alterity", however, there is the call of the other person,
notably female, experienced as desire, need, even
 generosity.[14]
 These works set the stage for later descriptions of world, facticity,
time as now-moment, transcendence in immanence, and transcendence
toward a future fecundity in the family. They constitute the core of
Levinas' first major work, *Totality and Infinity: An Essay
on Exteriority*. 


### 2.3 The "Treatise on Hospitality": Totality and Infinity (1961) or Responsibility, Transcendence, and Justice



*Totality and Infinity* was written as Levinas'
*Doctorat
 d'Etat*.[15]
 His concept of transcendence provides us a useful point of departure
in *Totality and Infinity*, provided we understand his debt to
Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl understood transcendence in
several ways, of which one significant dimension was that typical of
consciousness extending toward, and encountering, the worldly objects
at which it aims. After Husserl, Heidegger will define transcendence
as the essence of our existing in the world; *Da-sein* is
always already in the world among things, according to a worldly
transcendence or being out-there. Sartre followed Heidegger in this,
urging that "transcendence is a constitutive structure of
consciousness" (Sartre 1943 [1992: 23]), and his concept of
consciousness is similarly in the world and ingredient in our
actions.



For Levinas, these senses of transcendence are acceptable but not
primary. Instead, he aligns transcendence with exteriority, in the
sense of what lies outside myself but eludes my comprehensive
knowledge: the other person (TI:
 49).[16]
 The encounter with the other is an encounter with a visible thing, of
course. But *this* other speaks to me, implores or commands me.
In responding, I discover my responsibility to them. This is the
ground of ethics or indeed our concern with ethics as the good of the
other person.



As Levinas argues, when ethics goes in search of its existential
ground, before any consideration of utility, virtue, or duty, it
discovers the intersubjective enactment of responsibility, which
resists being integrated into accounts in which the other is a
universal *other* to whom it is my duty, for example, to act
ethically or in the hope of increasing the happiness of the
collectivity. Utility, virtue, and duty are crucial to ethical
debates. Yet Levinas is pointing to their common *lived* origin
in the irreducibility of the face-to-face encounter.


#### 2.3.1 *Totality and Infinity*'s Contribution to Ethical Theory



Michael Morgan has discussed Levinas' existential basis of
ethics in relation to the three ethical schools just indicated (2007).
He reminds us that Levinas is working at a pre-theoretical and
embodied level that represents the impetus *behind* ethical
systems forged through reflection, tradition, and critique. In that
sense, Levinas' objective is simultaneously phenomenological and
hermeneutical: he *describes* the encounter with the other,
argues that it imposes a limit on object constitution, and
*interpretively* traces ethics back to the birth of
intersubjective meaning. As opposed to Heidegger's inaugural
question of being, Levinas' concern is with the exteriority or
transcendence of the other who addresses me. Consistent with
Morgan's claim, Diane Perpich has argued that the face-to-face
in Levinas gives rise to a "normativity without norms"
(2008: 126-127). For his part, Steven Crowell observes that the
normativity of the face is also *epistemic*; it is the ground
for the objectivity of any perception because, if the other did not
face me and call my experience into question, I would never encounter
a "sense of the normative, of standards against which the
validity of my experiences can be judged" (Crowell 2015: 574).
Indeed, the first normativity I experience, prior to reflection,
corresponds to an affect (TI: 294), which accompanies my experience of
the other's exteriority. At the same time, I respond to that
other. As Levinas writes, 



> 
> 
> [l]anguage makes possible the objectivity of objects and their
> thematization. Already Husserl argued that the objectivity of thought
> consists in being valid for everyone. To know objectively is therefore
> to constitute my thought in such a way that it already contain[s] a
> reference to the thought of others. What I communicate therefore is
> already constituted in function of others. (TI: 210, emph. added)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, Levinas' existential phenomenology of the face-to-face is
relevant to contemporary ethics above all insofar as ethics is
concerned with its own grounds in lived intersubjectivity. We can even
note parallels between Levinas and some contemporary ethicists. For
example, the neo-Kantian, Onora O'Neill, bases the rationality
of practical reason on a "minimal but *authoritative*
demand", which implies that the ethical principles I espouse
never be irrational so that another person could not similarly adopt
them. Levinas might say that the "authority" motivating
such demands is experienced like an effect of the other's
transcendence (O'Neill 1996: 51-57). Moral intuitionists
like David Wiggins and John McDowell have, similarly to Levinas,
focused on our sensibility when it comes to grasping moral truths. In
discussing authentic education, McDowell argues that acquiring an
ethical sensibility makes possible our intuitions of what is right and
good. It even fosters a flourishing rational will able to discern
*bona fide* ethical requirements (McDowell 1998, Wiggins 1987
[1998]). Both McDowell and Wiggins share with Levinas an effort to
enrich the perspective on the subject as a purely rational agent,
although Levinas reconstructs the intersubjective, existential origins
of that agency.



It goes without saying that the philosophical influences and debates
of the above-mentioned ethicists are different from Levinas'.
Despite this difference, however, Morgan (2007) and Jean-Michel
Salanskis have both underscored the importance--for the
justification of *any* ethics--of scrutinizing its
*existential* conditions. Salanskis asserts that Levinas'
arguments tally with what he calls "the three requirements to
which any philosophical exposition of morality must respond".
These are: 



> 
> 
> duty as *irreducible* to being, as Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein
> experienced and expressed it. [And ethics, secondly,] must
> nevertheless favor the ... designation of an *objective*
> duty, not relative to a subjective or psychological trace (such
> relativity being precursive to the dissolution of morality pure and
> simple). [Thirdly,] duty must be *felt*; it is not really duty
> unless it is *mine*. (Salanskis 2006: 63, my trans.) 
> 
> 
> 



If ethics refers to the study or to a system of moral principles, then
Levinas provides a phenomenology of the everyday genesis of these
principles. Salanskis calls this "a new philosophy of
morality" (2006: 31-73).



In turn, Gabriela Basterra has recalled that Kant's moral law,
understood as the basis of a positive feeling and as the object of our
greatest respect (*Achtung*) is cognized *a priori*, and
even the respect we experience for it is *not* of empirical
origin. Respect is thus a unique affect that motivates my will to
follow the moral law, though it is *not* a feeling in an
empirical psychological sense (Kant 1788 [2002]). Instead, it is
something that affects me, and Basterra compares it to the affection
that Levinas identifies as the interruption of my activity by the
other who faces me (Basterra 2015). Once again, the two philosophies
are different, notably because they entail distinct approaches. But it
remains that, like Kant's *a priori*, we cannot
assimilate the motivation experienced before the face of the other to
a subjective state or to an objective concept.


#### 2.3.2 Structure of the Work



*Totality and Infinity* unfolds around phenomenological
descriptions of being, depicted initially as nature or forces in
conflict (TI: 21-22). However, our being in-the-world also
entails the enjoyment of natural elements and love of life (TI:
110-115). "We live from 'good soup', air,
light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc.... These are not
objects of representations. We live from them" (TI: 110).
Levinas also reframes labor as the creation of a store of goods thanks
to which the other can be welcomed (TI: 157-161, 205), rather
than solely as the mastery or humanization of nature. Because we take
joy in living and in creating a home, our lives are not firstly like
Heidegger's "care" (*Sorge*; TI: 112).
Instead, we live nourished and can receive the other into our space.
On the basis of these descriptions, transcendence as defined above
comes to pass in several stages. First, the onset of the
other--as the expression of the face--interrupts our free
activity (and willing) and calls us to account for ourselves (TI: 198,
291), something Levinas calls "goodness" (TI:
 200).[17]
 Second, in thereby responding, the subject approached by the other
engages in an act that opens the possibility of dialogue. The
unfolding of dialogue expands the social relationship, and Levinas
argues that social life preserves a residuum of the initial
"ethical" encounter with the face. Intersubjective
dialogue entails conversation, teaching, and at a more general level,
literary or philosophical discourse (TI: 51, 57, 251-52,
295).



Over the course of this expansion, the trace of responsibility is
attenuated and conundrums arise concerning the well-being of
other*s* and conflicts within the *community*. These
require deliberations about justice and fairness. For instance: what
does justice for the other(s) mean? Should it above all concern the
reparation of wrongs? Can responsibility for an other coexist with
disinterested equity? Or is justice ultimately in service to the
stronger and opposed to responsibility? Now, because it can clearly be
interpreted as all these things, justice sometimes appears as
intermediary between Levinas' aforementioned ontology of worldly
forces in conflict (or elementary being) and acts of responsibility.
This would tally with Aristotle's two conceptions of justice,
first as political and second, as unbidden 'decency',
*to epiekes*, meaning to accept receiving less than
one's share. Aristotle himself defined the combination of the
two as *complete* virtue (*Nicomachean Ethics*, 1130a,
119 and
 1137b7-11).[18]
 There would thus be an interesting precedent to Levinas'
question of the relationship between responsibility and justice in
Aristotelian virtue ethics.



Levinas' argument in *Totality and Infinity* unfolds up
to the question of justice and then takes an unanticipated tack.
Rather than pursuing justice as it is refined through civil society
into the State, Levinas focuses on a smaller-scale institution, the
family, arguably common to all humanity. It is presumably in the
family rather than in the State that the responsibility described in
the face-to-face encounter is most clearly enacted. If the family is
consolidated by the birth of the child, then, as Levinas puts it, it
is the father who elects and calls the child to responsibility, just
as the child grows up serving his siblings in a way more personal than
that prescribed by the impersonal justice of States. According to
Levinas, *this* justice carries a specific temporal
modalization: "The unique child, as elected one, is accordingly
at the same time unique and non-unique. Paternity is produced as an
innumerable future", as open posterity (TI: 279). In this
penultimate section entitled "Beyond the Face", the
phenomenology of the family thus inserts the responsibility
experienced in the face-to-face into a micro-society, in which
questions of justice may arise, but with a new emphasis on future
time.


#### 2.3.3 Time, Transcendence, and Sociality



*Totality and Infinity* does not devote attention to clock time
or to the time of universal (or Hegelian) history. Because Levinas
begins his analyses with the concept of being as virtually aligned
with material causality and strife, the experience of
'subjective' time as the interruption by the face is not
yet social time. History, too, seems to be a metaphysician's
history. In his "Preface", Levinas describes history as
violence, punctuated by extremes of war and temporary peace (TI:
21-23). Morgan has argued that this makes Levinas'
approach to ethical intersubjectivity anti-naturalistic, at least to
the degree that naturalism is tied to a Hobbesian mechanistic ontology
and by extension an ego-centered anthropology (Morgan 2011: 246).
Levinas would be the last, however, to deny the self-interest of our
drives and instincts. To the contrary, only an intersubjectivity
inaugurated by the other's summons interrupts these behaviors
(Morgan 2011: 246). Yet Levinas also envisions an alternative history
in which it is possible to bear witness to wrongs undergone by
persons. These wrongs may not be recorded in the official history of
governments, but their attestation prolongs the discussion of human
sensibility invested by responsibility. Levinas writes, 



> 
> 
> History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgment
> is borne upon it. When man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted
> from history. (TI: 52)
> 
> 
> 



Levinas' phenomenological account of time thus contains three
levels, an initial one equivalent to formal historicist time; a second
level comparable to Husserl's universal flow of immanent
 time-consciousness,[19]
 and a third temporality that is episodic and affectively colored,
which he calls an interruption or rupture. 



> 
> 
> [The] discontinuity of the inner life interrupts historical time
> [notably in the face-to-face encounter]. The thesis of the primacy of
> history constitutes an option for the comprehension of being in which
> interiority is sacrificed. The present work proposes another option
> (TI: 57). 
> 
> 
> 



The aforementioned interruption of our immanent consciousness qua
time-flow by the other, an interruption that Levinas says
characterizes our "inner life", is aligned with the
experience of transcendence.



Unlike Heidegger, who explained the subject in terms of
*Da-sein--*itself an ongoing transcendence toward the
world in which *Da-sein* "comes toward itself
futurally" (he-BT:
 SS69)[20]
 in facing the possibility of its mortality--Levinas situates his
very concrete transcendence in the *interruption* of the first
two temporal levels. Indeed, whereas Heidegger gradually translated
his conception of the silent call of being (to *Da-sein*) into
the notion of the event (*Ereignis*) in the 1930s, Levinas
makes *his* interruption an intersubjective affair or rather
the basis of ethical intersubjectivity. For him, the encounter with
the other is *not* an ontological event in Heidegger's
sense. Neither is it like an occurrence that breaks up the historical
*status quo*, modifying the course of history into a
'before' and 'after', in function of its
magnitude. Nevertheless, Levinas does argue that the encounter with
alterity *may* leave a trace in historical
 time.[21]
 Now, because the interruption brings to light a basic personal
responsibility for an other, a host of responses are possible *post
facto*, from welcoming that other with hospitality to attempting
to get him out of our way. Be that as it may, a trace of the
interruption persists in the subject, like a grain of sand in an
oyster or a preconscious motivation to bear witness to the
other's suffering. Jill Stauffer has recovered some of these
'traces' in her research on the testimonies of those
deprived of human rights (2015: 40-43, 56-58, 61-64,
91 *inter alia*).



Flowing out of the temporal interruptions that leave affective
mnemonic traces in persons, the ground of social existence in Levinas
does not resemble the solipsism for which Heidegger was sometimes
criticized. Our life with others is never a flight from what should be
the resolute assumption of our mortality (Heidegger's
"inauthenticity"), nor even moments disappearing in a
teleology of expanding socio-political groups that culminate in the
State (Hegel, sometimes Husserl). As individuals, we are always
already in social relations, marked by a remainder of responsibility.
We have always already been impacted by the expression (or face) of an
other. Yet, because the immediacy of this impact resists
conceptualization, we tend to overlook the force the other's
address has on us (as facial expression or words). We carry on, in our
respective spheres, apparently motivated by desires and projects, some
of which entail the kind of quests for mastery and recognition that
Hegel described. Nevertheless, in *Totality and Infinity*,
these quests are as if undercut by "metaphysical desire"
(TI: 33-34, 114, 148ff.), which Levinas defines as "a
desire [for the other] that cannot be satisfied". As he
explains, "we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual
needs, or even of moral and religious needs" (TI: 34). However,
metaphysical desire "desires beyond everything that can simply
complete it. It is like goodness--the Desired does not fulfill
it, but deepens it" (TI: 34). This under-layer of our everyday
desires comes to light in the faltering of our will to mastery as
experienced in the face-to-face encounter. The other's facial
expression or bodily posture affects me before I begin to reflect on
it. As indicated, it is dual: a command and a summons. Naked and
defenseless, the face signifies, with or without words, "Do not
kill me". It opposes a passive resistance to our desire for
mastery wherein our freedom asserts its sovereignty (TI: 84). Levinas
speaks of the face of the other who is "widow, orphan, or
stranger". While these are biblical figures, he argues that we
encounter them concretely even before transcribing them into religious
allegory (TI: 76-78). Indeed they invest our freedom as the
possibility of giving.



It is as summons and injunction that expression precipitates
transcendence. If I am self-sufficient in my everyday activities and
perception, then this is because I am a being that inhabits
overlapping worlds in which my sway is largely decisive for me. The
passive resistance of the face alters this sway through an affective
mood not unlike one Levinas had explored in 1935: shame. In shame, we
experience our freedom as unjustifiable. In thus being as if lifted
out of its concerns, the "I" offers an account to the
other, who is thereby treated as if higher than that "I"
when considered in its personal sovereignty. For that reason as well,
the "I", singled out and addressed by the other, is chosen
or as if "elected" to respond (TI: 245-246, 279). It
"transascends" (35, 41) or rises to the other, answering
"here I am" (EI: 106). Levinas argues that this instant of
"election" belongs to a temporal order different from that
of everyday existence: the moment of enactment of a "good beyond
Being" (TI: 80, 102-104, 292-293).



It is impossible to set up a temporal order of succession or
alternation between being and the good beyond being. For humans, the
good comes to pass almost trivially and in everyday contexts. Of
course, as readily as responsibility and generosity may be glimpsed in
human affairs, cruelty and competition are also obvious. Given this,
Levinas seeks support for his intuition about the good in at least two
moments in the philosophical tradition wherein its occurrence and
irreducible value have been identified: Plato's Idea of the
good, and Descartes' infinite substance, which points beyond
itself to an unknowable cause. However, *that* humans
experience moments of inexplicable generosity, even enact them
spontaneously, is a fact that would remain enigmatic within an
ontology of competing drives or merely utilitarian desires. In that
respect, the trace of the good is present within existence as the
possibility that something other than rivalries and
instrumentalization take place intersubjectively.



As Levinas understands it, transcendence has the non-metaphysical
characteristic of an interruption, a relation *in nuce*, and
what he now calls "infinity". Insofar as infinity denotes
what is non-limited, uncircumscribable, it refers to the unpredictable
quality of a face's expression (TI: 5). As he writes, 



> 
> 
> [t]o think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not
> to think an object. But to think what does not have the lineaments of
> an object is in reality to do more or better than think. (TI: 49) 
> 
> 
> 



So far as infinity has a positive sense, then, it has that sense as
our unquenchable desire for sociality. Thus, before we interpret it as
"God" or reify it as a *summum ens*, the idea of
infinity is rooted in an everyday encounter whose implications are
clearest at the sensuous-affective level, and even somewhat resemble
Husserl's explorations of spontaneous empathy
(*Einfuhlung* as radicalized in the 1930s notes on
intersubjectivity [Husserliana, vols. 13-15 (Husserl
1973a,b,c)]). Rather than Husserl, however, Levinas refers to the
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of
lived intersubjective flesh, urging that this corporeal intertwinement
is part of our "fundamental
 historicity",[22]
 that is, part of the sedimented experiences that contribute to our
grasp of new situations. Rich with the accumulation of past
experiences, intersubjective sensibility proves to be the locus of
relationality and transcendence in 1961.



In the fourteen years separating *Existence and Existents* and
*Time and the Other* from *Totality and Infinity*, we
see both continuities and differences. If Heidegger had begun what he
conceived to be a hermeneutic deformalization of Husserl's
phenomenological consciousness, seeking what "lies hidden"
beneath phenomena (he-BT: SS7c), then Levinas extended this
deformalizing gesture already in 1947, arguing that light itself is
incipient meaning, suspending the opposition between the *a
priori* and the *a posteriori*. By 1961, it is the
experience of the face-to-face encounter that destabilizes the *a
priori*-*a posteriori* dichotomy by urging that, in the
face-to-face, the third party (humanity) looks at me *through*
the eyes of the other. This is because the non-spatial
"proximity" that is the interruption of our flowing
time-consciousness takes place with an unnoticed spontaneity like that
of the blinking of an eye, yet nevertheless leaves a trace.
Consciousness always takes up after these instants of interruption and
reconnects itself as a homogeneous flow. Thus the good beyond being is
not radically separated from existence in 1961. Consequently and to
repeat, this affair is a human one. Any philosophical translation of
concrete embodied life must therefore approach the human subject as it
emerges through its relations with others, even though the
intersubjective situation entails both my particularization through
election and a loss of egoic mastery. This is in line with many of
Merleau-Ponty's analyses, some of them inspired by Husserl,
although Merleau-Ponty argues against transcendental subjectivity,
urging that the classic phenomenological "I" constituting
its world alone will drift toward an unwanted absoluteness. It could
thus never be alone and must be approached existentially (mp-PP:
365).


#### 2.3.4 Being, Mediations (the Family and the State), and the Will in Ethics and Politics



Whereas in *Existence and Existents*, Levinas voiced "the
profound need to leave the climate of [Heidegger's]
philosophy" (EE: 4), by 1961 he will have done so, albeit not
without significantly reworking Heidegger's fundamental
ontology. As we have seen, Levinas envisages being as constant,
neutral presence and, at times, like a Hobbesian state of nature.
Derrida reminds us that this pre-Heideggerian conception is close to
Kant's notion of existence understood as conflictual intensities
(1997 [1999: 49, 86]). That is why, in its natural expression, being
takes on almost a mechanistic quality in Levinas. In social and
institutional senses, being is conceived as the encompassing of
individuals and communities by the State. On the latter depend
security and property, life and death. But in the
"Preface" to *Totality and Infinity*, Levinas
compares the State with systematic philosophy: as the
'*organon*' of politics, the State manages commerce
and conflicts, just as it declares wars. Similarly, Hegel's
idealist dialectics oversees and integrates sensibility and cognition,
passing from the individual to the collective, and expressing the
movement of *Geist* or Spirit, itself (TI: 21-23;
36-38; 87-88).



Overall, Levinas' most sustained criticisms target fundamental
ontology. As we have seen, leaving the "atmosphere" of
Heidegger's thought motivates his return to more traditional
conceptions of being. To be sure, Levinas was skeptical about deriving
an ethics from ontology. Certainly, such an ethics could not limit
itself to Heidegger's *Mitsein*, that sociality into
which *Da-sein* flees when troubled by its uncanny
groundlessness (its being thrown into-the-world). Having attempted,
from 1935 onward, to deformalize Heidegger's being-there and its
states of mind or moods (*Befindlichkeiten*), that is, down to
more *embodied* experiences of shame, desire, hunger, and
nausea, Levinas' conviction is that *Da-sein* remains too
formal an entity to exist in a world in which intersubjectivity is
more substantial than a mere refuge from the anxious care of
groundlessness (he-BT: 232). Indeed, although for Heidegger anxiety
individuates us and discloses our possibility for "the freedom
of choosing ... and taking hold of [ourselves]" (he-BT: 232),
this process remains solipsistic in the sense that it is our freedom
and our mortality that are in question. When intensified,
*Angst* reveals the groundlessness of our being-there,
ultimately freeing us for the most radical question: why might there
'be' anything at all? Against Heidegger, Levinas
understands this framing as tantamount to a hermeneutic universe in
which the idea of our authentic possibility concerns only death and
underestimates the significance of the encounter with the other
person. Only through a different hermeneutics, which reveals human
existence as embodied and *interpersonal*, can we conceptualize
the opening to responsibility that the encounter with the other
creates.



In this respect, and despite his debt to Heidegger, Levinas stands
closer here to the French existentialists and to Charles Taylor, whose
conception of the corporeal self is moral "through and
through" (Morgan 2007: 169). However, unlike Taylor, Levinas
does not endorse a *plurality* of strong values, because the
encounter with the other is the primary condition for him. While
Taylor's philosophy is influenced by Christianity, a significant
debate has been ongoing for over a decade about Levinas'
philosophy and its relationship to Judaism. It has been suggested that
Levinas' critique of Heidegger's ontology as a
"philosophy of the Neuter" (TI: 298) relies on decisive
attention paid to the influence of "Jerusalem" over that
of "Athens" in the Western philosophical tradition.
Scholars like Shmuel Trigano have traced a number of crucial
Levinasian "philosophemes" to Jewish positions, notably as
expressed by Philo and Maimonides (Trigano 2002: 145-178). On
the other hand, commentators like Leora Batnitzky have argued that,
when compared with the thought of Leo Strauss, for whom Jewish
philosophy still holds a place for "revelation",
Levinas' work largely rehabilitates the tradition of Modern
philosophy--and with it a secular, almost political, project
(Batnitzky 2006: 4). Despite this, and in light of *Totality and
Infinity*, she comes close to Trigano when she argues that Levinas
tends to ignore important political questions, including that of the
Jewish State, which has dire consequences for his thought, because




> 
> 
> to think politics is urgent in an undertaking [such as
> Levinas'], since it amounts to thinking through the criterion of
> ethical validity of the universalization project ... with regard to
> the other and with regard to self .... (Batnitzky 2006:
> 173-174)
> 
> 
> 



Levinas' recourse to Descartes' *Meditations* may
well justify Batnitzky's qualifying his thought as Modern. More
important is that his argument that ethics is first philosophy (TI:
29, 47, 304) runs into the difficulty of universalizing our
pre-intentional "experience" of spontaneous responsibility
toward the other. Hence, in *Totality and Infinity*, the
transition from the micro-sociality of the face-to-face encounter to
social existence more broadly occurs through language as teaching and
dialogue (TI: 194-197; 201-203). As indicated, Levinas
will open still another path to universalization, through the family,
in his final section "Beyond the face" (TI:
267-280). Despite this second path, the question remains how it
is that, through the eyes of the other, the whole of humanity looks at
me (TI: 213). Gillian Rose first criticized this limited
universalization of responsibility as lacking important
socio-political mediations (1992). Ernst Wolff has investigated this
passage toward universality in light of Levinas' evolving
conception of liberal society, from a skeptical stance toward a more
positive appraisal (2007).



By focusing on temporal mediations (rather than social or spatial
ones), Levinas does provide a partial universalization of
responsibility by way of the aforementioned phenomenon of the family.
This choice, resembling the solidarity through love found in
Hegel's early theological writings, works responsibility out in
terms one might today consider traditional or patriarchal, i.e.,
through paternal election and the service of the son to his brothers.
Introducing this discussion, Levinas admits: 



> 
> 
> The acuity of the problem [of universalization] lies in the necessity
> of maintaining the I in the transcendence [of the face-to-face] with
> which it hitherto seemed incompatible [given its self-interests]. (TI:
> 276) 
> 
> 
> 



That is, although the face-to-face is a momentary interruption, the
trace of responsibility needs to be received and assured in a more
durable way, which leads Levinas to assert that "the fecundity
of the I is its very [temporal] transcendence" (TI: 277). That
is, thanks to the *time* of generations, an ego surpasses
itself through its children (TI: 277). Thus, while this
under-determined time of generations "adds something new to
being, something absolutely new" (TI: 283), the child, it
provides a partial mediation between the affective instant of
responsibility and the creation of institutions and practices apt to
ensure that the ethical trace has a potential for universality.



Both Rose (1992) and Derrida have pointed toward the difficulty of
introducing ethics into questions of justice and politics in this way
(Derrida 1964 [1978: 121, 133-136]). Part of the difficulty here
lies in the tension between universalization understood as the ethical
cultivation of humanity, versus universalization understood as
providing an ethical inflection to politics broadly conceived. For
Levinas, the passage of responsibility into politics is invariably
fragile, because ethical language is frequently absorbed or imitated
by political rhetoric. Yet, in 1961, the question of how
responsibility and election experienced in the family
passes--without tribalism--into a vaster history and public
space remains under-thematized; notably, as it concerns demands for
social justice and *equality*. Levinas partly responds, urging
that the notion of fraternity is *not* firstly biological or
genetic, but intersubjective; it flows out of face-to-face
encounters--and what he calls the human kinship forged by
"monotheism" (TI: 214), by which he means the ethical core
or essence of Judaism. He argues, 



> 
> 
> The very status of the human implies fraternity and the idea of the
> human race. Fraternity is radically opposed to the conception of a
> humanity united by resemblance, a multiplicity of diverse families
> arisen from the stones cast behind by Deucalion, and which, across the
> struggle of egoisms, results in a human city. (TI: 214) 
> 
> 
> 



This unification in difference is created only when monotheism results
in a law that equalizes those obliged by it. Indeed, as we have seen,
Levinas similarly traces what he calls originary
"religion" to the face-to-face, following his
phenomenological genealogy (TI: 40). Commentators have nevertheless
insisted that, unless ethics can correct or amend justice on the basis
of a subject's experience of responsibility, the possibility of
universalization stands open to doubt (Wolff 2007: 383-399). And
for many commentators, interpersonal responsibility remains the
exception not the rule. It may be subject to codification, though that
would be the concern of ethical theory, which is not Levinas'
priority (see Morgan 2007: 238).



Two dilemmas thus arise in *Totality and Infinity*. It is an
open question whether they are laid to rest in *Otherwise than
Being*. They concern first the dichotomy between what was
traditionally called free will versus nature, and second the
socio-cultural mediations between families and States. In the first
case, it may be surprising that Levinas characterizes human existence
in terms resembling those of physiological determinism, that is, in
terms of drives and the interests attaching to them. For him, the
problem of reconciling freedom and nature would above all be one of
interrupting the activity of the drives, which is the bodily substrate
of consciousness and contributes to its dynamic temporal unity.
Understanding the will, then, does not begin with freedom so much as
with something closer to *conatus essendi* or even to a will to
power (i.e., with something "natural"). Levinas proves
close to Kant here. For the latter, the motivation to
*disregard* one's interests in favor of the moral law
lies in the unique affect called *Achtung*. Kant urged that
*Achtung* be considered in its negative and positive aspects:
negatively, as attention or freedom *from* sensuous
distraction. In its positive sense, *Achtung* corresponds to
*reverentia*, respect, understood as the freedom to grasp the
law as something eminently worthy of adherence, despite its
constraining quality. Moreover, 



> 
> 
> the presentation of something as *determining basis of our
> will* humbles us in our self-consciousness when we compare it with
> the sensible propensity of our nature. (Kant 1788 [2002: 45]; Nancy
> 1983 [2004: 142]; Basterra 2015: 91-98) 
> 
> 
> 



As the focus of attention and motivation, *Achtung* is unique
in that it is what Kant calls an *intellectual* affect (Kant
1788 [2002: 66]). It has no direct relationship to our bodily make up,
which, as we know from Levinas, is indissociably tied up with drives
and instincts. When thus motivated, practical reason determines itself
to act out of respect for a law indemonstrable by theoretical reason,
thereby discovering freedom in the performance of its moral act. It is
only then, *post facto*, that freedom is found to have reality,
through obedience.



Basterra has argued that Kant's ethics affords us an important
insight into the question of nature versus freedom in Levinas. Whereas
for both, the will follows its natural course (desires and emotions),
something outside it *may* compel it toward ethical behavior or
responsibility. For Kant, the categorical imperative does not
"belong" to the self-positing subject, but rather
addresses them as if *from without* and elicits humility. For
Levinas, it is the face of the other that addresses us thus and
focuses our attention, prior to our considering that face's
empirical qualities (sex, ethnicity, etc.; Basterra 2015:
125-126).



Let us now turn toward the second dilemma: the fraught relationship
between ethics and politics. In 1961, Levinas characterizes politics
and drives as unfolding in a parallel fashion. Both are sites for the
manifestation of the will to persist in being. He doubts that politics
"left to itself" can become or long remain ethical (TI:
300; Wolff 2007: 129). However, he remarks that justice can be
addressed as a *demand* posed to some States, notably liberal
ones.



This does not solve the problem of mediations, yet suggests that it
may be misguided. After all, what do the mediations ultimately serve,
if not the *finality* of the State as overarching protector and
 regulator?[23]
 Levinas was aware of this. In 1951, in his first published article on
the State of Israel, he did not hesitate to forestall accusations of
idolatry even against a *Jewish* State. Arguing philosophically
that the "State is not an idol because it precisely permits full
self-consciousness", he added that modern humans
"acknowledge [their] spiritual nature ... when acting in the
service of the State and in their dignity as
 citizens".[24]
 This is indeed why, he added, the decline of organized religions is
tied to the advent of modern States. Here and elsewhere, he recognized
that a State, and preeminently one founded on a religion, embodied a
paradox whose solution--in Israel's case at
least--could only be found in an approach to religion as the
*symbolic* pendant of ethical responsibility (DF: 218). He
thereupon added the more existential claim that 



> 
> 
> the Jewish people craved their own land and their own State, not
> because of the abstract independence which they desired, but because
> they could then finally begin the work of their lives. (DF: 218) 
> 
> 
> 



Clearly, this is not an exhaustive solution to the problem of
mediations between family (or ethnicity) and the State (or
politics).



Commentators have taken various positions on Levinas' politics.
Howard Caygill's *Levinas and the Political* was the
first systematic, critical study thereof. Caygill emphasized
inconsistencies in Levinas' texts on politics and Israel, and
pointed to his "problematic fusion of rabbinics and
Hegelianism" (2002: 79-93). Morgan and Salanskis have
recently argued that politics *can* stand within both history
and a certain idealism, at least insofar as one understanding of
"Israel" acknowledges Jewish particularity as carrying the
*possibility* of universalization, thanks to the Biblical
prophets' call for justice (Morgan 2016: 250ff; Salanskis 2006;
see also Salanskis 2016). It bears noting that by 1984 Levinas will be
more generous toward European liberal States, and more willing to
trace the genealogy of liberalism back to a Biblical conception of
responsibility. In "Peace and Proximity" (1984), he
ventured, 



> 
> 
> Europe is not a simple confluence of two cultural currents. It is the
> concreteness where theoretical and biblical wisdom do better than
> converge. The relation with the other ... that is, with peace[,]
> comes a reason that thematizes, synchronizes, and synthesizes, that
> thinks a world and reflects on being, concepts necessary for the peace
> of humanity. (col-BPW: 168)
> 
> 
> 


### 2.4 Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974): Transcendence-in-Immanence



*Otherwise than Being* grew up around its core fourth chapter,
entitled "Substitution" and first published in 1968 (OBBE:
 99-129).[25]
 It is a justifiable simplification to say that Levinas' concept
of substitution corresponds to that of responsibility, explored this
time as *immanent* relationality rather than "my"
response to the face, understood as *exteriority*. In this
work, Levinas uses the term
"*interiorite*" repeatedly, which the
translator renders as "inwardness", perhaps to avoid
introducing spatial binaries (OBBE: 28, 87, 92, 108, 119). The work is
not about inner-outer dichotomies, much less cognitive operations, or
object-memories of events or things. It has little to do with what we
discover phenomenologically through reflection.
"Inwardness" denotes a bodily life as if haunted by
others, which is also now called "proximity" (OBBE:
81-94). Comparable in this to Husserl's horizon of
apperceptions, inwardness entails a spectrum of affective tones.
Perhaps unlike Husserl, these tones require recourse to discursive
figures that Levinas now borrows from psychology, poetics,
hermeneutics, even theology and dogmatics (e.g.,
"obsession", "persecution",
"recurrence", "too tight in its skin",
"exile", "maternity", "love", and
finally "expiation" and
 "kenosis").[26]
 While thus concerned with intersubjective affectivity in its
immediate passive undergoing, substitution is manifest in action or
*praxis*, a domain in which we experience
 immediacy.[27]
 By 1974, then, transcendence, understood as the other
"outside", has become transcendence-in-immanence, in a
sense closer to Merleau-Ponty's account of intercorporeity,
which similarly urged that philosophies of embodiment should never
*oppose* immanence and transcendence (mp-PP: 308). For Levinas,
the concept of the other would still have some reference to the face
as expression and exteriority, *but* it would denote
principally the "inwardness" of non-object forming
memories, whose affective return or "recurrence"
complexifies the linear time-structure of Husserl's
phenomenological consciousness (OBBE: 88).


#### 2.4.1 The Structure of the Work



*Otherwise than Being* opens with a general overview of the
argument, in which being and transcendence are also named
"essence" and "disinterest". Emphasizing the
processual quality of being, Levinas will refer to it equivalently as
"being" *or* "essence", venturing that
he might even have used the dynamic form *essance* (OBBE: 187
note 1). Responsibility will be focused and discussed as the condition
of possibility of all verbal signification (OBBE: 43-47). But
the themes of conversation and teaching recede into the background. He
now makes a more strategic use of the body as flesh, that is, as a
locus with simultaneously an inside and an outside, as in
Merleau-Ponty. Subjectivity is again framed affectively as the coming
to pass of responsibility, although this time the phenomenological
analysis of intentionality is analyzed into its primitive layer of
sensibility that Levinas calls "pre-originary susceptiveness
[*susception* pre-originaire]" (OBBE: 122,
136-138). For him, that means that subjectivity always entails
pre-cognitive dimensions that are from the outset intersubjectively
conditioned. The other has become other-in-the-same, as indicated. But
the other-in-the-same is not *objectively* different from the
factical other who faces me, because neither are objects and both are
expressions or modes of alterity. As we will see, the
other-in-the-same describes a pre-thematic "investiture"
(because I never know when I *first* experienced this other in
me; OBBE: 125): "All my inwardness is invested in the form of a
despite-me, for-another" (OBBE: 11). In *Otherwise than
Being*, Levinas has returned to Husserl's inquiries into
passive synthesis, to the latter's perplexities about the
stretch of retentions of passive experiences, about the unbidden
spontaneity of our associations, and the near-infinity of sensuous
horizons--all part of a process unfolding in what Husserl called
in 1926 "a phenomenology of the so-called unconscious"
(Husserl 2001: 201 and "Appendix 19" 512-519). In
light of this return, we should not approach interiority and
exteriority as opposed terms, but as dimensions of intersubjectivity
and the inhabitation of a self by alterity.



The second chapter approaches Heidegger's discussion of language
as the way in which being becomes, the way it temporalizes (he-BT:
 SS68).[28]
 Levinas revisits Heidegger's argument that the *logos*
gathers up being and makes possible its unveiling
(*aletheia*). He will argue that the lapse of time
*between* lived immediacy and its reflective representation is
*never* fully gathered by the *logos*. Therefore, the
temporal lapse poses a challenge to language understood as
Heidegger's gathering and it falls, much the way that
transcendence as interruption did in 1961, outside the realm of being,
even though Levinas still considers being a process of totalization,
something all-encompassing. This rethinking of the lapse along with
transcendence-in-immanence will be Levinas' ultimate
modification of Heidegger's project. Together, the lapse and
this new conception of transcendence do ultimately pass through
language as words addressed. I will come back to this. For now,
suffice it to say that it is the inhabitation of a self by alterity
that forms the sensuous conditions of possibility of speech. Thus it
is not being that addresses us through language, it is a quite
different alterity.



Two additional innovations in *Otherwise than Being* include:
(1) the proposed phenomenological reduction to the birth of meaning in
a bodily self that carries what it cannot identify *as*
properly itself (the "other", affectively). This appears
to be a radicalization of Husserl's discussion of the
pre-reflective ego in *Ideas II* (SS58, "Supplement
12" SSSS2-3). Whereas Husserl emphasized the basis
of the ego in its ongoing flow of lived experience, which he said was
"lawful", Levinas focuses on the discontinuity of time
consciousness (see also Franck 1981 [2014: 149-166]). (2) A
hermeneutics of the self, emerging through intersubjective contact in
which the "proximity" of the other elicits passive
"substitution" and opens onto spontaneous communication
(OBBE: 113-121). In what suggests an attempt at deepening
Husserl's concept of empathy (*Einfuhlung*; OBBE:
125), the figures of proximity, recurrence, and substitution
characterize the intersubjective intertwining that makes communication
possible: "Communication would be impossible if it should have
to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only
a limitation that invites war" (OBBE: 119). Indeed, prior to
spoken or written language, prior to signs reciprocally exchanged,
"we suppose that there is in the transcendence involved in
language a relationship that is not empirical speech, but
responsibility" (OBBE: 120). As "my pre-originary
*susceptiveness*", the nature of intersubjective
sensibility shares its time-structure with strong passions, sometimes
indeed with trauma (OBBE: 122-124). As Levinas writes: 



> 
> 
> [this susceptiveness] describes the suffering and vulnerability of the
> sensible as *the other in me* .... the ipseity [also known
> as embodied selfhood] has become at odds with itself in its return to
> itself. The self-accusation of remorse gnaws away at the closed and
> firm core of consciousness ... fissioning it 
> 
> 
> 



in its temporal unity (OBBE: 124-125). Consequently,
vulnerability and sensitivity to trauma not only provoke retreat into
self but heighten our awareness, however tenuous, of our connection
with the other(s), and they motivate our bearing witness. Thus the
affective in-habitation of my self by others precedes speech-acts and
speech-communities. If the reverse were the case; that is, if a *de
facto* community were posited as prior to the event of words
addressed, then this would presuppose what it was meant to show: the
genesis of speech-acts (OBBE: 92). Instead, 'beneath'
words proffered lies a fundamental vulnerability that psychology might
interpret as a predisposition to witnessing, from oneself to the
other. Levinas calls this vulnerability the "Saying"
(OBBE: 149-152). It is both precursive to words uttered in the
form of address (i.e., pre-linguistic), and it would accompany
communication like its affective horizon. The duality of Saying and
Said is a new concept in Levinas' late work.



Building on the exploration of proximity begun in chapter three,
chapters four and five evince a tone more somber than any found
hitherto in Levinas' *oeuvre*. This is in keeping
with the dedication of the book, written in Hebrew and in French,
which announces that it will be a work of mourning. While Derrida
characterized *Totality and Infinity* as a phenomenology of
hospitality (Derrida 1997 [1999: 21]), *Otherwise than Being*
commemorates the "victims of the ... hatred of the other
man". It develops the parallel between semiotic
"substitution" of a word for a thing (or the signifying
function of all language) and the spontaneous substitution of myself
for an other (implied by a spectrum of acts of self-sacrifice), which
Levinas calls the one-for-the-other (OBBE: 45-50, 70-74,
119-129). Whereas Heidegger had explored the hermeneutics of
*Da-sein*, for whom communication unfolds thanks to our (as
*Da-sein*) taking or equivalently offering "this [thing
or word] as that [thing]" (he-BT: SS31), Levinas will
arguably set Heidegger's "as" into his
 "for":[29]
 Heidegger's "this *as* that" becomes
Levinas' "one *for* the other" of
substitution. While responsibility expressed the unfolding of the
intersubjective affects that Levinas compared to Plato's
"Good beyond Being" in 1961 (TI: 292-293,
304-307), the good of substitution is more ambiguous, occurring
"on the brink of tears and laughter" (OBBE: 18), yet also
"glorious" (OBBE: 94, 140-144).



The experience of time characteristic of trauma, and mourning, does
not take the place of Husserlian phenomenology's
flowing-yet-always-also-present (*stromend-stehend*)
 time-consciousness,[30]
 any more than it replaces the succession and uninterruptedness of
clock time. If what-is results from the self-giving of things to the
focus of phenomenological attention, and if together they invariably
find a place in the formal flow of time-consciousness, then even for
Husserl what-is, i.e. being, must temporalize. Husserl had always
urged that, insofar as there is appearing, there is being as well
(hu-CM: SS46; also see Heidegger, he-BT: SS7). For Heidegger,
being temporalized through *Da-sein*, which was
out-ahead-of-itself or oriented toward its future. Yet if, in both
their cases, being unfolds temporally, then for Levinas, our
sensibility shows a different temporal character, because the
sensibility called the other-in-the-same returns and repeats rather
than flows. Like trauma and mourning, responsibility in its new somber
tones recurs without definitively halting the flow of
time-consciousness. This is why Levinas referred to the cluster of
concepts around substitution as *adverbial*: they pass through
being (understood as verbal or processual) and its time, and they
modify it. Indeed, when being is understood as the verbal dynamism
expressed by "essence", then responsibility and
substitution can only be compared to ad-verbs. Hence the title,
*autrement*, other-wise or 'otherly' than being
(OBBE: 35).



The final half of chapter five recurs to the performative register of
language to convey the tension of a consciousness striving to
consolidate itself in the wake of alterity as affective investiture,
by which its passivity slowly becomes active witnessing. This opening
out of inward affects becoming gestures of generosity motivates
*Otherwise than Being*'s recourse to a new, performative
language. Thus, Levinas adds, 



> 
> 
> and I still interrupt the ultimate discourse in which all the
> discourses are stated, in saying it to one that listens ... That is
> true of the discussion I am elaborating at this very moment. (OBBE:
>  170)[31]
> 
> 
> 
> 



Aware of the seemingly artificial quality of calling his authorial
witness "immediate", Levinas' claim is nevertheless
more than a literary artifice. Basterra compares it to Kant's
idea of autonomy, which shows itself only when we follow a law that
"exceeds and addresses the subject", motivating our
ethical act (Basterra 2015: 126). Earlier in her study, she
had argued that the intellectual affect of *Achtung* was
capable of focusing our attention and opening us to a respect
comparable to Levinas' Saying, which he also calls
"sincerity". For pure reason, autonomy "is therefore
an illusion", but it is one only insofar as that which is not
intrinsically part of *my* interests can still motivate me to
act. Thus pure reason erroneously supposes that my ethical gesture
came *from* me (Basterra 2015: 129). Levinas provides us a
crucial hermeneutics of the intersubjective origin of this Kantian
"illusion". He sets our misinterpretation of heteronomy as
autonomy in Kant's practical reason into a hermeneutic register,
referring to the sincerity and substitution underlying the words we
offer: "It is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity,
the breaking up of inwardness ... exposure to traumas,
vulnerability" that I bear witness to, and for another (OBBE:
48). Again, it does not come from us. Levinas finds illustrations of
such witnessing in many places, from the justice imperative of the
prophets to the concern of Latin American clerics over the events
unfolding in Chile in 1973 (OGCM 81-82).


#### 2.4.2 New Existential Moods and Fleshly Memories



As in his 1935 discussion of need and nausea, *Otherwise than
Being* argues that lived sensibility often overflows
representation. And again, Levinas suggests sensuous modes different
from Heidegger's *Befindlichkeiten* (see
 SS2.2 above),
 in which all understanding takes place for Heidegger (he-BT: 17).
Indeed, interwoven layers of affectivity are unfolded in *Otherwise
than Being*. Levinas explores the sensuous-affective
proto-experience of the other in light of *new* moods, writing:
"Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of sensibility. In
its passivity is erased the distinction between being accused and
accusing oneself" (OBBE: 125). Unlike *Existence and
Existents*, wherein light overcame the distinction between
subjects and objects, allowing the subject to make the object
intelligible within its horizon of appearing (EE: 41), *Otherwise
than Being* approaches transcendence in sensuous and temporal
terms, arguing *inter alia* for the insistence of a past that
eludes thematization (OBBE: 122-123). In that sense,
transcendence for an embodied being is always
transcendence-in-immanence. The affective "experience" of
my relations with particular others is thus preserved as a trace or
pre-thematic reminiscence of the flesh, as "a relationship with
a singularity without the mediation of any principle, any
ideality" (OBBE: 100). Invoking *Otherwise than Being*
(OBBE: 105-107), John Llewelyn has called this affective
dimension of invested selfhood, or "ipseity", a
"'deep' saying" that "bears witness to
what is neither recollected nor forgotten *in the epistemic
sense* of these terms when [or once] it is represented as a
sign" (Llewelyn 2002b:
 135).[32]



As indicated, *Otherwise than Being* problematizes
Levinas' earlier, more ontological approach on the basis of
Husserl's inquiries into passive syntheses and
*Einfuhlung* (empathy). There is good reason for this.
Responsibility denoted an event that repeats, and even increases as it
is assumed (already TI: 100-101). In *Otherwise than
Being*, however, the question of immanence and passivity arises in
regard to responsibility's unremarked persistence and its
affective upwellings in us. This is because the status of a memory of
sensuous events, which affect us *before* we represent them, is
elusive. For the phenomenologist, it might correspond to an
apperception or horizon, in the sense of something not directly
perceived. Thus Levinas also insists that, unlike the apperceptions
Husserl was able to explore thanks to the reduction he set on
 memory,[33]
*this* affective past continues to elude thematization because
it was never an intentional object at all, and because memories of our
lived flesh precede the consolidation of our ego (OBBE:
144-147). John Drabinski has explored this
"pre-history" in light of Levinas' reprise of
genetic phenomenology (2001: 185-206). Theodore de Boer
approaches it as an echo of both Rosenzweig and Jewish prophetism
(1997: 87-100). Of course, Levinas is aware that such a
temporality is open to skeptical critique. He even reminds us that
skepticism itself obeys an ethical imperative to deconstruct
philosophy and with it, all totalizing discourses, whether they are
logical or political (OBBE: 168-170).



Levinas does not propose a solution to the conundrum of how
non-objective memories *can* be translated into objects for
philosophical reflection. His aim is to deconstruct dialogue down to
its embodied condition of possibility, and this leads to a discussion
which is not so unlike Husserl's genetic inquiries into
"proto-intentionality [*Urintentionalitat*]"
explored in the 1920s. Unlike Husserl, however, he does not aim at a
system consisting of levels of drives and affects formatted by higher
egoic structures (Husserl, *E Manuscript* III 9/5a, cited in
hu-GDP: lixff). Yet he *does* exploit a difficulty that beset
Husserl's early phenomenology of time-consciousness, one that
would argue in favor of Levinas' 1974 conception of
"diachrony", or the interruption that he equates with
transcendence-in-immanence. This was the paradox of sensation in
relation to intentionality that Husserl identified in Appendix 12 of
his lectures on internal time consciousness (Hua 10:
 130-133).[34]
 In his 1965 essay, "Intentionality and Sensation" (DEH:
135-150), Levinas focused on the gap (i.e., diachrony) between
bodily sensation entering intentionality and sensation as
pre-conscious bodily processes. He recalled the paradox that the
sensuous *origins* of intentionality lay *outside*
intentionality's field or reach, in the body, even as the
ongoing alterations of sensation forge our feeling of ongoing temporal
progression. To be explicitly experienced, sensation thus *had*
to intentionalize. Yet much of its prior, bodily existence eludes our
consciousness.



Levinas compared this dual, conscious-preconscious status of
sensibility to his idea of a pre-intentional "receptivity of an
'other' penetrating into the 'same', [in sum,
to our intersubjective] life and not [to] 'thought'"
(DEH: 144). As already broached by Husserl, this sensuous
"other" will support Levinas' 1974 arguments for the
affective interruptions of the even flow of time-consciousness, and
his claim that intersubjective affects overflow the framework of all
representational
 consciousness.[35]
 Sophie Veulemans has fruitfully compared Levinas' diachrony
with Bergson's approach to the "new" in the midst of
duration (Veulemans 2008). Rudolf Bernet, in turn, equates the newness
of the phenomenological instant with "the root of all alterity
and all difference" in Levinas, which allows Bernet to urge that
the intersubjective investiture of the subject "will always
[prove] unthinkable in a philosophy of consciousness" (Bernet
2002: 92). Following his argument, phenomenology would not have
adequately thought through the sensuous way "in which the other
liberates the subject from its captivity within
 ... immanence" (Bernet 2002: 93).


#### 2.4.3 The Saying and the Said



*Otherwise than Being* involves an innovative discussion of
signification. Given Levinas' hermeneutic insight that language
is not merely a system of words paired up with pre-existing, objective
realities, but instead brings reality to light, language and time will
have analogous functions. That is, both make meaning possible as the
realization of our world. Indeed, while Heidegger had argued that
being resonates in (poetic) language, as the verb "to be",
Levinas, as we have seen, had counter-argued for an otherwise than
being that showed itself in ad-verbial meaning. Yet, if the
relationship between language and being is fully encompassing, even in
a sense mystical, as it is for Heidegger, then either Levinas'
otherwise than being looks like mere speculation, or it simply inheres
in being or participates in its verb-like transcendence. Either way,
fundamental ontology thereby proves primordial and weakens
Levinas' claims. Yet for the latter, transcendence in fact
points to the temporality that, as we have seen, already differs from
phenomenology's totalizing flow or the way Heidegger's
being temporalizes through *Da-sein* (i.e., as
out-ahead-of-itself toward its ownmost possibility; OBBE:
169-170, 178-182). The lapse of time between the
pre-intentional sensuous moment and its intentionalization denotes the
transcendence that Levinas also equates with "the Saying"
(OBBE: 37-55). His discussion of the Saying correlates with his
treatment of sincerity, introduced already in *Existence and
Existents*. *Otherwise than Being* radicalizes his notion
of sincerity, insisting that the structure of sensibility is always as
if punctuated by sensuous lapses. It is thanks to such time lapses
that we are open and able to communicate because, as we have seen,
proximity is an affective mode that motivates dialogue. While
*all* sensuous lapses are not necessarily openings to
intersubjective communication, proximity and vulnerability are the
*loci* of transcendence-in-immanence and the birth of
signification (whether words are actually uttered or not). For
Levinas, there is more in living affectivity than Heidegger's
conception of being speaking through language captured. This is clear
the moment we understand signification originally as an affective
proto-intentionality and not as some thought, already formulated, that
the I thereupon chooses to communicate to another (OBBE: 43).



Levinas thus conceives language as more than denotation and
description. Already verbs escape the coupling of words with things
that we find in the case of the noun. "In the verb of apophansis
[predication], which is the verb properly so called, the verb
'to be', essence resounds and is heard" (OBBE: 41).
"Red reddens" without requiring conversion into
propositions; sounds resound in music and poetry. Nevertheless, a verb
*can* be converted into a noun, thereby losing its processual
quality. 



> 
> 
> Through the ambiguousness of the logos ... the verb par excellence
> ['being'] in which essence resounds ... is nominalized,
> becomes a word designating and sanctioning identities, assembling
> time ... into a conjuncture. (OBBE: 42) 
> 
> 
> 



Thus, even the verbality or event-like quality of being can take on a
nominal form, such as in "*a* being". Levinas calls
this convertibility "the amphibology of being and
entities" (OBBE: 43). While this back-and-forth reference
expresses the danger of taking being for a thing--a danger about
which Heidegger warns us--the amphibology also fails to grasp
fully the reflexive quality of verbs like *se dire*, understood
as "to say" but in a passive sense, as though one were
saying *oneself*, self-communicating. Levinas then sets
*his* ethical-hermeneutic "reduction" on the
reflexive particle *se*, urging that, although being
"speaks" through the *logos*, the *se*
points toward an intersubjective mode of our embodied sensuous
passivity (OBBE: 43-45). This passivity is enigmatic because the
*se* is not a verb and cannot really be made into a noun. It is
in its enigmatic structure that the vulnerability that arises in
proximity as if grounds signification, and words said, to another. To
this reflexive *se*, or "self", corresponds our
passivity, as it occurs in the temporal lapse called
"diachrony". Diachrony thus expresses our sincerity toward
the other and a certain transcendence: "the spirit hears the
echo of the *otherwise*" (OBBBE: 44). With the adverb
("other*wise*"), a modalization of fleshly
investiture momentarily escapes the nominalization flowing out of the
aforementioned amphibology between verbs and nouns, between being and
*a* being. Here we find the ultimate sense of transcendence,
which Levinas compares with Merleau-Ponty's "fundamental
historicity", those unremarked, passive bodily sedimentations
that make up our selfhood (OBBE: 45).


#### 2.4.4 Hermeneutics and Jewish Philosophy



Levinas' later work, notably *Otherwise than Being*, has
been characterized as hermeneutic. Focusing on the discussions of the
other-in-the-same and passivity in that work, commentator Giuseppe
Lissa provides an apt description of Levinas' interpretive
project. By investigating the depths of consciousness, by comparing
its passivity to the process of ageing, Levinas investigates a 



> 
> 
> reality unknowable, but perhaps interpretable by a thinking that no
> longer claims to be an exercise in knowledge ... because this
> thinking is engaged in the search for a meaning that precedes all
> knowledge. 
> 
> 
> 



Lissa concludes that Levinas intimates a meaning that, in
"preceding [knowledge], founds it, orients it, and to some
degree justifies it" (Lissa 2002: 227). For him, Levinas'
turn to hermeneutics largely dates from his abandonment of his
phenomenology of "exteriority", as the subtitle of
*Totality and Infinity* indicates: *An Essay on
Exteriority*. As we have seen, insofar as the search for meaning
underlying intentional object-constitution (and other modes of
intentionality) presupposes a meaning only incipiently
grasped--which corresponds to Heidegger's rethinking of
hermeneutics in light of *Da-sein*'s basic
understanding--Levinas appears to owe a debt both to
Heidegger's existential
 hermeneutics[36]
 as well as to a much older, polyphonic practice of reading: Talmudic
thought as interpretively elaborating Jewish law (*Halakhah*)
and recounting and parsing narratives (*Aggadah*). Because this
hermeneutics differs from that of Christian theology by giving
significantly less weight to philosophical justifications of
*faith*, it is worth our turning briefly to it.



Levinas presented twenty-three Talmudic readings in the context of the
*Colloques des intellectuels juifs de langue francaise*.
However, in 1957, at the first meeting of the colloquium, he merely
participated in the debates. Salomon Malka reminds us of one of his
profoundly hermeneutic observations: 



> 
> 
> Judaism is not a religion, the word doesn't exist in Hebrew; it
> is much more than that, it is an *understanding of being*. The
> Jews introduced into history the idea of hope and that of a
> future .... Moreover, Jews have the sentiment that their
> obligations toward the other person come before their obligations in
> regard to God. (Malka 2002: 42, my trans., emph. added) 
> 
> 
> 



This remark already shows us two important things. First, that Judaism
might be an "understanding of being" implies that this
understanding is profoundly aware of its finitude and, by extension,
has to be an ongoing process. It helps us grasp how it is that Levinas
found resources in Heidegger's hermeneutics, both utilizing
*and* criticizing its approach. Second, that our obligations to
the other person somehow come before duties toward God (from rituals
to norms), and occasionally also abrogate these duties, already opens
a secular, or better, a human-oriented dimension within Judaism.



The relationship between Levinas' thought, its Jewish
influences, and phenomenological philosophy has given rise to multiple
evaluations. Martin Kavka argues that "Levinas understood both
Judaism and Western philosophy as engaging in structurally similar
forms of thinking" (Kavka 2010: 20-21). He situates the
structural similarity in that "both [these intellectual
corpuses] consist of texts that point to what cannot be brought to
presence" and consequently work on, or between, the dimensions
of reference, explanation, and hermeneutic pre-comprehension (cf.
Ouaknin 1993: 225 [1995:
 155-156]).[37]
 Yet Kavka adds that Levinas' relationship to the Jewish canon
is also "inherently muddy", though it is also clear that
there is more than *one* canon, more than a single
interpretation thereof. Indeed, both Michael Fagenblat and Kavka agree
that "it is not clear ... that ... a 'new
direction' in Jewish philosophy is [ever] really new"
(Kavka 2010: 21). Moreover, Fagenblat has argued that Levinas'
ethics prolongs, in a phenomenological-hermeneutic register,
"the dispersal of [modern approaches to the] Judeo-Christian God
in social life" (Fagenblat 2010: 196).[38]
 He also examines the hermeneutic extension that *Otherwise than
Being* gives to *Totality and Infinity*. Both commentators
suggest that Levinas' increasingly critical stance toward the
epistemological and foundationalist aspects of Husserlian
phenomenology motivated him to extend his hermeneutic recourse beyond
Heidegger's *Existenzphilosophie* toward Jewish thought,
including Neo-Platonic currents and Maimonides (Fagenblat 2010:
97-110).[39]
,
[40]
 But it can also be argued that Levinas' hermeneutics begins
well before *Otherwise than Being*. His reinterpretation of
being-in-the-world, the meaning of facticity, the creation of a
dwelling, and even his reading of *eros* and the family in 1961
entail interpretive choices, indebted to at least two significant
hermeneutic themes: Heidegger's interpretation of our
pre-comprehension of existence and Franz Rosenzweig's approach
to Jewish life in *The Star of Redemption* (Rosenzweig 1921
[2005]).



In 1961, Levinas wrote that Rosenzweig's *Star of
Redemption* was "too often present in this book
[*Totality and Infinity*] to be cited" (TI: 28), and
numerous are the commentaries on the presence of Rosenzweig in
Levinas'
 work.[41]
 It is important to recall that Rosenzweig had been a scholar of Hegel
until the experience of the trenches in World War I motivated his
rethinking of idealist political philosophy and Christian universality
more broadly. The *Star of Redemption* is a complex work
analyzing the respective tasks of Jewish and Christian wisdom and
ritual. Peter Eli Gordon argues that Rosenzweig is 



> 
> 
> a post-Nietzschean philosopher, in that, like Heidegger, he denies
> that human meaning is intelligible independent of a life-context.
> Temporal hermeneutics thus replaces the transcendental search for
> essence. (Gordon 2003: 185) 
> 
> 
> 



The same could be said of Levinas. Since he conceives temporality in
human terms (as opposed to eternity or *stasis*), meaning
itself can only be approached in light of time. Readers familiar with
Rosenzweig's "new thinking" may know that he
situated one of the principal hermeneutic differences between Judaism
and Christianity in the way their theologies
'temporalized': Christianity being oriented around the
life and death of the incarnate God, an event whose occurrence lies in
the past; Judaism, on the other hand, being future-oriented, awaiting
the messiah (who does not come).



Levinas took up the question of meaning and temporality in a way
somewhat different from both Rosenzweig and Heidegger. In 1961, as we
have seen, his phenomenology of hospitality proceeded on the
present-time of love of life and the encounter called the
face-to-face. However, the place where he explicitly uses the term
"phenomenology" therein concerns precisely a secularized
messianic future. This is the chapter entitled "Phenomenology of
Eros", which deploys "a phenomenological model for the
ultimate term of our desire", as Fagenblat puts it (2010:
93). The argument would be this: before *eros* is sublimated in
civil society, *eros* and (sometimes) the family bring to light
our concern with others in their particularity and difference,
independently of their biological or social roles. We can take the
family as a "model" here, in the Frankfurt School's
sense of




> 
> 
> an intellectual construction ... [whose elements] are borrowed from
> empirical experiences that have already shown their worth such that
> the elements used appear henceforth obvious. (Broch 2008: 43) 
> 
> 
> 



The phenomenology of *eros* opens a future of
"election" within the family and perhaps beyond it.
Despite the apparent heterosexism of his formulations, Levinas
introduces abiding concern for singularity and uniqueness by defining
the figure of paternity as the possibility of electing each son in his
specificity, even as the latter may serve (and clash with) his
brothers. Consistent with a model, the family is both figure and
reality. It serves Levinas' hermeneutic secularization of
messianic future-time through the succession of generations.
Interestingly, *eros* unfolds "phenomenologically"
in much the same way as did the proto-experience of the "there
is" (*il y a*). That is, it unfolds in a darkness
overlooked by phenomenologies that rely on light and the universal
evidence that light enables (TI: 256). There would consequently be a
neglected underside to the phenomenological account of
object-constitution, which precedes and accompanies
intentionality's encounter with objects. And *that*
requires hermeneutics.



Like Fagenblat, scholars from David Banon to Marc-Alain Ouaknin have
explored the hermeneutic dimension of Levinas' thought, even
beyond his Talmudic readings that delve into the many-voiced debates
between the rabbis of the Mishna and the Gemara (the oldest and
subsequent transcriptions of Jewish oral traditions; Banon 1987).
Indeed, as Ouaknin points out, in the case of Talmudic and Biblical
hermeneutics, Levinas always considered the eminence of a
book--what defines it as "the Book"--to be less
its themes than its *structure*. Levinas focuses "on the
structure of the Book of books inasmuch as it allows for exegesis
[hermeneutics], and on its unique status of containing more than it
 contains".[42]
 Hermeneutics is thus *engendered* by excesses of potential
meaning over senses already printed on the page, or even discerned by
the reception traditions of the work. It would thus be the specific
architecture of the book that conditions its reception. Moreover, the
parallelisms that we have seen--between the Saying and the Said
*and* between temporal diachrony and synchrony--are also
found at the literary level in Biblical and Talmudic texts, with their
openness to ongoing interpretation. Levinas even equates
"revelation" with the call of the text to *each*
reader or listener, who thereby becomes responsible for its
interpretation. "The Revelation as calling to the unique within
me is the significance particular to the signifying of the
Revelation" of the text, which is understood as dialogical to
its core. Here we see the structural analogy between the call of the
other and my response that begins as Saying, as opening to words
addressed. Levinas adds, 



> 
> 
> the totality of the true is constituted from the contribution of
> multiple people, the uniqueness of each act of listening carrying the
> secret of the text; the voice of the Revelation, as
> inflected ... by each person's ear, would be necessary to the
> 'Whole' of the truth. (BTV: 133-134) 
> 
> 
> 



Hermeneutic truth here becomes the responsibility of an *open*
community, as much as an invitation to participation extended to each
possible listener. That is why Levinas could urge that Scripture be
understood as a call to respond as readily as could proximity,
substitution, and responsibility, all of which similarly express the
ethical investiture that results in words offered.



Levinas' hermeneutics might nevertheless be deemed immanent,
concerning one book and one community. Although commentators like
Batnitzky find in Levinas a project for a modern politics, and thus
for universality, others are skeptical about her claim. Trigano
objects that Levinas' ethics unfolds out of a sort of non-site,
starting with the category of the singular. "For Levinas",
he argues, 



> 
> 
> it is ethically imperative to think the singular in order that the
> horizon of the other person arise. The universal is, in effect, a
> dangerous game that can lead to totality and to the negation of the
> other person. To decide in favor of the singular is to avoid such a
> development 
> 
> 
> 



and with it, a politics (Trigano 2002: 173). In short, the original
hermeneutic turn that Levinas gives to Husserlian and Heideggerian
phenomenologies has left commentators with questions about the
relationship between an immanent hermeneutics and one concerned with
politics as the sphere of the universal. These questions imply
discussions about politics *in our time* from which Levinas
would have refrained in his time, in the wake of the Shoah, when
politics seemed less important than questions of the survival and
future of Jewish communities. Yet this apparent absence of politics
explains why Michel Haar (1991: 530) asked of Levinas whether his
ethics could really unfold outside any site, outside any positive
reciprocity, and outside all objectivation (cited by Trigano 2002:
175, note 79). Indeed, Trigano criticizes Levinas, urging that the
dialectical relationship between singular experience and universal
meaning (and institutions) implies that philosophy should have a
minimal relationship to politics, 



> 
> 
> which is the very field in which the disjunction between the universal
> and the singular ... is established, and this disjunction--so
> far as it is at once the separation of the same and the other and
> [yet] also the path of their alliance ... is the very condition of
> possibility of the other. (Trigano 2002: 176) 
> 
> 
> 



On Trigano's account, it follows that Levinas'
hermeneutics only partly responded to Jews' post-war need for
the universalization of their experience, at a human level
encompassing both theory and politics (Trigano 2002: 176). This does
not contradict Batnitzky's reading, which considers
Levinas' *oeuvre* as a whole. But it can certainly be
argued that universalization in Levinas' ethics remains largely
formal. On this question turns the important matter of what it means
to develop a Jewish *philosophy*. And it is fair to say that




> 
> 
> the universal, the neo-Kantian ethicization of Judaism emerged in
> ruins from the Shoah, the more so that the essential question of
> political philosophy today is that of the place of the singular within
> the political universal. (Trigano 2002: 177) 
> 
> 
> 



If we accept this claim, then any comparison between Levinas and a
pre-Shoah Jewish thinker goes only part way toward addressing the
problem of Jewish hermeneutic philosophy *today*.


#### 2.4.5 The Third Party, Illeity, and Politics



Jacques Derrida once called *Totality and Infinity* a
"treatise on hospitality" (1997 [1999: 21]). As we have
seen, Levinas' 1961 work approached being as war or a conflict
of wills that persist in their existence like the philosophical
tradition's concept of *conatus essendi* (the will to
persist in being). Neutral existence or the *there-is* (*il
y a*) denoted indeterminate nocturnal being, which gives way to
the diurnal being called "the elemental" (sunlight, winds,
rain). As noted, being in Levinas thus entails both dynamic forces and
a conception of natural processes and causality. However, hospitality,
also called "metaphysical desire" (TI: 33), cannot be
grounded on such forces, much less on a conception of the will as
based on drives of self-preservation or self-expansion. And, because
hospitality is elicited by the other--and is
non-reciprocal--it does not presuppose an original social
exchange, much less moral sentiments or innate emotive capacities for
empathy or compassion. If it did, there would be no question of
escaping a so-called natural order of existence. That is why
Levinas--aware that the concept of nature has a debated
history--characterizes both our response to the other and, in
1974, proximity, as "pre-natural signification" (OBBE:
68). He explains, 



> 
> 
> [i]n renouncing intentionality as a guiding thread toward the
> *eidos* [formal structure] of the psyche ... our analysis
> will follow sensibility in its pre-natural signification to the
> maternal, where, in proximity [to what is not itself], signification
> signifies *before* it gets bent into *perseverance in
> being* in the midst of a Nature. (OBBE: 68, emph. added) 
> 
> 
> 



In order to clarify this, Levinas had to develop further concepts. In
1961, he referred to our desire for the other as
"religion" ("the bond ... established between the
same and the other" that does not totalize) and as
"transascendence". "Transcendence, like desire and
inadequation, is necessarily a transascendence" (respectively
TI: 41, 35). By 1974, Levinas calls "illeity" the value
and dignity of responding to another person. He defines illeity as




> 
> 
> a neologism formed with *il* (he) or *ille*, [whereby
> alterity] indicates a way of concerning me without entering into
> conjunction with me. (OBBE: 12; also 13-16, 147-162) 
> 
> 
> 



Beyond the concept of the third party introduced in *Totality and
Infinity*, "illeity" also refers to something
absolute, even divine, in the other. We can see here how our
responsibility to the other person thus almost stands in the place of
our responsibility to God, which, as we have seen, is an important
hermeneutic dimension of Judaism.



The question remains, as it did already in *Totality and
Infinity*: How do responsibility and transcendence thereupon enter
into the ongoing flow of time and the totality of being? And how does
an investiture of this affective intensity pass into rationality? As
in the 1961 work, we find in 1974 that the "third
party"--denoting both other people and the reprise of
intentionality--similarly "looks at me through the eyes of
the other" (TI: 213). Here too the passage to reason, social
existence, and objective time occurs because the temporal lapse called
"diachrony" is invariably reabsorbed by intentional
consciousness. On this point, Levinas accords Husserl his argument
that affects are always on the verge of becoming intentional (Hua 10:
Appendix 12). The responsibility and fraternity, which are now
formulated as the unfathomable other-in-the-same, still *leave a
trace* in social relations. And, faithful to his 1961 project, the
trace is not framed as metaphysical. It is found, rather, in our
concern for restorative justice, even for modest equity. This concern
for justice does not erase the Hobbesian or Machiavellian nature of
human drives. In 1974, however, the difficulty of holding together the
passive temporality (which Levinas likens to ageing, [OBBE: 54])
*with* the flowing time of intentional consciousness and social
rationality, has become more obvious. Levinas inquires, "Does a
face abide in representation *and* in proximity; is it
community *and* difference?" (OBBE: 154, emph. added).
Undecidable, this is a question for us as well: 



> 
> 
> The third party introduces a contradiction in the saying whose
> signification before the other until then went in one direction
> [toward the singular other]. It is of itself the limit of
> responsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to do
> with justice? A question of consciousness. (OBBE: 157)
> 
> 
> 



With the return to a philosophy of consciousness and representation,
the indispensable figure of the trace that Levinas has introduced
becomes attenuated. As we have seen, to confront eventual skepticism
about the trace, he *enacts* his witness in a literary here and
now. His figural performance points not toward another world or to a
being different from that discussed by Heidegger, so much as to the
intensities and vulnerability of pre-conscious affectivity.
Levinas' writing thus appears to come down to a poetics of the
inexpressible. Nevertheless, since he also demands that we reflect on
intersubjectivity from a standpoint outside the face-to-face
encounter, his work gives us a double task: conceptualization
*and* the as-if of an enacted here-and-now. Still, justice does
not only come down to the question "what do I have to do with
justice?" It entails an additional explanatory move that Levinas
*cannot* make. This move would have to account for what the
other means to the third party, and why third parties insist that
"I" also receive just treatment. These are questions
requiring a systematic perspective, outside the now-moment in which
"I" emerge and enact my witness, affectively invested by
alterity (OBBE: 158).



The equalizing situation from which comparison, justice, and
normativity can be *deduced* is beyond Levinas' immediate
concern. Such a situation is that of objective consciousness. This is,
for example, the approach adopted by Hegel in the *Phenomenology of
Spirit*, which he calls the "for-us" or the
externalist standpoint (Hegel 1807 [1977: SS25]). Levinas thus
simply marks this standpoint, which is for him a conundrum, saying,




> 
> 
> [t]he relationship with the third party is an incessant correction of
> the asymmetry of proximity in which the face is looked at. There is
> weighing, thought, objectification ... in which my anarchic
> relationship with illeity [transcendence] is betrayed ... There is
> betrayal of my anarchic relation with illeity, but also a new
> relationship with it: it is only *thanks to God* that, as a
> subject incomparable with the other, I am approached as an other by
> the others, that is, "for myself". (OBBE: 158, emph.
> added) 
> 
> 
> 



Would Levinas' "thanks to God" then stand in the
place of Hegel's "for-us" account?



Commentators differ on the interpretation of the phrase "thanks
to God". In his subsequent use of the expression, Levinas sets
these words between quotation marks. Franck interprets the new concept
of illeity as denoting the *force* of proximity and the dignity
of my investiture by the other. It is the 



> 
> 
> He [illeity] in whose trace the Thou or the face that intends and
> assigns me signifies ... [But] the He ... does not point toward
> another world in which the phenomenological and ontological orders
> would nevertheless prevail ... [Rather, as Levinas says,] "it
> is the ... Infinity of the absolutely other, escaping
> ontology". (Franck 2008: 109, my trans.) 
> 
> 
> 



"Illeity" thus points to an indeterminate place or source,
the sheer dignity of the other who faces me, or the other always
already motivating my saying. Yet despite this, Levinas sometimes
*extends* illeity to the possibility of my receiving justice
from other people. He writes, "thanks to God
[*Il*] ... I am approached as an other by the others"
(OBBE: 158). But, of course, even if universal justice is
"thanks to God", *this* God *is not* part of
being (OBBE: 162)--a claim familiar to both negative theology and
to Maimonides' ultimate approach to God through human action.
Levinas is fully aware of the paradox he introduces into
"illeity". And he clearly knows the theological reversion
to *praxis* that Maimonides proposes at the end of his
*Guide of the Perplexed*: "The only positive knowledge of
God *of which man is capable* is knowledge of the attributes of
action" 
 (Fagenblat 2010: 113).[43]
 As Levinas puts it, "to know God is to know what must be
done" (DF: 17). It is not to know some being or even to erect a
regulative idea. The dignity and force of illeity thus share an
important connection with what we might call our *enacting* God
through responsibility to the other or through justice. Another word
for this is "holiness", whether this comes from me in the
form of the Saying or from the others as justice toward me.



Here lies the point at which a reading begins that bridges the
philosophical and the religious--above all the
Talmudic--dimensions of Levinas' thought. Indeed, as he put
it in his 1966 article "Infinity" (AT: 53-76): 



> 
> 
> An entire strain of contemporary philosophy, setting out from the
> irreducibility of the interpersonal to relations of objectivity,
> thematization, and knowledge, is situated in the religious tradition
> of the idea of the infinite ... even when it expresses itself in a
> deliberately and rigorously *atheistic* way. (AT: 76, emph.
> added)
> 
> 
> 



That suggests that whether we approach it atheistically or
religiously, the tension between interpersonal relations and
objectivity implies the third party and by extension a social
relationality which is indissociable from justice and politics. But it
is not clear that Levinas ever decided whether politics implied above
all war or the means toward a peaceable State. In his late essay
"Peace and Proximity" (1984; col-BPW: 161-169),
Levinas expressed an attitude surprisingly favorable to the idea of
the politics which, when the State is a liberal one, evinces palpable
aspects of the trace of responsibility in its policies. 



> 
> 
> It is not without importance to know--and this is perhaps the
> European experience of the twentieth century--whether the
> egalitarian and just State [and its politics] in which the European is
> fulfilled ... proceeds from a war of all against all--or from
> the irreducible responsibility of the one for the other. (In Rolland,
> ed. 1984, 346, my trans.) 
> 
> 
> 



Of course, the notion of a just politics has meant different things
according to the form the State takes, whether totalitarian,
authoritarian, or
 liberal.[44]
 Given his evocations of a pluralist or multilayered existence in
*Totality and Infinity* (TI: 19, 80, 306), Levinas'
argument that justice is marked by the trace of responsibility seems
to accord relatively well with liberal theories of political justice
and sovereignty. As is well known, Anglo-American theorists of
sovereignty and politics emphasize that individuals live in multiple
social associations, which impose a host of responsibilities on them.
A pluralistic socio-political existence diminishes the emphasis on
sovereignty as concentrated in the State alone. Be that as it may,
Levinas' notion of a trace of responsibility within justice does
not explain how other people, not just I, can be said to be ethically
"invested" by responsibility. That I receive justice from
them thus remains "thanks to God". Moreover, what is true
of ethical systems may well be true of political ones. That is,
following his comprehensive comparison of Levinas' philosophy
with contemporary theories of ethics, Morgan admits: 



> 
> 
> *I do not think that Levinas would favor any particular moral
> system*--say, some form of Kantian morality or of
> consequentialism, insofar as it is a *system*. (2007: 456,
> emph. added) 
> 
> 
> 



This may be true of any form of political regime as well, because for
Levinas politics attempts to forge systems--as he says, to
totalize (TI: 15, 21, 292-305). We have seen above Rose's
neo-Hegelian objection that Levinas' ethics lacks mediations
sufficient to have real implications for politics
 (SS2.3.4).
 Recently, Salanskis has nevertheless proposed a surprising
"mediation", found in Judaism itself, arguing that the
latter provides an "idealist horizon liable to interest *all
of humanity*", because it ties this horizon narratively
"to a practical and intellectual testing
'laboratory', that of the life of a people"
(Salanskis 2016: 129, note 68). This claim suggests that there is a
proto-political project in Biblical and Talmudic Judaism, though
Salanskis leaves unexplored the further implications of his
"laboratory". As to the political implications of the
Talmud's pluralism of rabbinic voices, which is part of
Salanskis' laboratory, Levinas does at times emphasize the
importance of Jewish thought entering into "universal
history", even while promoting responsibility for others and the
ethics of messianic awaiting (DF: 96). For example, in his Talmudic
reading entitled "Messianic Texts" (1962), he justifies
the creation of a Jewish State on the basis of the possibility of
protecting both messianic patience and a Talmudic education to
responsibility, despite the violence implied by Israel becoming
*one* State among others, within universal and secular history
(also see Morgan 2016: 256-265, responding to Kavka 2015).



Let us focus for a moment more directly on this question of justice in
Jewish thought. Insofar as we can speak of *one* Jewish
philosophical tradition, notably a modern one, the question of justice
forms the core of its approach to the *prophetic* message. In
that respect it would certainly have a political dimension; or, at the
least, a social-existential one. It may be that to answer the question
of the politics (in the minimal sense of State policies) liable to
emerge from Levinas' ethics requires that we pay close attention
to his *philosophical anthropology*, i.e., to his conception of
the human condition or what it means to be a human being. Recently,
Sarah Hammerschlag has returned to Levinas' captivity notebooks
in which he jotted his wartime insights into Judaism as he lived it
then: 



> 
> 
> J. [might be compared to] a splinter in the flesh. One might live
> without it, but if one didn't have [this source of suffering],
> my life [would be deprived] of its acuity ... or fallen back into
> infancy. (LO1: 172, my trans.) 
> 
> 
> 



This conception of a Jewish "anthropology" corresponds not
to particular Jews, but to our human condition when we understand it
as a condition largely *received*, passively and without our
explicit choice. As Hammerschlag and Fagenblat have urged, this human
*pathos*, consistent with a pluralistic ontology, might well be
approached as an existential category (Hammerschlag 2012:
 389-419).[45]
 This too is why Levinas characterized Judaism as "an
understanding of being", rather than as a religion. Yet this
category may surprise us if we overlook the fact that a definitive
part of our existence does comes from without, i.e., through the
internalization of the life of our community, its founding texts, but
also through social and political characterizations of us
(antisemitism, racism, sexism).



Approached as unbidden passivity, of course, the existential category
called Judaism raises the question of other passive ascriptions and
*their* implications for the question of what it means to be a
human being. If, by 1974, politics and the third party are largely
synonyms for "humanity" for Levinas, then we must conclude
that politics has, by extension, become more for him than the conflict
and strife he described in his preface to *Totality and
Infinity* (TI: 21-25). Politics would have to take seriously
a pluralistic humanism, as well as the condition of passive
ascriptions including racism. The implication is that one may
sometimes have a choice, in one's actions, about whether
politics is indeed a war of all against all or the site in which
traces of justice toward the other can be demanded. However that may
be, some commentators have raised the concern that
"humanity" for Levinas looks basically like
Husserl's rationalist ideal of humanity (Husserl 1954 [1970:
275], cited by McGettigan 2006: 16). This would be the humanity of
*Europe*, and beneath that, one flowing out of the intertwined
voices of "Athens" and
 "Jerusalem".[46]
 To be sure, the Biblical prophets demanded justice (and repentance)
from their wayward communities. But political justice requires a
public space, an *agora* in which the *agorein* (public
speaking) gives rise to categories of thought
(*kat'agorein* means to accuse publicly).



This dual preoccupation with justice as rectitude, and justice as
civic virtue, seems to suggest that together Athens and Jerusalem give
us a comprehensive approach to politics, as both practice and ideal.
Drabinski and Fred Moten have questioned this universality (Drabinski
2011: 165-196), and with it the category of
"being-Jewish", in favor of an emphasis on the passivity
intrinsic to a *multiplicity* of human situations, including
race, ethnicity, and gender. Moreover, as Moten cautions, passivity
can be readily observed in our relations to *things* rather
than persons. He thus adds that the Bible and the Greeks, although
often presented as "the whole world", thereby become a
teleological reflection that expresses an unacknowledged European
*malaise*, wherein the non-European receives the status of a
mere object (Moten 2018: 9, 11). Attributing this to the transcendence
toward-the-world of phenomenological intentionality, which shares some
of the blind spots of the colonial enterprise, Moten discusses the
object-like passivity of being on the receiving end of multiple
racisms, including Levinas' own "unintended racism".
If we take his concern seriously, then passivity as a category of
being-human strains against being attributed to Jews alone. In turn,
this raises the philosophical-anthropological question of situational
passivities, the very idea of humanity, and those "beings"
that inhabit worlds unacknowledged by the European tradition (Moten
2018: 17). While this is a critique of Levinas, Moten also invites us
to expand the latter's anthropological category of being-Jewish,
and to ask ourselves what kind of politics might flow out of such an
 expansion.[47]



### 2.5 Essays and Interviews after Otherwise than Being: The Tension between Ethics and Justice



Subsequent to *Otherwise than Being*,Levinas' works
return to and refine his major themes. These works include
*Transcendence and Intelligibility* (1984), *In the Time of
the Nations* (1988), *Entre Nous* (1991), and *Alterity
and Transcendence* (1995), all of which are collections of essays
from various periods between 1951 and 1989. However, the first of
these collections to appear, entitled *Of God Who Comes to
Mind* (1982), contains the important essay "God and
Philosophy" (1975; OGCM: 55-78), which is a critical
confrontation with the God of Descartes and Malebranche, and a subtle
debate with Heidegger. This essay is followed by the transcript of a
two-hour discussion with professors from the University of Leyden
(OGCM: 79-99), in which social problems infrequently addressed
by Levinas are
 raised.[48]
 Despite the wide temporal gamut run by these publications, we find
few new developments, other than a clearer resolve to address the
ambiguity intrinsic to the signifier "God" (OGCM:
SSSS10-13, 17-19), and the verbal dynamics of
being (corresponding to Heidegger's *Wesen*), henceforth
characterized by Levinas' neologism
"ess*a*nce" (OGCM: 43-51).



However, Franck has detected a profound divergence in these new
developments. In a highly sophisticated reading of the essays and
interviews written or given after *Otherwise than Being*, he
notes that the tension between the two aforementioned conceptions of
justice (that of 1961 and that of 1974) has come to look like an
epistemological inconsistency. This inconsistency is due to
Levinas' later choice to hold justice and (empirical) social
life at a significant distance from each other. Indeed, by
progressively aligning justice with transcendence, Levinas runs into
an important difficulty after 1974. That is, either justice belongs to
responsibility from the outset (1961), whereupon the "third
party" refers simply to the tendency of intentional
consciousness to reconnect any sensuous gaps in itself, or
responsibility and transcendence firstly *require* justice in
order to be pondered and communicated. In other words, for Franck,
either justice and responsibility are co-originary, in which case
responsibility cannot leave a trace in justice and being, or
responsibility itself *presupposes* justice, a constituted
world, and linguistic concepts. In the first case, that of aligning
responsibility and justice, the third party would simply denote
everyday consciousness (TI). In the second case, justice would in fact
gravitate toward illeity, the "He-ness" of the absent God
(OBBE and after). Once again, in the first case and in terms of lived
time, the third party is indeed largely simultaneous with the other,
given our social life and context. As Franck explains, we clearly live
in society and *any* phenomenological description must operate
within reflection, which is also the domain called the third party.
But in the second case, if we hold the third party close to illeity,
then the question why *I* receive justice "for
myself" from others can *only* be answered
quasi-theologically, as "thanks to God". Yet this second
option shifts our attention from justice within social life toward the
enigma posed by the fact that I *do* receive justice from
others thanks to some near-miraculous concern of theirs for me. But
then, should justice for all refer to our social and legal contexts or
rather to an absolute called illeity? Mobilizing extensive arguments,
Franck shows that this difficulty comes into a crude light in the late
works. And indeed, if the later Levinas chooses to hold these two
conceptions together, then justice is both social and in some sense
divine, like a godly justice or a theopolitics (Franck 2008: 239). If
it is the latter, then Levinas' hermeneutics of an ethical
"otherwise than being" just amounts to an abstraction
rooted essentially in theology. 



As if anticipating Franck's strong, structural critique, Levinas
staked out a surprising claim for the social simultaneity of the other
and the third party in a 1982 interview entitled "Philosophy,
Justice, and Love" (EN: 103-122). He there argues, 



> 
> 
> I do not live in a world where there is but one 'first
> come'. There is always a third [party] in the world; *he too
> is my other*, my neighbor. Consequently, it matters to me to know
> which of the two passes first: is the one not the persecutor of the
> other? Must men, [although understood] as incomparable, not be
> compared? *Justice is thus prior here* to taking the
> other's fortunes upon oneself. (EN: 103-104, emph. added)
> 
> 
> 
> 



The supposed priority of the other would thus depend on one's
approach, which can be ethical or socio-juridical. Indeed, the problem
of priority is further complicated by the fact that, as early as 1974,
Levinas cited Isaiah 57:19, deliberately inverting the order of the
terms, "neighbor" and "the one far away". He
thus writes, "Peace to the neighbor and to the distant
one" (OBBE: 157). Eleven years later, he corrects his citation
in an interview entitled "On Jewish Philosophy" (1985;
ITN: 167-183): "'Peace, peace, to him that is far
off and to him that is near', says the Eternal". And he
adds, 



> 
> 
> Outside the one who is near ... he who is far off compels
> recognition. Outside the other there is the third party. *He is
> also an other*, also a neighbor. But which is the closest
> proximity? [...] There must be knowledge of such things! (ITN:
> 172, emph. added)
> 
> 
> 



As a critical reader of Levinas, Franck appears to be the only
commentator who has raised Levinas' later remarks to the status
of epistemological inconsistency. Franck argues cogently that if we
must be able to determine whether the third party is also an other, or
a persecutor of others, or a criminal, then justice must
*precede* responsibility, rather than the reverse. That is,
rather than responsibility grounding justice thanks to the trace it
leaves within justice, the latter must have priority (2008,
240-242). Franck's objection has important implications
for the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas. We live
in human society, and we cannot escape that, he says. But does this
not imply that it is impossible to set justice decisively outside
politics, and as if outside ontology, as Levinas' later work
seems to do? That also means that we can never separate the sincerity
that Levinas calls "the Saying" (or *le dire*) from
the very words (*le dit*) that express and describe it. We
therefore need words, and intentionality, to make what Levinas
characterized as the pre-thematic into a theme (OBBE: 99). We even
need words to stabilize the affect called sincerity or the Saying.
Failing words, sincerity and with it proximity are simply
abstractions, philosophical constructions. There is nothing wrong
*per se* with such philosophical constructs, if that is what
these concepts are. It is illegitimate, however, to argue that they
precede intentional consciousness and even reflection.



Now, given *Otherwise than Being*'s
*rapprochement* between the third party and illeity, must the
third party not admit two distinct, even irreconcilable senses? The
1961 sense would still refer to social existence and the moderation of
responsibility, while the 1974 sense would henceforth point to a
radically absent *Il*, also called "God". This too
has consequences for the question of justice--i.e., whether it is
primary to Levinas' existential ethics, or secondary and largely
derivative from responsibility. As we know, the Jewish tradition, and
others as well, holds the judge responsible for fair decisions; this
specialist of laws is also a member of the community and must obey the
Law he adjudicates. This is more than simply a platitude; the
judge's dual status casts light on the competing priorities of
responsibility versus justice. To explain his positions Levinas recurs
to Psalm 82: "God stands in the divine assembly, among the
divine beings. He pronounces judgment". In other words, only if
illeity refers to a transcendent absolute, viz., "God in the
divine assembly", can the third party (understood as the others
or society) be raised above an everyday social function and confer on
justice something like a regulative idea able to preserve a trace of
transcendence.



Levinas' reference to Psalm 82 is less surprising than we might
suppose. Echoing Carl Schmitt's *Political Theology*,
Fagenblat points out, firstly, that all the important concepts in
modern statehood theory are secularized religious ideas. But,
secondly, the secularization process does not stop with statehood
theory, "a similar phenomenon applies to secular *moral*
concepts" (Fagenblat 2010: xi, emph. added). 
In short, "God"
is the crucial name for an absolute, indispensable to justice
understood as an ongoing project. To be sure, for Franck, the
reference to a "God" who judges is less a problem of
secularization than a reason why it is *impossible* to argue
for the *priority* of responsibility over justice. And this is
true whether the priority is defined as ontological *or*
practical. But Franck fails to acknowledge that Levinas is aware of
this tension. In "Philosophy, Justice, and Love", Levinas
draws a complex portrait of the third party as "God" based
on a new, and crucial, distinction between the meaning of
"God" as *Elohim* and "God" as the
Tetragrammaton (YHWH; EN:
 108).[49]
 In the rabbinic tradition, *Elohim*, God of justice, first
created the world. That world did not survive by itself; that is,
without the "supplement" provided by YHWH, the God of
mercy. Hence, the necessity of a second creation where justice was
*more* than equal treatment.



Given the mythic alignment of *Elohim* with justice, and YHWH
with mercifulness, Levinas argues that *illeity* has two
possible modalizations: justice or equity; mercy or compassion. The
priority of one God thus depends on the perspective we adopt: justice
would belong to ontology, compassion to an ethical perspective. For
Fagenblat, the ethical priority emerges as the possibility of creating
and safeguarding meaning--by extension, as creation *tout
court* (2010: 44-53). 
That is, in Biblical symbolism, when read in the
rabbinic tradition, a world created first on justice (as equality and
comparison) does not survive, because demands for equality (and with
them, for blind justice) are unceasing and do not admit an outside or
transcendent term allowing for considerations beyond bilateral
comparison. It is the transcendent term, the outside as it were, that
motivates justice to strive asymptotically towards an idea. That is
why Levinas observes that being human implies that we are certainly
born into a social world, a world of many others and third parties.
But we are sustained, and individuated, by mercy. Moreover, mercy
represents, for justice, the trace of responsibility. This becomes
clear only when one reads Levinas' philosophy together with his
Talmudic texts.



For this and other reasons, the all-important question of the priority
of responsibility as against justice must be approached as a complex
one, in part dependent on lived circumstances. From the
"metaphysical" perspective that Levinas defined as desire
for the other in *Totality and Infinity* (TI: 39),
responsibility and proximity come first (EN: 107-108). From the
perspective of practice and our living-in-society, justice stands
closer to ethics and may sometimes precede it. Gerard Bensussan
has pondered this question in light of the Christian tradition in the
West, for which Judaism already represents an alterity--in text
and in act; for example, when the Passover seder re-enacts the escape
from enslavement in Egypt, it ritually recalls: "strangers we
were, and thus, strangers *we are*", even now (Bensussan
2008: 78). A more rigorously philosophical reckoning may require that
the relationship between the two perspectives, justice and mercy, be
further clarified. Be that as it may, this is one point on which the
Jewish writings of Levinas enrich, even ground, his philosophical
arguments.


## 3. Concluding Remarks



Commentators have differed on the comparative importance of
Levinas' major works, *Totality and Infinity* and
*Otherwise than Being*. Some have urged that we see in them two
sides of a single coin: that of responsibility experienced in the
face-to-face encounter and that of the insistence of an affective
trace that interrupts flowing time as conceived by classical
phenomenology (Peperzak 1993: 7). Other commentators have argued that
*Otherwise than Being* is Levinas' *magnum
 opus*,[50]
 a study on the intersubjective pre-conditions of language indebted
to, yet diverging from, Heidegger's investigations of the poetic
*logos* (in which man dwells and being is intimated; Heidegger
he-EHP: 59-64). As we have seen, Derrida called *Totality and
Infinity* a "treatise on hospitality" (see
 SS2.4.1 above)
 and devoted, in sum, more attention to it than to *Otherwise than
Being*, although the latter work was in part a response to
Derrida's criticisms in "Violence and Metaphysics"
(Derrida 1964 [1978]). There is little question that the novelty of
*Otherwise than Being* lies in its three innovations: (1) the
analyses and tropes for transcendence-in-immanence (recurrence,
proximity, obsession, persecution, and substitution); (2) the
deconstruction of language understood as the site in which existence
is said and explained, and (3) Levinas' "wager" of
stepping out of philosophical reasoning into a performative register
that both "says" and "unsays" itself by turns
(OBBE: 167).



Despite these innovations, Levinas' philosophical project
remains largely constant: *to rethink the meaning of existence in
terms of the ethical transcendence of the other*. To that end, he
consistently revisited Husserl's phenomenological method. He
reconceived Heidegger's ontological difference as an irreducible
separation between being and the good we enact. He had extensive,
often undeclared recourse to the profound, anti-totalizing intuitions
of religious life found in Franz Rosenzweig's new thinking. By
reason of his opposition to systems-thought, Levinas never adhered
uncritically to any one philosophy. 



A common thread runs through his philosophy and his Talmudic readings.
Transcendence is one of his words for the spontaneity of
responsibility for another person. Responsibility is experienced in
concrete life and is variously expressed, from words like "here
I am" to apologies and self-accounting. This is the case,
Levinas argues, even before a *de facto* command is heard or
reflected on. This surprising proposition hearkens to the debated
meaning of Jews "receiving the Torah before knowing what was
written in it" (NTR: 42-43). Levinas names this
responsiveness Platonically the "Good beyond being". We
*perform* that good, that trace of the infinite, because
instances of answering to or for another are everyday events, though
they may not appear typical of natural or self-interested behaviors.
Above all, we do *not choose* to be responsible. Responsibility
arises as if elicited, before we begin to think about it, by the
approach of the other person. Because this theme is found in his
philosophy as well as in his interpretations of Talmudic passages,
Levinas' thought has, at times, left both Talmud scholars and
philosophers dissatisfied. For some Talmudists, his thought seems
secularly humanistic, with "infinity" suggesting a
clandestine concept of divinity. No stranger to Mishna and Gemara
(Talmud), his interpretations are less preoccupied with traditional
inter- and intra-textuality, than with the *ethical* content of
the teachings therein. To philosophers skeptical of him,
Levinas' thought reinterprets Heidegger's hermeneutic
circle of facticity in a metaphysical vein. Indeed, its
anti-foundationalist approach to responsibility, as the pre-reflective
structure of the embodied, intersubjective "self"
(*soi*), appears to these critics to lie between phenomenology
and religious thought, even if it lacks specific dogmatic commitments.
As we have seen, in his later philosophy, the seemingly metaphysical
concept of illeity expresses my emotive experience of a
"power" or an affective excess greater than I can contain.
In this way, it also resembles Descartes' "light so
resplendent" (Descartes 1641 [1911], *Meditation* V). But
it is precisely in these tensions, between the Jewish religious and
philosophical traditions, on the one hand, *and* his
phenomenological-existential thinking-of-the-other, on the other hand,
that Levinas' originality lies.