EMMANUEL LEVINAS TIME AND [and additional essays] Translation by Richard A Cohen y NS Uy iy Ne DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESSTime and the Other originally appeared as ”Le temps et Vautre” in J. Wahl, Le Choix, Le Monde, L’Existence (Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947) it was republished with a new Preface by Levinas in 1979 as Le temps et Vautre, copyright 1979 by Fata Morgana, St. Clement, France. “Diachrony and Representation” first appeared as “Diachronie et représentation,” in “University of Ot- tawa Quarterly,” Vol. 55, No. 4, 1985. “The Old and the New” first appeared in a collection entitled L’An- cien et le nouveau published by Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1982. English translation copyright ©1987 by Duquesne University Press All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Ngépart of this book may be used or vorofl in any manner whatsoever without ritten permission except in the case of short quotations for use in critical articles and reviews, Published in the United States of America by Duquesne University Press 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15282 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lévinas, Emmanuel. Time and the other. Translation of: Le temps et l’autre. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Time. 2. Ontology. I. Title. B2430.L483T4613 1987 115 87-6900 ISBN 0-8207-0183-1Contents Translator’s Note Translator’s Introduction Preface (1979) PART I: The Solitude of Existing Existing without Existents Hypostasis Solitude and Hypostasis Solitude and Materiality PART II: Everyday Life and Salvation Salvation through the World—Nourishments The Transcendence of Light and Reason PART III: Work Suffering and Death Death and the Future The Event and the Other Other and the Other Time and the Other vii 67 BUNISSPART IV: Power and Relationship with the Other Eros Fecundity OTHER ESSAYS “Diachrony and Representation” “The Old and the New” Selected Bibliography Index 80 Ska 95 97 121 139 143Translator’s Note Time and the Other [Le temps et l'autre] was first delivered as a series of four lectures in 1946/47 in Paris at the Philosophi- cal College founded by Jean Wahl. It was published in 1948 in a collection entitled Choice, World, Existence [Le Choix - Le Monde - L’Existence] (Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947; pp. 125-196), along with essays by Jeanne Hersh, Alphonse de Waelhens, and Jean Wahl (see Preface footnote 2), who also lectured at the Philosophical College. In 1979 it reappeared, with a new preface, as a separate volume (Montpellier: Fata Morgana). “The Old and the New” [L’Ancien et le nouveau] was deliv- ered as one lecture of a year long lecture series of the same title, given by various authors, offered in 1979/80 at the Catholic Institute of Paris, for masters students in theology. It was published in 1982, along with all the other lectures of that series, in a collection entitled The Old and the New [L’Ancien et le nouveau], edited by Joseph Doré (Paris: Edi- tions du Cerf; pp. 23-37). “Diachrony and Representation” [Diachronie et representa- tion] was also delivered as a lecture, on October 20, 1983, at the University of Ottawa, on the first day of a three day conference dedicated to Paul Ricoeur, entitled “In Search of Meaning,” It was published in the University of Ottawa Quarterly (volume 55, number 4, 1985; pp. 85-98), edited by Theodore-F. Geraets. The final three sections, with minorviii TRANSLATOR’S NOTE revisions and additions, were also given as a lecture by Levinas on September 2, 1986, at the last session of a ten day colloquium devoted to his thought, entitled “Emma- nuel Levinas: Ethics and First Philosophy,” held at Cerisy la Salle in Normandy, France, organized by Jean Greisch and Jacques Rolland for the International Cultural Center of Cerisy-la-Salle. Following accepted conventions in translating Levinas, I have consistently translated the key terms autrui and autre by “Other” with a capital “O” and “other” with a small ”o.” (When Autre appears capitalized, usually in contrast to the term Méme, “Same,” I show the French original in brack- ets.) As indicated below (in Preface footnote 3), autrui refers to the personal other, the other person, and autre refers to otherness in general, to alterity. Still, it must be said, Levinas often uses autre where he could very well have used autrui; one should avoid making a fetish of this dis- tinction and pay attention to context, though I have kept to the above convention for the sake of consistency. T have translated autre homme as “other person,” since the generic sense of “man,” which Levinas intends, loses something in the literal translation, “other man.” I mention this less to evade potential gender criticisms (see footnote 69), than to steer the reader away from interpreting the ex- pression “other person” as perhaps indicating a shift from the level of subjectivity to the level of personality, which it does not. The text is strewn with the terms “man” and “he,” which I have left intact and which are also intended, I believe, in the generic sense of “humankind” and “one.” Levinas’ own notes are always preceded by his name, “Levinas:”; all other notes are my own. Time and the Other recently appeared in German transla- tion: Die Zeit und der Andere, translated by Professor Ludwig Wenzler (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1984). ITRANSLATOR’S NOTE ix mention this to draw the reader's attention to the Postface by Professor Wenzler, ‘Zeit als Nahe des Abwesenden’’ [Time as the Nearness of the Absent”] (ZA 67-92), which Levinas has told me he very much admires. J would like to thank Professor Theodore-F. Geraets, of the University of Ottawa, for sending me a copy of Levinas’ manuscript of ”Diachrony and Representation,” prior to its publication in the University of Ottawa Quarterly; Professor André Prévos, of the Pennsylvania State University, Scran- ton Campus, for painstakingly reviewing with me an ear- lier version of the translation of Time and the Other; Mr. John Dowds, Director of the Duquesne University Press, for the steady support he and the Duquesne University Press have given to this and other Levinas projects; and Loyola Col- lege of Maryland for a summer research grant. Finally, I would like to thank, however inadequately, Pro- fessor Emmanuel Levinas, for having given me permission to translate and join together the three texts which make up this volume, and for having conceived them in the first place.Translator’s Introduction Time and the Other has a genetic phenomenological struc- ture. It begins with existence without existents, describes the origination of the distinct existent, the subject, then moves to the progressively more complex constitutive lay- ers of subjectivity, its materiality and solitude, its insertion in the world, its labor and representation, its suffering and mortality, to conclude with the subject’s encounter with the other person, dealt with specifically in terms of eros, vo- luptuosity and fecundity. Unlike the Hegelian phenome- nology, however, these stages mark a progression toward alterity rather than toward totality; they are driven by a de- sire to break out of the circuits of sameness rather than a yearning for complete comprehension. Thus the analyses begin with what so lacks alterity that it is anonymous like the night itself, existence without existents, what Levinas calls the ’there is,’ and end with what is so radically and ir- reducibly other that it is the very paradigm of alterity, what Levinas in Time and the Other calls the “mystery” of the other person. The comparison and contrast with the Hegelian phe- nomenology that Levinas’ design recalls is instructive. For both, the end bears on the beginning. For Hegel, the end Provides the truth of the beginning. Notions such as “be- ing,” “nonbeing,” and “becoming,” with which Hegel’s phenomenology begins, are inadequate and surpassed be-2 INTRODUCTION cause they are insufficiently articulate to account for the complex reality whose truth the Hegelian quest seeks to ex- press. These broad and basic terms trip on themselves be- cause they want to express more than they can. Only the fully articulate and absolutely self-reflective Concept, wholely realized at the end of the phenomenological voy- age, can adequately say what thought all along was trying to say, yet was all along only saying partially, only stum- bling toward, and which is finally said in all its purity in Hegel’s Logic: the absolute all-inclusive truth. The contrast between Levinas’ and Hegel’s phenomenology does not result solely from the former adhering to Husserlian phe- nomenology (the attempt to faithfully describe the origin and constitution of reality in all its manifold and interre- lated layers of meaning, without presuppositions). Just as Hegel’s phenomenology is driven by a yearning for the to- tal truth, the truth which knows all and knows itself to know all, Levinas’ phenomenology is driven by a desire for an exteriority which remains irreducibly exterior, therefore it aims for a liberation from rather than the realization of to- tality, unity, and the self-same. Levinas’ itinerary is not a reverse Hegelianism, ending in indeterminate being; for in Levinas, too, the “end” which moves the “beginning” be- comes increasingly complex, determinate, and meaningful. But the end in Levinas is neither an end, a finality, nor a truth, a comprehension. Levinas’ thought ends with what has no end: alterity, the infinite, the wholely other. Thus it breaks with Hegelian phenomenology as well as with the noetic-noematic confines of Husserlian phenomenology. Levinas’ itinerary in Time and the Other—from anony- mous existence to the emergence of subjectivity, to subjec- tivity’s practice, theory and mortality, to its shattering relationship with the alterity of the other person—is essen- tially the same itinerary as that found in Levinas’ immedi- ately preceding work, except that Existence and Existents (1947) concludes with a section entitled “On the Way toINTRODUCTION 3 Time,’ and Time and the Other (1948) progresses a few steps further in that very direction. The repetition and difference expressed in the relationship between these two texts, the way the analyses of Time and the Other retrieve and overlap the analyses of Existence and Existents, and push them a bit further along, is indicative of the remarkable continuity ex- hibited by the development of Levinas’ thought as a whole. The movement of Levinas’ thought is like that of waves, as Derrida was the first to say, but we must think of the waves as those of an approaching high tide: each wave pushing a bit further than the last, each venturing a more radical in- terpretation of alterity. Each wave becomes visible dis- creetly, looms larger and then crashes at the always turbulent forefront of Levinas’ thought. The design of the two early texts is again followed after Section I of Levinas’ first major work, Totality and Infinity (1961). There the stages spread out in the early works are brought into an even closer focus; they are far more com- plex and nuanced; and in some instances they are altered. Totality and Infinity is a mature work, and again progresses further toward alterity, now into the choppy domain of eth- ics, into the infinite obligations and responsibilities of social life. Levinas’ second major work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), represents the next wave after Totality and Infinity, pushing Levinas’ conception of the other per- son's radical and irreducible alterity into the domain of lan- guage, into the Saying which disrupts and gives sense to the Said. Finally, a recent collection, entitled God Who Comes to the Idea (1982), as well as the article ”Diachrony and Representation,’ included in this edition of Time and the Other, brings the Other's alterity into relationship with the absolute alterity of God. Thus, to summarize and simplify this development, to describe these oncoming waves with single words, Levinas’ thought progresses through analyses of the alterity of exis- tence in Existence and Existents; of time in Time and the Other;4 INTRODUCTION of ethics in Totality and Infinity; of language in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence; and of God in God Who Comes to the Idea and "Diachrony and Representation.” Just as in each work one sees a development from sameness to the alterity which disrupts sameness, in Levinas’ work as a whole one sees a progressive radicalization of the sense of the otherness of the other person. Time and the Other (and Existence and Existents, for that matter), then, provides an early but lasting sketch of Levinas’ mature thought, and thus affords a clear, bare bones vision of its initial stages. The summary above is not meant to imply that Levinas dealt with time once and for all in Time and the Other. Rather, because Levinas binds time to alterity, the theory of time articulated in Time and the Other marks but one mo- ment in a progressively radicalized theory of time that un- folds in Levinas’ work as a whole. Each of Levinas’ works presents a distinct analysis of time, and each analysis is progressively more radical than the prior analysis, as the analysis of alterity is progressively radicalized. “The Old and the New” (1982) and ’Diachrony and Rep- resentation” (1985) represent a return to the theory of time first developed in Time and the Other. The important differ- ence, however, is that in these articles the meaning of time is deepened in the light of Levinas’ more mature reflections on subjectivity, ethics, language, and God. Beginning with Existence and Existents, then, a work very close to Time and the Other in chronology and content, it is possible to begin tracing the progressive “alterization’ of time as it unfolds across the development of Levinas’ entire work. This is the route I will follow in this Introduction. Existence In Existence and Existents Levinas is concerned primarily with the time of the solitary subject, beginning with the time of the emergent existent: the instant. FollowingINTRODUCTION 5 Bergson’s lead, Levinas rejects the classical, abstract, repre- sentational theory of the instant. In classical thought, he ar- gues, an abstract time frame, a formal time “line/” spreading out into infinite “befores” and infinite “afters” is conceived first, and instants are afterwards placed within it, as its content, each instant being the same as all the oth- ers, and each excluding all the others. Levinas retains the idea that instants exclude one another, are separate, mo- nadic, but contrary to the classical theory he conceives the instant concretely, as the very “accomplishment of exis- tence” (EE 76). That is to say, he conceives of the instant as originary sensation or materiality. This is the instant Hus- serl names the ’’Urimpression,”’ though, he admits, “names are lacking for it.” It is an originary self-sensing, where the sensing and the sensed are one and the same, yet are none- theless, paradoxically, noncoincident. Levinas thus describes the instant, not in terms of knowl- edge and causality, which was the error of classical thought, but in terms of existential “conquest”—the sub- ject’s escape from anonymous existence—and existential “fatigue”—the subject inescapably burdened with itself, weighed down by its own materiality. “What is absolute in the relationship between existence and an existent, in an instant,” he writes, ’consists in the mastery the existent ex- ercises on existence, but also in the weight of existence on the existent” (EE 77). This early notion of the atomic instant, caught up within itself, mired in itself, in the movement of an inescapable and instantaneous ”“hyperma- teriality,” will remain throughout Levinas’ thought, later playing a crucial role in accounting for the subject’s rela- tionship with alterity, the role of the subject’s extreme pas- sivity. Time The instant is again found in Time and the Other (Part I). Once again, Levinas characterizes the emergence of subjec-tivity in terms of its hypermateriality, its intimate and para- doxical self-relationship, its noncoincident self-sensing. But he also takes up, critically, another sort of time, which he began to analyze in the concluding sections of Existence and Existents, namely, ecstatic time, Heideggerian temporal- ity. Already, at the end of Existence and Existents, Levinas began to speak of time in terms of an escape from subjectiv- ity, subjectivity’s desire to get out of itself, to rid itself of it- self, to ’save” itself from the mastery and burden of its material self-relationship as a distinct existent. The instant has no past or future, it is fragile, evanescent, worldless, and thus sees in the past and future, in the horizons of the world, in the dialectic of temporal horizons, an exit from it- self. But already, proleptically, in Existence and Existents Levinas wrote of this horizontal escape: “If time is not the illusion of a movement, pawing the ground, then the abso- lute alterity of another instant cannot be found in the sub- ject, who is definitively himself. This alterity comes to me only from the other.’ Instead of seeking alterity in the world, as Heidegger does, Levinas asks, in the next sen- tence: “Is not sociality something more than the source of our representation of time: is it not time itself?. .. The dia- lectic of time is the very dialectic of the relationship with the other, that is, a dialogue which in turn has to be studied in terms other than those of the dialectic of the solitary sub- ject” (EE 93). Of course, this is the very line of study Levinas does pursue, connecting time to the alterity of the other person, and progressively radicalizing the sense of the Other's alterity. But in Time and the Other, under the in- fluence of Heidegger's brilliant analyses of being-in-the- world, this venture toward the Other's alterity passes though a necessary detour: time as a relative rather than an absolute escape from the immanence of subjectivity. That is to say, Levinas examines the time of ecstasis and the time of representation. Thus a later wave, the time of the other per- son, already appears on the horizon of worldly time, ec- static temporality.To characterize time solely in terms of the subject's ori- ginary self-relationship, the materiality of the instant, with its self-mastery and fatigue, is insufficient because the sub- ject is not only mired in itself, an island unto itself, but is also ecstatically projected into the world. Inasmuch as Levinas has already caught sight of the subject’s desire to escape itself, in Time and the Other the subject’s ecstatic pro- jection into the world is characterized as salvation.” The subject saves itself from its intimate self-enclosure, evades itself, by being-in-the-world, “loosening the bond between the self and the ego” (TO 00). But in this early work Levinas is already dissatisfied with Heidegger's interpretation of the subject’s ecstasis in terms of praxis, the use of tools, the instrumentality of the “in-order-to’ (Heidegger's das Um- zu), for he finds that the subject is first nourished by the world, first enjoys the world, before using it. Enjoyment is prior to practice and theory. The relevant point, from the point of view of time, is that the subject is not merely en- closed within itself, encased within its sensations, in the self-movement of the sensuous instant, but extends out into the horizons of future and past, horizons opened by the world and light. But for Levinas, being-in-the-world, whether in the ecstases of enjoyment, labor, or knowledge, does not truly break the immanence of subjectivity. The subject always only finds itself, its enjoyment, its labor, its knowledge, in the ecstatic movement which seems to offer the promise of an escape outside of itself. Heidegger is per- fectly clear that the “in-order-to;’ the referential totality of the world, ultimately refers back to Dasein. Ecstatic time de- lays rather than disrupts the time of subjectivity; it is a postponement of immediacy rather than a deposition of immanence. For Levinas it is insufficiently other. But such a claim forces Levinas into confrontation with the great moment of alterity in the Heideggerian ecstatic theory of time, namely, being-toward-death. What opens up the horizons of temporality, the horizons of the future and past, in the Heidegger of Being and Time, is ultimately8 INTRODUCTION death. The referential totality of the world ultimately refers back to Dasein, but Dasein is the being who dies. Death in turn is understood as the “impossibility of possibility” which makes possibilities possible by making them the possibilities of a finite subject, making them the subject’s ownmost possibilities, its projection as a being destined to die. How can Levinas claim that ecstatic time is merely a relative escape from immanence rather than an absolute break from immanence, when precisely death seems to shatter the subject’s immanence absolutely? The question is not intended to lead back into the classical tradition which overlooked death, or which took death to be a fall, a punishment or a failure, but of properly interpreting the es- sential mortality of finite being. Levinas is struck not so much by the alterity of death in the Heideggerian analysis, as by its mineness (Jemeinigkeit). Death, for Heidegger, is not only my own, it is that which is precisely most my own, my uttermost possibility of being. It does not shatter Dasein but shatter’s Dasein’s inauthentic possibilities. Death individual- izes Dasein, makes Dasein truly be its being. For Levinas, on the other hand, death is not my own, not therefore the “possibility of impossibility,” as Heidegger would have it, but the “impossibility of possibility” (TO 70n.43). That is to say, against what Levinas describes as the “supreme lucid- ity and...supreme virility” of Heideggerian being-toward- death, Dasein’s resoluteness, its courage to be, Levinas proposes instead that we recognize another moment, the emasculation and suffering which death brings to subjec- tivity. He writes: "Death in Heidegger is an event of free- dom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, over- whelmed, and in some way passive” (TO 70-71). Levinas, then, in Time and the Other, sees in death and mortality not the uttermost possibility of subjectivity, but a countermovement against subjectivity. And in this counter- movement, rather than in the Heideggerian projection, heINTRODUCTION 9 finds time. The future is not what comes from out of me in my being-toward-death, in the resoluteness of my futural projection, but what comes at me, ungraspable, outside my possibilities, not as the mastery of death but as the very mystery of the death which always comes to take me against my will, too soon. Death escapes the subject not because the subject flees into a superficial everyday existence, into avoidance and in- authenticity, but because the futurity of death, its unfore- seeability, its ungraspability, overwhelms the subject’s powers. ”The fact that it deserts every present is not due to our evasion of death and to an unpardonable diversion at the supreme hour,” Levinas writes, “but to the fact that death is ungraspable, that it marks the end of the subject’s virility and heroism’ (TO 71-72). Such a relationship with an alterity outside my possibilities, is a relationship with a future which can in no way be reduced to self-presence. Furthermore, this future, which is not on my horizon but comes toward it, “indicates,” Levinas writes, “that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other, some- thing bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity. My solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (TO 74). That being whose very existence is made of alterity is, of course, the other person. Thus Levinas discovers the alterity of the future not in death as a possibility, which is insufficiently other to escape the subject's self-presence, and is even the very dynamism, the very courage, resoluteness, or mastery of self-presence, but in death as mystery, and mystery as the alterity of the other person. Thus Time and the Other con- cludes with an examination of the “mystery” of the other Person. In Time and the Other Levinas has not yet interpreted so- cial life in the ethical terms he later introduces in Totality and Infinity. The time of alterity is situated concretely—a10 INTRODUCTION technique Levinas always uses but never fully explains—in terms of the relationship with the Other encountered eroti- cally, in the voluptuosity of the caress that caresses what withdraws and escapes presence, the “feminine Other.” Such a relationship goes so far into alterity as to be finally— in a finality without end—in relation with another Other, the child, engendered in fecundity. To mark the extraordi- nary and irreparable rupture in being that such a relation effects, Levinas calls it “transubstantiation.” At this stage of his thought, the erotic relationship (which returns again at the conclusion of Totality and Infinity) serves as the “proto- type” of the encounter with the radical alterity of the other person. It therefore also serves as the concrete situation wherein time occurs. One notices in Time and the Other that Levinas analyzes only the future of time: “voluptuousness is the very event of the future,” he writes, “the future purified of all content, the very mystery of the future.” The erotic relationship be- tween the caress and the withdrawal of the feminine, which constitututes the voluptuosity of eros, the acuity of its duality, constitutes time as a relationship with a future that escapes presence absolutely, the Other's future. This emphasis on the future, to the apparent exclusion of the past, figures quite strongly in Levinas’ early works. Per- haps, one might think, it indicates a residual Heideggerian influence, the priority of the future over the equiprimordial dimensions of past and present, an influence which Levinas will later shake off. For the later works tend to em- phasize the past, almost to the exclusion of the future. Per- haps, too, one might think, this shift indicates the different orientations of Levinas’ youth and his age, one looking for- ward, the other looking back. But such suggestions seem facile, and in any event explain very little. Jacques Rolland is closer to the mark when he argues—with regard to the transition from Totality and Infinity to Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence—that there is a movement in Levinas’INTRODUCTION 11 thought from a focus on the radical and overwhelming al- terity of the Other to a focus on the effect of that alterity on the subjectivity of the subject. Such a movement, in terms of time, would account for the early almost exclusive em- phasis on the future and the later almost exclusive empha- sis on the past, as we shall see. This suggestion is not intended to fault Levinas. Levinas’ emphases are not exclu- sions. The radical future of Time and the Other will require the radical past of the later works. The essential point is that time must be conceived in its full dimensionality. Indeed, precisely what Levinas is at- tempting to come to grips with, along with Heidegger and the classical tradition, is the way time breaks up reality into the dimensions of past, present, and future. The problem, however, is how to characterize the alterity that keeps this break up—time—open. In rejecting purely conceptual solu- tions to this problem, Levinas, like all of his contempo- raries, was quite early influenced by the work of Bergson (whose major works he acknowledges at the end of ”Di- achrony and Representation,’ and whose thought he the- matizes and criticizes in “The Old and the New”). Neither can the influence of Husserl and Heidegger, with whom Levinas studied in the late twenties, be underestimated in accounting for his rejection of purely conceptual solutions to the problem of time. One of Levinas’ earliest philosophical labors, in 1935, was the little known translation of an article by a Russian thinker, N. Khersonsky, entitled “The Notion of Time.” The Khersonsky article essentially reproduces the Bergsonian critique of the classical conceptualization of time, its spa- tialization and abstraction. The cognitive, judgemental, representation of time is rejected because “the act of judge- ment’s own logical force consists precisely in not separat- ing the subject and the predicate by time, but in attributing simultaneity to them both.” The time of knowledge is Simultaneity, contemporaneousness. Concrete “living12 INTRODUCTION time,” to the contrary, the translation continues, "flows from one instant to another without delaying with any one of them.” Throughout the development of his thought, Levinas will always adhere to the critical perspective of this early position, characterizing the time of representation as the time of simultaneity, the contemporaneity of subject and predicate. Levinas does not, however, affirm Bergso- nian duration—the continual creation of novelty—as a satis- factory alternative to abstract time. The newness of duration is insufficiently opened by otherness, is still too much a product of consciousness, albeit an intuitive con- sciousness. For Levinas, the classical conception cannot account for the “fact’”—which is the core of Levinas’ own theory of time—that the other person encountered face-to-face is not the subject’s contemporary, that they do not meet one an- other “at the same time.” The time of the Other and my time, or the times of mineness, ecstatic temporalities, do not occur at the same time. Veritable time, in Levinas’ sense, is the effect or event of the disjointed conjunction of these two different times: the time of the Other disrupts or interrupts my temporality. It is this upset, this insertion of the Other's time into mine, that establishes the alterity of veritable time, which is neither the Other's time nor mine. The problem with time classically conceived has to do with the limitations of negation (cf.TI 40-43). Approaching time from the point of view of judgemental knowledge, the ancients characterized time’s break up of reality in terms of Predicative negation: the future and past are not present, thus in some sense they ave not. Caught within the logic of such a perspective, the perspective of propositional judge- mental truth, the classical tradition was led inevitably to sacrifice time, as nonbeing, to eternity, first by means of ex- ternal negations, where only the pure unity of being is af- firmed, and finally, with Hegel, by means of internal negations, where an historically evolved unity of being isINTRODUCTION 13 affirmed. But the whole of contemporary philosophy, and certainly not Levinas alone, rebels against this cognitive re- duction of plurality to unity, of nonbeing to being, of time to eternity. This rebellion defines and sets the tasks of the contemporary epoch of thought, and thus again points out the central importance of time. For Levinas the universal categories of being and nothingness are inadequate when it comes to time. Heidegger, following Husserl, but with much more con- sistency than Husserl, also rejects the classical tradition and its representational model of knowledge and time. But for Levinas, as we have seen, Heideggerian temporality, while not sacrificing time to the abstract and unified present of propositional knowledge, nonetheless sacrifices time to the ecstatic self-presence of an existential or onto- logical unity, to the prepredicative fore-structure of under- standing. The problem, one must always keep in mind, is how to account for rather than reduce the break up of real- ity that time effects. The late Heideggerian “thought of Be- ing” means to be Being’s thought, but it cannot escape the ablative, the thinker’s thought about Being. Heideggerian temporality, for Levinas, does not go far enough. Levinas, more than any other contemporary thinker, insists on the radical alterity of time’s dimensions. To do so, as has been indicated, he binds time to the alterity of the other person. ' Time is neither an abstract difference, in contrast to iden- tity, the obliteration of alterity; nor the concrete identity of difference and identity, the integration of alterity, totaliza- ; tion; but the non-in-difference.of one person to another, the ‘ Proximity of the Other, an infinite distance without dis- tance. Ethics Thus in Totality and Infinity Levinas realizes that binding time to the irreducible alterity of the other person, to the14 INTRODUCTION non-in-difference of one to another, means insisting on an alterity beyond the identifications effected by both episte- mology and ontology. Epistemology and ontology (whether pre-critical, critical, dialectical, or hermeneuti- cal), he argues, reduce the alterity of time to the sameness of the present or presence. The irreducible alterity beyond the identifications of both epistemology and ontology, thus beyond truth and reality, the non-in-difference of one to another, he realizes, is an ethical alterity, the alterity of the good encountered in the face of the Other. Levinas is fond of recalling, in this regard, Plato's words, “the Good beyond Being,” among other similar formulations in the history of Western thought, to lend a sort of philosophical dignity to this so apparently anti-philosophical notion, the notion of a thought beyond being and truth, the notion of a relation where the terms related remain absolutely separate yet in relation. Recognizing the ethical dimension of alterity, and thus the inextricably ethical character of the alterity constitutive of time, means Levinas can no longer remain content to un- derstand, as he did in his earlier works, the rupture time effects as the “ungraspable,’ the “unknowable,” “mystery,” or as erotic “withdrawal” and fecund “transubstantiation.” These characterizations of alterity, though not incorrect, ex- press only its negativity, giving pride of place, as it were, to grasping and knowledge. They begin, however, in pre- cisely the way philosophy has always insisted one must al- ways begin, in the beginning, with what has or seeks beginnings, origins, principles. Philosophy always begins at the beginning, with knowledge and understanding, with being and truth, because philosophy has hitherto been synonymous with first philosophy, with the firstness of first philosophy as the very telos of philosophy. In contrast—and it is precisely this contrast or shock or em- phasis which most sharply indicates how much and what is at stake in Levinas’ “philosophy’—alterity must be ac-INTRODUCTION 15 knowledged in terms of what surpasses understanding ab- solutely, what is superior to the horizons of being and the truth of being, what exceeds or precedes the beginning of philosophy: the surplus or excellence of ethical command and the infinite responsibilities it calls forth. The alterity of the Other is not simply recalcitrant to knowledge and ca- resses; it is a positive force; but its positivity is a moral rather than an ontological or epistemological force. Because philosophy is rooted in the firstness of first philosophy, in the quest for origins, Levinas’ claims shift back and forth from negative to positive, from the inadequacy of philoso- phy to the excellence of ethics. This is the opposition or dis- turbance which Jacques Derrida, recalling the words of James Joyce, calls “Jewgreek.”” The subject is traumatized, loses its balance, its moderation, its recuperative powers, its autonomy, its principle and principles, is shaken out of its contemporaneousness with the world and others, owing to the impact of a moral force: the assymetrical “height and destitution” of the Other. Death, which Levinas had already grasped in terms of the alterity of the other person, becomes murder. “Mur- der,” Levinas writes, in Totality and Infinity, “at the origin of death, reveals a cruel world, but one to the scale of human relations. The will. . .exposed to death but not immediately, has time to be for the Other, and thus to recover meaning despite death. This existence for the Other, this Desire of the other, this goodness liberated from the egoist gravita- tion,...retains a personal character. ...The Desire into which the threatened will dissolves no longer defends the powers of a will, but, as the goodness whose meaning death cannot efface, has its center outside of itself” (TI 236). Thus the egoist will, autonomy, the firstness of first philos- ophy, always threatened by death, but mortal by nature, does not gather itself into a greater strength, (no strength, in any event, can ultimately resist death), but recognizes it- self as murderous, recognizes its powers as violent, its au-16 INTRODUCTION tonomy as imperial, and thus becomes good. This transformation or reorientation of the egoist will into good will is not, to be sure, necessary, for necessity is an episte- mological and ontological category. Rather, Levinas will say, shifting from nominative to prescriptive language, the good will is elected to its moral status. It is elected at the mo- ment it is capable of seeing the offense of the offended, or the face” (TI 247). “Goodness,” Levinas writes, ’ consists in taking up a position in being such that the Other counts more than myself. Goodness thus involves the possibility for the I that is exposed to the alienation of its powers by death to not be for death” (TI 247). Thus in death—on Heidegger's home turf, as it were—Levinas discovers the radical and ethical alterity of the Other, rather than the in- dividuation of Dasein and openness onto Being, and he dis- covers the radical passivity of the good will. Exposed to the alterity of the other person, the I’s egoist capacities, its powers of synthesis, which have hitherto de- fined the ego for philosophy, are “reconditioned,” “put into question,” over-exposed, such that the ] is first for-the- other before the very firstness of its being for-itself. It is in this ethical reversal, in this ’first” which ontologically and epistemologically comes second, or afterwards, in this pe- culiar structure of over-exposure, excessive vulnerability, the anteriority of what comes later, in this first for-the-other before being for-itself, against a for-itself which naturally comes first and whose very telos is to come first, that Levinas discovers the irreducible alterity of time. Thus time involves an extraordinary past in a superlative passivity which is more passive than, or prior to, the subject’s predi- cative and prepredicative syntheses, which seem to come first and which are even defined as the power of coming first, and serve, in one way or another, as the ground of first philosophy. The I commanded by the Other finds itself commanded before itself, despite-itself, before its own self-control, be-INTRODUCTION 17 fore the very abilities which seem to be its definition and definitiveness. The J elected to its responsibilities is elected subject to the Other. It is forced into itself, morally singu- larized, made responsible, not by itself but despite-itself, an-archically, by the Other. Thus a radical passivity, a radical exposure, prior to all the syntheses which have hitherto defined time, subjectivity, being, and truth for philosophy, and a radical alterity, again beyond all the syntheses which have hitherto defined time, subjectivity, being, and truth for philosophy, are related by means of ethics, and thus by means of a time liberated from the present and self-presence, liberated from synthesis and sameness. The irreducible alterity of the Other, the time of the Other, impinges on the subject’s temporal syntheses from the outside, disrupting its unity with another time, the time of the Other or ethics, the command which comes from on high. And in the same extraordinary moment, the Other's commmand calls forth a subjectivity for-the-other, that is to say, a subjectivity which “fears murder more than death,” which recognizes itself as murderous and the Other as vulnerable or destitute, the object of the subject’s actual or potential violence, the object of irresponsibility and injustice. Such a reconditioning transformation is not properly ontological or epistemological, rather it is an ethi- cal deformation of being and knowledge, the very ’defor- malization” of time. In Totality and Infinity it is argued that the rupture of the egoist I, its reconditioning in the face of the Other, the re- orientation despite-itself of the for-itself to the for-the- other, is effected by means of a positivity, the surplus of ethics, rather than by a negativity or lack which the subject would then recuperate or attempt to recuperate. Levinas fo- cuses more closely on the time structure of this ethical orientation—non-in-difference—in an article which ap- peared shortly after the publication of Totality and Infinity, entitled “The Trace of the Other” (1963). The theses of To-18 INTRODUCTION tality and Infinity are first repeated in abbreviated form: “To discover such an orientation in the I is to identify the I with morality. The I before the Other is infinitely responsible.”; “The unicity of the I is the fact that no one can answer for me.” How, then, does Levinas see a past and a future in this disruption and election of the ego? How is the structure of ethics the structure of time? The future is the future of he who is always yet to come, he who will never and can never fully present himself, because the subject’s ego cannot reach in or reach out to be or anticipate the Other's ego. This inability, however, is not merely an epistemological or ontological failure, a problem of knowl- edge or a limitation of being. Indeed it is not a failure. The oncoming character of the Other, the Other qua future, what Levinas names “‘illeity,” is not merely ‘unforeseeable, which it would be from the point of view of the knowing or grasping ego, it is not merely a question of craft and ruse, the tactics of war, rather the Other is better than the ego, and thus exerts moral demands on the ego. The I is respon- sible not only to know the Other, or to share an under- standing of the world which the Other also shares, but is responsible to respond to the very alterity of the Other, to an alterity which is always on the verge of presence but never comes to presence, is never reducible to the phenom- enality of the face. The face is not, properly, a phenome- non, a noema of the subject’s noeses, but a plasticity or enigma which pierces phenomenality with command, from a future which is never present though infinitely close to the present. This oncoming character of the Other—the future—is also what Levinas calls “expression,” a meaning- giving which overdetermines any meaning-given. At the same moment, furthermore, the Other forces upon the egoist subject a past that was never within the subject's powers of presencing or making present. That is to say, in the face of the Other, goodness emerges as the responsibil- ity of the subject which has always already been responsible,INTRODUCTION 19 prior to any explicit agreements, prior even to the subject’s ability to welcome the Other. “The beyond from which a face comes signifies as a trace.” Levinas writes in “The Trace of the Other,’ “A face is in the trace of the utterly by- gone, utterly past Absent. .. which cannot be discovered in the self by any introspection.” Precisely the obligation the Other inserts into the ego, the obligation which is the very election of the ego, its responsibility to respond to the Other, is suffered by the ego as always already having passed into the ego, as having already put the ego into ques- tion, an-archically—to the extent that the ego is put into question, that is to say, to the extent that the ego is good. “No memory could follow the trace of this past. It is an im- memorial past.” Language The ethically elected ego is both already obligated and never sufficiently obligated, and such is the very structure of time. A past already in force, a moral force, putting the ego into question, despite-itself, against its synthesizing nature, more passive than its agency, without ever having been present—obligation to the Other—and a future which never becomes and never can become present—the Other's command: such is the structure of ethics and time, disrupt- ing being and knowledge. But such is also the structure, as Levinas’ use of the terms “trace” and “expression” indi- cates, of language, of the significance of signification. Already in “The Trace of the Other” Levinas character- izes this paradoxical relationship, a relationship with what remains outside of relation while yet being in relation, the non-indifference of one to the other, proximity, in terms of signification (and—we should notice the oncoming wave— in the concluding pages he characterizes it in terms of God). Over the next several years, in a series of articles which will be collected together to become the core of Oth-20 INTRODUCTION erwise than Being or Beyond Essence, he focuses on the ethical alterity of the other person (future) and the ethical expo- sure of the subject (past), thus on the alterity constitutive of time, in terms of language and signification. It is a matter of elaborating more precisely what is meant by “the trace of the Other,” by the meaningfulness of the plasticity of the face, by expression and command, and by the responsibil- ity to respond to the Other. As early as Totality and Infinity, Levinas conceived the face as equivalent to expression. “Expression manifests the presence of being,” he wrote, “but not by simply drawing aside the veil of the phenomenon. It is of itself presence of a face, and hence appeal and teaching, entry into relation with me—the ethical relation. And expression does not manifest the presence of being by referring from the sign to the signified; it presents the signifier. The signifier, he who gives a sign, is not signified” (TI 181-81). Thus Levinas dis- tinguishes the relation of sign to signified, which is an epis- temological and ontological relation, from the extraordinary relation of both the sign and the signified to the signifier, the Other. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Es- sence, language and signification are understood in yet a more complex fashion. Levinas realizes that signification at the phenomenal level is not simply a matter of signs referring to what they signify. Such a straightforward correspondence model is precisely what Derrida criticizes in Husserl, showing that the presence of the signified depends at least as much on the meaningful absence of other signs as on an ostensively direct relation of the sign to the signified in intuition. For signs to be significant, Derrida shows, other signs must be absent. That is to say, language is meaningful not because it touches base here and there in a one to one correspon- dence with things, but because it is a shifting network of signs, signs which not only refer to one another but defer to one another, playing between themselves in various histor-~ INTRODUCTION 21 ically determined configurations, where the presence of one sign is meaningful owing to the absence of other signs. This play is equivalent to what Heidegger, in his later work, called the “verbality of the verb” “Language,” Levinas writes in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, “issued from the verbalness of a verb would then not only consist in making being understood, but also in making its essence vibrate” (OBBE 35). But it is not in Derrida’s semiotic play or in the Heidegge- rian verb, in the vibration of absence and presence, that Levinas finds the alterity constitutive of meaning and time. Such a play, despite its inevitable deferral of meaning, de- spite its vibrancy and essential undecidability, remains an economy, the economy of what is Said. But what is Said de- pends, in its turn, on another sort of absence, the irreduc- ible absence of what in Totality and Infinity Levinas called the signifier, that is to say, he who speaks and at the same time commands ethically, putting the ego into question. “It belongs to the very essence of language,’ Levinas wrote in Totality and Infinity, foreshadowing the analyses of Other- wise than Being or Beyond Essence, ”which consists in contin- ually undoing its phrase by the foreword or the exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremo- nies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights” (TI 30). This move- ment of language is what Levinas now calls Saying, the eth- ical condition of what is Said. “It is the impossibility of the dispersion of time to assemble itself in the present, the in- surmountable diachrony of time” (OBBE 38). It is because language depends first on one-being-for- the-other, Saying, the exceptional command of the Other demanding and evoking the subject's irrecuperable respon- sibility to respond, that there is meaning, the Said, and time, the future and past. The Said, like representation, tends toward the present, toward simultaneity, contempo- raneousness, the economy of self-presence, even if it al-22 INTRODUCTION ways “fails” in its aims, as Derrida points out, even if it endlessly vibrates, is subject to endless reconfigurations and manifests an irreducible equivocation in being. This deformation in language is not the deformalization to which Levinas points. Saying is never present in the Said, for the Said is too late and too early, is already caught—no matter how subtle or brilliant its vibrancy—within the economy of truth and self-presence. Saying enters the Said otherwise than the vibration or play of the Said: it is traced in the Said, as a subversion, both as the possibility of un- saying or resaying the Said—the pure future—and as the disruption, the hurt, to which the egoist subject passively submits, in patience, in suffering, already striking the ego- ist subject in a vulnerability it can never ground or recuperate—the immemorial past. The structure of such a relation—both ethical and significant: the proximity of the Other, non-in-difference, the for-the-other, the Saying of the Said—is what Levinas calls dia-chrony or emphasis. In his 1982 paper, “Diachrony and Representation,” Levinas focuses on this structure—which produces ethics and language—specifically in terms of the diachrony of time. He begins, as might be expected, with a condensed and schematic recapitulation of his entire itinerary, in order to articulate—in contrast to the time of re-presentation and presencing—the paradoxical alterity of dia-chrony, the pro- totype of all time. For time to be thought as the break up of reality into the irreducible dimensions of past, present, and future, it must finally be thought in terms of a past which was never present and a future which never will be present. Such, as has by now become clear, is the Other's future and past for the subject despite-itself, the Other's Saying, the Other’s command, but only for the good ego, the ego first for-the-other, for-the-other-before-itself, the subject subject to the Other, elected to itself. Levinas employs the term “dia-chrony” in opposition to the term “synchrony,” just as earlier he posed “mystery” against “possibility,” “infinity”INTRODUCTION 23 against “totality,” “otherwise than being” against “being,” “Saying” against “Said, and the “Other” against the “Same.” The terms are not on the same plane. The dia- chrony of time can never be grasped but is only, or at best, undergone in the first person singular. God The last stage of Levinas’ thought, the alterity of the “to- God” (@ Dieu), extends the significance of the Other's oth- erness to its furthest reaches, Already in Totality and Infinity Levinas characterized the intersubjective relation as reli- gion, the insatiable desire for the absolutely desirable, in contrast to the satisfactions of ontology, epistemology, and theology. The central term of that text, “infinity,” is explic- itly borrowed from Descartes’ Meditations, where it referred to the divine—which “dazzled” the Cartesian ego. Levinas has always been concerned and outspoken about Judaism, the religion of his birth; Totality and Infinity, however, marks the beginning of what comes to be a more and more explicit and extensive insertion of God into his properly philosoph- ical writings. But Levinas’ God does not appear as a tidal wave to obliterate the work of all the earlier waves. As indicated by his attachment to the religious writings of Franz Rosenzweig, especially The Star of Redemption (1921), and his attachment to the Lithuanian rabbinic tradi- tion, particularly as found in the celebrated work of Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn (1749-1821), the Nefesh Hahayyim (pub- lished posthumously in 1824) [The Soul of Life], God for Levinas is neither an absolute power nor the object of mys- tical or dogmatic belief. God, too, is encountered in the al- terity of the other person. God Himself “comes to the idea” in proximity, in the non-in-difference of one to another. The wholely other, God, shines in the face of the Other. “The subjection that precedes deliberation about an imper- ative, measures, so to speak, or attests to, an infinite au-24 INTRODUCTION thority” (TO 117), he writes in the section entitled “To-God,” in “Diachrony and Representation.” The appear- ance of God, then, is not the appearance of a set of absolute tules or a privileged text, nor is it a revelation which opens the skies, it is, rather, the very excellence of ethics, com- mand without commandments, the love for the Other prior to the love for oneself, “love,” as Levinas describes it, re- calling Pascal, “without concupiscence.” “The futuration of the future,’ he writes, “is not a ‘proof of God's existence, but ‘the fall of God into meaning“ (TO 115). Thus to care for one’s neighbor more than oneself, to take on responsi- bility for the Other, ethics, and to take on the Other's re- sponsibilities, justice, is to enter into a sacred rather than an ontological or epistemological history. “The existence of God,” Levinas has said in a recent interview, “is sacred his- tory itself, the sacrednesss of man’s relation to man through which God may pass.” Sacred history, the ethical time and significance of social- ity, for Levinas, is not the voyage of an Odysseus, who ven- tures out courageously but only in order to finally return home, where he began his voyage; but the journey of an Abram, who leaves his ancestral home for good, who never returns and never arrives at his destination, who encoun- ters and is subject to the absolute alterity of God, who over- throws the idols and is transformed to becomes his better self, Abraham. Thus Levinas’ works become “conse- crated,“ as he says of Rabbi Hayyim’s great work, “to a God who claims to be dependent on humans, on the persons who, since they are infinitely responsible, support the uni- verse.” Thinking time in relation to the other person, thinking time and the obligations of social life together, means ex- ceeding all the categories and structures which have thus far determined thought itself. It means exceeding the neces-INTRODUCTION 25 sity of thought’s necessary categories and structures, for the sake of a greater necessity, and exceeding the priority of thought’s a priori conditions and transcendentality, for the sake of a greater priority. Not, certainly, to enter a wild no man’s land where anything and everything is permitted, where thought becomes radically otherwise than thinking, a vertiginous leap toward “action,” dance,” or “violence,” where the rupture of thought makes all names possible by making them all equally unintelligible; but, as Levinas would have it, to be awakened to an even more vigilent thinking, to a more attentive, alert, sensitive awareness, to a thinking stripped of its formality and ceremonies, stripped to the rawest nerve, to an unsupportable suffering and vulnerability, a thinking which thinks otherwise than thought itself, because suffering the inversion and election of being for-the-other before itself. To think otherwise, for Levinas, is to undergo the empha- sis, the hyperbole, the superlative, the excellence which es- capes thought while determining it. It is to recognize the dative, the “to the other” and the ’for the other,” which overdetermines the nominative. It is to enter into a dis- orientation which is neither an opinion, a prejudice, a dogma, nor a truth, but the wonder proper to ethical sig- nificance. This perpetual dis-orientation is responsibility. But the responsibility Levinas has in mind is paradoxically a greater responsibility than the already infinite responsibilities set by ratio in its quest for the truth of being, in its call for suffi- cient reasons and historical authenticity. The responsibility Levinas discerns in thinking, then, is not just another more rigorous attention to method and evidence, another episte- mological duty added to the responsibilities which guide and give the reasons for reason, the autonomy of the mea- sured life. Rather, there is an other responsibility, an un- measured and unmeasurable responsibility, one directed from and toward the outside of thought, from and toward26 INTRODUCTION the irreducible alterity of the other person. There are obli- gations greater than the infinite responsibility to think and be on one’s own, greater, then, than all the traditional phil- osophic responsibilities, greater because better. The alterity which is time itself, breaks up reality into an irrecuperable past and an unreachable future, disrupts the natural com- placency of being, overloads it, charging it with a greater responsibility than its capacities can handle. This will mean that less than a hundred years after its liberation from twenty five centuries of servitude to the categories of knowledge, from eternity and essential being, time must be rethought beyond its recent tutelage to the structures of ex- istential understanding, from history and temporality. Time must be liberated from its liberators, for time is not a matter of freedom. Levinas demands further thought, demands that thought go further—than it has ever gone or can go. Yet his thought is not another nuance in hyperconsciousness; dis- orientation and disorder are familiar in our day. Ours is an age of dis-aster—an age without a guiding star, an age whose firmament has been shaken and is shaking, an un- moored epoch, so seemingly without bearings, where the future of humanity, if not life itself, is in question. We live, Levinas has written in a recent article, in “the century which in thirty years has known two world wars, the totali- tarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiro- shima, the Goulag, the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia.” It has never been more difficult to think—but not just because the quantity of accumulated and available information has increased geometrically and geographi- cally, as it has; nor only because, having tried and ex- hausted more than two millenia of self-interpretations, and having recently tried several brilliant and varied renewals, thought no longer knows what to think of itself, no longer has words for itself, can push its hyper-self-reflection no further; but, more profoundly, because thought can noINTRODUCTION 27 longer think in good conscience. Good conscience is not good enough. To live the end of metaphysics, its fulfilment and termina- tion, requires, Levinas insists, that we take bad conscience se- riously, that we recognize the full extent and weight of our debts and obligations to the Other and to Others, that we value goodness and justice above being and order.Preface (1979) To write a preface on the occasion of the republication of something one published thirty years earlier is almost to write the preface to someone else’s book. Except that one sees its shortcomings more quickly and feels them more painfully. The text you are about to read reproduces the steno- graphic record of four lectures given under the title “Time and the Other” in 1946/47, during the first year of the Phil- osophical College founded by Jean Wahl in the Latin Quar- ter, Paris. It appeared in 1948 in a collection entitled Le Choix, le Monde, |’Existence,' the first of the Philosophical College publications. I was happy to have this article ac- company those of Jeanne Hersch, Alphonse de Waelhens, and Jean Wahl himself.” The style (or nonstyle) of this writ- ‘Cahiers du Collége Philosophique (Grenoble-Paris: Arthaud, 1947), pp. 125-96, ‘Jeanne Hersch (1910-_) has taught at a number of universities in Eu- rope and the United States; she is currently active in UNESCO. She has translated Karl Jaspers into French, and is the author of Ltllusion philo- sophique (1936), L’étre et la forme (1946), and La for a V’épreuve du XX siécle (1983), among other works, Alphonse de Waelhens (1911- _) professor of philosophy at the Uni- versity of Saint-Louis in Brussels, has written several studies in contem- Porary philosophy, most notably books on Martin Heidegger (La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger, 1942) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Une phi- losophie de la‘ambiguité, 1951).30 PREFACE ing will surely be, for many, abrupt or maladroit in certain turns of phrase. In these essays there are also theses whose contexts have neither been formulated, nor their openings explored to the end, nor have they a systematic dissemina- tion. Take these remarks as a preliminary note signaling all the flaws that since 1948 the aging of the text has probably accentuated. If I nonetheless approved the idea of its republication, and in book form, and have foregone rejuvenating it, this because I still adhere to the main project of which it is—in the midst of diverse movements of thought—the birth and first formulation, and because its exposition progressively improves as one advances through its pages written in haste. Is time the very limitation of finite being or is it the relationship of finite being to God? It is a relationship that, nevertheless, would not secure for a being an infinitude as opposed to finitude, an auto-sufficiency as opposed to need, but that would signify, beyond satisfaction and dis- satisfaction, the surplus of sociality. This way of examining time still seems to me today to be the vital problem. Time and the Other presents time not as the ontological horizon of the being of a being [l' “‘étre de I‘étant’’| but as a mode of the beyond being [I’ ‘‘au dela de I’étre’’], as the relationship of “thought” to the other [Autre],’ and—through the diverse 3] have always translated autrui as the “Other,’ with an uppercase “O,” and autre as “other,” with a lowercase “o” (except for the title of this book and one section heading in part 3, Whenever “other” [Autre] is capitalized in French, I have supplied the term in brackets. Autrui refers to the per- sonal other, the other person; autre refers to otherness in general, to alter- ity. Jean Wahl (1888-1974), a poet, existential philosopher, expositor of exis- tential philosophies, and historian of philosophy, was professor of philos- ophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 until his death. Levinas always speaks of Wahl with much personal admiration. Totality and Infinity is dedicated to Marcelle and Jean Wahl. See also Levinas, “Jean Wahl et le sentiment,’ Ca- hiers du Sud, vol. 42, no, 331 (1955) 453-59, reprinted in Noms propres— PREFACE 31 figures of the sociality facing the face of the other person: eroticism, paternity, responsibility for the neighbor—as the relationship to the Wholely other [Tout Autre], the Tran- scendent, the Infinite. It is a relation or religion that is not structured like knowing—that is, an intentionality. Know- ing conceals re-presentation and reduces the other to pres- ence and co-presence. Time, on the contrary, in its} dia-chrony, would signify a relationship that does not com: promise the other's alterity, while still assuring its non-! indifference to “thought.” : As a modality of finite being, time would indeed signify the dispersion of the being of a being into mutually exclusive moments, which are, besides, as instants unstable and un- faithful even to themselves, each expelled into the past out of their own presence, yet furnishing the fulgurating idea— and the non-sense and sense, the death and life—of this presence that they would thus suggest. But then eternity— the idea of which, without borrowing anything from lived duration [la durée vécue], the intellect would claim to pos- sess a priori: the idea of a mode of being, where the multiple is one and which would confer on the present its full sense —is it not always suspect of only dissimulating the fulgura- tion of the instant, its half-truth, which is retained in an imagination capable of playing in the intemporal and of de- luding itself about a gathering of the nongatherable? In the final account, would not this eternity and this intellectual God, composed of these abstract and inconstant half- instants of the temporal dispersion, be an abstract eternity and a dead God? The main thesis caught sight of in Time and the Other, on (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 165-74; and the paper Levinas gave after Wahl’s death, “Jean Wahl: Sans avoir ni étre,” in Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel, edited by Jeanne Hersch (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1976), pp. 13-31, Also see footnote 7. below.32 PREFACE the contrary, consists in thinking time not as a degradation of eternity, but as the relationship to that which—of itself unassimilable, absolutely other—would not allow itself to be assimilated by experience; or to that which—of itself infi- nite—would not allow itself to be com-prehended. That is, however, if this Infinite or this other [Autre] must still toler- ate what we designate by using the demonstrative “that,” like a simple object, or what we hitch to it with a definite or indefinite article to give it body. It is a relationship with the In-visible, where invisibility results not from some incapac- ity of human knowledge, but from the inaptitude of knowl- edge as such— from its in-adequation—to the Infinity of the absolutely other, and from the absurdity that an event such as coincidence would have here. This impossibility of coin- ciding and this inadequation are not simply negative no- tions, but have a meaning in the phenomenon of noncoincidence given in the dia-chrony of time. Time signi- fies this always of noncoincidence, but also the always of the relationship, an aspiration and an awaiting, a thread finer than an ideal line that diachrony does not cut. Diachrony preserves this thread in the paradox of a relationship that is different from all the other relationships of our logic and psychology, which, by way of an ultimate community, at the very least confer synchrony on their terms. Here there is a relationship without terms, an awaiting without an awaited, an insatiable aspiration. It is a distance that is also a proximity—which is not a coincidence or a lost union but signifies, as I have said, all the surplus or all the goodness of an original proximity. Is not the difficulty and height of reli- gion that dia-chrony is more than a synchronism, that prox- imity is more precious than the fact of being given, that allegiance to the unequalled is better than a self- consciousness? All descriptions of this “distance- proximity” could not be elsewise than approximate or metaphorical, since the dia-chrony of time in them is the~ PREFACE 33 non-figural meaning, the literal meaning, the model.‘ The “movement” of time understood as transcendence toward the Infinity of the “wholely other’ [tout Autre] does not temporalize in a linear way, does not resemble the straightforwardness of the intentional ray. Its way of signi- fying, marked by the mystery of death, makes a detour by entering into the ethical adventure of the relationship to the other person.® Temporal, transcendence is described in my 1948 essay only through insights that remain at best preparatory. They are guided by the analogy between the transcendence that signifies dia-chrony and the distance of the Other's alterity, as well as by the insistences upon the link—incomparable to that which links the terms of every relationship—that traverses the interval of this transcendence.° I did not want to modify the itinerary that follows the ex- pression of these ideas. It seems to me to bear witness to a certain climate of openness that the Montagne Sainte- Geneviéve quarter of Paris offered shortly after the Libera- tion. Jean Wahl'’s Philosophical College was a reflection of it and one of its centers. One heard the inimitable sonority of ‘Levinas: Not all the negations occurring in the description of this “rela- tionship with the infinite” are confined to the formal and logical sense of negation, and constitute a negative theology! They say all that a logical language—our language—can express, through a saying and an unsaying, of the dia-chrony that shows itself in the patience of awaiting and is the very length of time, neither reducing to anticipation (already a way of "making present”), nor concealing a representation of the awaited or the desired (this representation would be a pure ”presentification”), The awaited and desired would already be terms; awaiting and aspiration would be a finality, not a relationship to the Infinite. sLevinas: See my Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (French original, 1974) [translated by A. Lingis (The Hague; Martinus Nijhoff, 1981)] and, more particularly, my study “God and Philosophy,” which appeared in 1975 in Le Nouveau Commerce, no. 30/31 [translated by R. Cohen and A. Lingis, in The Collected Philosophical Papers of Emmanuel Levinas, edited by A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986)].34 PREFACE Vladimir Jankelevitch’s lofty and inspired speech, uttering the unheard in the Bergsonian message, formulating the in- effable, and drawing a packed hall at the Philosophical Col- lege; and Jean Wahl hailing the very multiplicity of tendencies in “living philosophy,” stressing the privileged kinship between philosophy and the diverse forms of art. He loved following the transitions from one to the other. By his whole attitude he seemed to invite one to audacious “intellectual experimentation” and risky prospection. Hus- serlian phenomenology and, thanks to Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the philosophy of existence,’ and even the first statements of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, then promised new philosophical possibilities. The words desig- nating what people were always concerned with, without daring to imagine it in a speculative discourse, took the rank of categories. Without circumlocution—and often without precaution—and although taking some liberties with the academic rules, but also without submitting to the tyranny of the then fashionable watchwords, one could give oneself—and propose to others—ideas “to be exca- vated,” “to be deepened,” or “to be explored,” as Gabriel Marcel often designates them in his Metaphysical Journal.® It is advisable to read the diverse themes of Time and the ‘Vladimir Jankelevitch (1903-1986), a musician and philosopher, began his publishing career with Henri Bergson (1931), praised in its Preface by Henri Bergson himself, Known for his many subtle psychological and moral studies of such subjects as time and boredom, his main work is probably Traité des vertues (1949), "Given the prominence of existential philosophy at the time, and Levinas’ close personal relationship with Jean Wahl, the reader may take interest in the latter’s small 1947 book, A Short History of Existentialism, translated by F, Williams and S, Maron (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), in which Levinas appears as a discussant (pp. 47-53); and, among others, Wahl’s Philosophies of Existence, translated by F. Lory (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) (French original, 1954). ‘Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, translated by B, Wall (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952) [Librairie Gallimard: Paris, 1927]. Levinas attended the Saturday evening gatherings of the philosophical avant- garde at Marcel’s house in the 1930s.PREFACE 35 Other through which my main thesis advances—with de- tours—in the spirit of those years of openness. There is what is said of subjectivity: the mastery of the Ego over be- ing’s anonymous there is, forthwith the reversal of the Self over the Ego, the encumbrance of the Ego by the self-same and, thus, a materialist materiality and a solitude of imma- nence, the irremissible weight of being in work, pain, and suffering. Next there is what is said of the world: the tran- scendence of nourishments and knowledge, an experience in the heart of enjoyment, a knowing and a return to self, a solitude in the light of knowing absorbing every other, the solitude of a reason essentially one, Then there is what is said of death: not a pure nothingness but an unassumable mystery and, in this sense, the eventuality of the event at the point of making an irruption within the Sameness of immanence, of interrupting the monotony and the tick- tock of solitary instants—the eventuality of the wholely other, of the future, the temporality of time where diach- rony precisely describes the relationship with what re- mains absolutely outside. Finally there is what is said of the relationship with the Other, the feminine, the child, of the fecundity of the Ego, the concrete modality of diachrony, the articulations or inevitable digressions of the transcen- dence of time; neither an ecstasis, where the Same is ab- sorbed in the other [Autre], nor a knowledge, where the other [Autre] belongs to the Same—a relationship without relation, an insatiable desire, or the proximity of the Infi- nite. These are theses that have not all been taken up later in their first form, that since then may have been revealed as inseparable from more complex and older problems, and as demanding a less improvised expression and especially a different thought. I should like to stress two points, in the last pages of these early lectures, that seem important to me. They con- cern the way in which the phenomenology of alterity and its transcendence was there attempted.36 PREFACE Human alterity is not thought starting with the purely formal and logical alterity by which some terms are distin- guished from others in every multiplicity (where each one is already other as the bearer of different attributes or, in a multiplicity of equal terms, where each one is other than the other through its individuation). The notion of a tran- scendent alterity—one that opens time—is at first sought starting with an alterity-content—that is, starting with femi- ninity. Femininity—and one would have to see in what sense this can be said of masculinity or of virility; that is, of the differences between the sexes in general—appeared to me as a difference contrasting strongly with other differ- ences, not merely as a quality different from all others, but as the very quality of difference. This idea should make the notion of the couple as distinct as possible from every purely numerical duality. The notion of the sociality of two, which is probably necessary for the exceptional epiphany of the face—abstract and chaste nudity—emerges from sex- ual differences, and is essential to eroticism and to all in- stances of alterity—again as quality and not as a simply logical distinction—borne by the ’’thou shalt not kill” that the very silence of the face says. Here is a significant ethical radiance within eroticism and the libido. Through it hu- manity enters into the society of two and sustains it, autho- rizes it, perhaps, at least putting into question the simplicity of contemporary paneroticism.’ I should like finally to stress a structure of transcendence that in Time and the Other has been caught sight of starting with paternity: the possible offered to the son and placed beyond what is assumable by the father still remains the fa- ther’s in a certain sense. Precisely in the sense of kinship. The father’s—or non-indifferent—is a possibility that an- other assumes: through the son there occurs a possibility beyond the possible! This would be a non-indifference that *See note 69, below,PREFACE 37 does not issue from the social rules governing kinship, but probably founds these rules—a non-indifference through which the “beyond the possible” is possible to the Ego. This is what, starting with the—nonbiological—notion of the Ego’s fecundity, puts into question the very idea of power [pouvoir], such as it is embodied in transcendental subjectivity, the center and source of intentional acts. Emmanuel Levinas 1979" “For other recent general comments by Levinas on Time and the Other, see the fourth 1981 radio broadcast interview by Philippe Nemo in Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, translated by R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), pp. 55-62.[PART ]] the achievement of an isolated and lone subject, but that it is the very relationship of the subject with the Other.‘ This thesis is in no way sociological. It is not a matter of saying how time is chopped up and parceled out thanks to the notions we derive from society, how society allows us to make a representation of time. It is not a matter of our idea of time but of time itself. To uphold this thesis it will be necessary, on the one hand, to deepen the notion of solitude and, on the other, to consider the opportunities that time offers to solitude. The analyses I am about to undertake will not be anthro- pological but ontological. I do believe in the existence of on- tological problems and structures, but not in the sense that realists—purely and simply describing given being— ascribe to ontology. It is a matter of affirming that being is not an empty notion, that it has its own dialectic; and that notions like solitude and collectivity belong to a certain mo- ment of this dialectic and are not merely psychological no- tions, like the need one can have for the Other or, implied in this need, like a prescience, presentiment, or anticipa- tion of the other. I want to present solitude as a category of being, to show its place in a dialectic of being, or rather— because the word “dialectic” has a more determinate meaning—to show the place of solitude in the general economy of being. T he aim of these lectures is to show that time is not ‘See note 2 of the Preface, above,40 TIME AND THE OTHER Thus from the start I repudiate the Heideggerian concep- tion that views solitude in the midst of a prior relationship with the other. Though anthropologically incontestable, the conception seems to me ontologically obscure. The re- lationship with the Other is indeed posed by Heidegger as an ontological structure of Dasein,? but practically it plays no role in the drama of being or in the existential analytic. All the analyses of Being and Time’ are worked out either for the sake of the impersonality of everyday life or for the sake of solitary Dasein. Then again, does solitude derive its tragic character from nothingness or from the privation of the Other that death accentuates? There is at least an ambi- guity. I find here an invitation to go beyond the definition of solitude by sociality and of sociality by solitude. Finally, the other in Heidegger appears in the essential situation of Miteinandersein, reciprocally being with one another.... The preposition mit (with) here describes the relationship.‘ "Levinas, like almost everyone else who refers to Heidegger in French (or in English for that matter) leaves the term Dasein untranslated. I shall do the same. Dasein refers to human being, literally meaning "there- being”; it is a term used to highlight the central Heideggerian notion that human existence is always in-the-world and not enclosed within a subject “in here” opposed to objects “out there.” *Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by J. Maquarrie and E, Ro- binson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). It is perhaps of some interest to note that Being and Time had not been translated into French at the time of Levinas’ lectures. Indeed, it has taken more than half a century to have Being and Time translated into French in its entirety. In 1938 sections 45-53 and 72-77 were translated by H. Corbin and included as part of a volume of Heidegger's writings entitled Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? (Paris: Gallimard). In 1964 sections 1-44 (the “Intro- duction” and ”Division One,” the Dasein analytic) were translated by A. de Waelhens, and R. Boehm, and published as a volume entitled L’Etre et le Temps [Being and Time”] (Paris: Gallimard). Despite its title, this latter volume is only a truncated version of the original text. The complete text, entitled Etre et temps, appeared in 1983 translated and published by E. Martineau, and then three years later in a new translation by F. Vezin (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). ‘See Heidegger, Being and Time, section 26 (pp. 153-63). Levinas will re- turn to Heidegger’s notion of Miteinandersein at the end of Time and the Other (p. 93).TIME AND THE OTHER 41 It is thus an association of side by side, around something, around a common term and, more precisely, for Heidegger, around the truth. It is not the face-to-face relationship, where each contributes everything, except the private fact of one’s existence. I hope to show, for my part, that it is not the preposition mit that should describe the original rela- tionship with the other. My way of proceeding will lead me to developments that will perhaps be fairly arduous. They will not have the bril- liant pathos of anthropological developments. But in return I should be able to say something else about solitude than its unhappiness and opposition to collectivity, to that col- lectivity whose happiness one usually says is in opposition to solitude. In thus going back to the ontological root of solitude I hope to glimpse wherein this solitude can be exceeded. Let me say at once what this exceeding will not be. It will not be a knowledge, because through knowledge, whether one wants it or not, the object is absorbed by the subject and duality disappears. It will not be an ecstasis, because in ec- stasis the subject is absorbed in the object and recovers it- self in its unity. All these relationships result in the disappearance of the other. This is when I come up against the problems of suffering and death. Not because these are very lofty themes, per- mitting brilliant and fashionable expositions, but because in the phenomenon of death solitude finds itself bordering on the edge of a mystery. This mystery is not properly un- derstood negatively, as what is unknown. I shall have to es- tablish its positive significance. This notion will allow me to catch sight of a relationship in the subject that will not be reduced to a pure and simple return to solitude. Before the death that will be mystery and not necessarily nothingness, the absorption of one term by the other does not come about. I shall show finally how the duality evinced in death becomes the relationship with the other and time.42 TIME AND THE OTHER The dialectic these developments may contain is in any case not Hegelian. It is not a matter of traversing a series of contradictions, or of reconciling them while stopping His- tory. On the contrary, it is toward a pluralism that does not merge into unity that ] should like to make my way and, if this can be dared, break with Parmenides. THE SOLITUDE OF EXISTING In what does the acuity of solitude consist? It is banal to say we never exist in the singular. We are surrounded by beings and things with which we maintain relationships. Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others. All these relationships are transitive: | touch an ob- ject, I see the other. But I am not the other. I am all alone. It is thus the being in me, the fact that I exist, my existing, that constitutes the absolutely intransitive element, something without intentionality or relationship. One can exchange everything between beings except existing. In this sense, to be is to be isolated by existing. Inasmuch as I am, I am a monad. It is by existing that I am without windows and doors, and not by some content in me that would be incom- municable. If it is incommunicable, it is because it is rooted in my being, which is what is most private in me. In this way every enlargement of my knowledge or of my means of self-expression remains without effect on my relationship with existing, the interior relationship par excellence. Primitive mentality—or at least the interpretation Levy- Bruhl gave of it'—seemed to shake the foundation of our ’See Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, translated by L. A. Clare, in- troduction by C. Scott Littleton (Princeton University Press, 1985); origi- nally published in 1910 as Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétes inférieures; English translation originally published in 1925. Levinas again refers to Levy-Bruhl’s notion of a prelogical participatory existence, where the prin- ciple of noncontradiction is inoperative, in Existence and Existents, p. 60, and in Totality and Infinity, p. 276. See also Levinas, “Levy-Bruhl et la phi-TIME AND THE OTHER 43 concepts because it appeared to contribute the idea of a transitive existence. One had the impression that through participation the subject not only sees the other, but is the other. This notion is more important to primitive mentality than is the notion of the prelogical or the mystical. None- theless it does not deliver us from solitude. A modern con- sciousness, at least, could not abdicate its secrecy and solitude at so little cost. And to the extent that the experi- ence of participation may be real today, it coincides with ec- static fusion. It does not sufficiently maintain the duality of terms. If we leave monadology we arrive at monism. Existing resists every relationship and multiplicity. It con- cerns no one other than the existent. Solitude therefore ap- pears neither as the factual isolation of a Robinson Crusoe nor as the incommunicability of a content of consciousness, but as the indissoluble unity between the existent and its work of existing. To take up the existing in the existent is to enclose it within unity and to let Parmenides escape every parricide his descendants would be tempted to commit against him. Solitude lies in the very fact that there are ex- istents. To conceive a situation wherein solitude is over- come is to test the very principle of the tie between the existent and its existing. It is to move toward an ontological event wherein the existent contracts existence. The event by which the existent contracts its existing I call hypostasis.* ‘Given that this term is little used in philosophy today and, given Levinas’ distinctive use of it to refer to the origin of an entity that is neither substantial nor insubstantial, the following information, taken from an ar- ticle entitled “Substance and Attribute,” by D,J. O’Connor (The Encyclope- dia of Philosophy, vol. 8, edited by P. Edwards [New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1972], p. 36) may prove helpful: “It is interesting to note that the principal term for substance in the writings of Aristotle is ousia, a word which in earlier Greek writers means ‘property’ in the legal sense of the word, that which is owned... ..The Latin word substantia, from which the English term is derived, is a literal translation of the Greek word hypos- ——_—__—_—____ losophie contemporaine,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de |'Etranger, vol. 147 (1957), 82nd year, no. 4, pp. 556-69; and note 64, below.44 TIME AND THE OTHER Perception and science always start with existents already supplied with their private existence. Is this tie between what exists and its existing indissoluble? Can one go back to hypostasis? EXISTING WITHOUT EXISTENTS We return again to Heidegger. One cannot ignore his distinction—which I have already used—between Sein and Seindes, Being and being, but which for reasons of euphony I prefer to render as existing and existent, without ascribing a specifically existentialist meaning to these terms.’ Heidegger distinguishes subjects and objects—the beings that are, existents—from their very work of being. The first are expressed by substantives or substantivated participles, the other by a verb. This distinction, which is posited from the start of Being and Time,* permits dispelling certain of the equivocations of philosophy in the course of its history, where one started with existing to arrive at the existent pos- sessing existing fully, God. The most profound thing about Being and Time for me is tasis (“standing under”). This term acquired its* philosophical connota- tions in later Greek and occurs principally in controversies among early Christian theologians about the real nature of Christ.” The later Greek who gave the term hypostasis its philosophical connotation was Plotinus. Though Levinas rarely mentions Plotinus, it would be interesting to com- pare their accounts of the emergence of distinct entities. It would also be interesting to compare the commitments involved in Heidegger’s charac- terization of Dasein’s being in terms of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), own- ness or property, as well as his use of the term ousia, with Levinas’ commitment to the term /ypostasis to understand the individuation of ex- istence, ’For comments on this particular sentence, and an important analysis and “semiotic critique” of much else in Levinas, see Jacques Derrida’s 1964 essay, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emma- nuel Levinas,’ republished in his Writing and Difference, translated by A. Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1978) pp. 79-153. "See Heidegger, Being and Time, translator's note 1 on pp. 19 and 22.TIME AND THE OTHER 45 this Heideggerian distinction. But in Heidegger there is a distinction, not a separation.’ Existing is always grasped in the existent, and for the existent that is a human being the Heideggerian term Jemeinigkeit® precisely expresses the fact that existing is always possessed by someone. | do not think Heidegger can admit an existing without existents, which to him would seem absurd. However, there is a notion—Geworfenheit"—"expression of a certain Heideg- ger,” according to Jankelevitch—that is usually translated “dereliction” or “desertion.” One then stresses a conse- quence of Geworfenheit. One must understand Geworfenheit as the “fact-of-being-thrown-in’ . . .existence.” It is as if the existent appeared only in an existence that precedes it, as though existence were independent of the existent, and the existent that finds itself thrown there could never become master of existence. It is precisely because of this that there is desertion and abandonment. Thus dawns the idea of an existing that occurs without us, without a subject, an exist- ‘The notion of separation is of the utmost epistemological and ontological importance in Levinas’ philosophy. The idea is doubtlessly borrowed from Franz Rosenzweig, whose The Star of Redemption, published in 1921, exerted an enormous influence on Levinas. Rosenzweig aimed to think humankind, the world, and God, each in their own terms—that is, in their radical separation from one an- other; as well as in their interrelations. Levinas likewise here attempts to think existence independent of existents—that is, in its separation from the world and others (and God to the extent that God is an existent). Later in this text—and elsewhere in other texts—he attempts to think the human being, qua “hypostasis,” in independence, in separation from the world and others (and God), This structure of separation puts Levinas in a difficult position relative to philosophy and its history, which has perhaps defined itself from its in- ception as intellectual vision of the one, the whole, the comprehensive. Levinas attempts to both reject Parmenides (the One) and remain a philos- Pher, Whether and how this is possible is the central issue of the collection of secondary articles on Levinas, Face to Face with Levinas, edited by R. Co- hen (Albany; State University of New York Press, 1986). “"Mineness, see Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 68 and 284. "Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 174, 223, 330-33. “The English translators of Being and Time have indeed used the term “thrownness’ to translate Geworfenheit.46 TIME AND THE OTHER ing without existents, Without doubt Jean Wahl would say that an existing without existents is only a word. The term “word” is surely upsetting because it is pejorative. But on the whole I am in agreement with Wahl. Only one should first determine the place of the word in the general econ- omy of being.” I would also gladly say that existing does not exist. It is the existent that exists. And the fact of having recourse to what does not exist, in order to understand what does exist, hardly constitutes a revolution in philoso- phy. Idealist philosophy on the whole has been a way of grounding being on something that does not have being. How are we going to approach this existing without exis- tents? Let us imagine all things, beings and persons, re- turning to nothingness.“ What remains after this imagi- nary destruction of everything is not something, but the fact that there is [il y a].* The absence of everything returns as a presence, as the place where the bottom has dropped out of everything, an atmospheric density, a plenitude of the void, or the murmur of silence. There is, after this de- struction of things and beings, the impersonal “field of forces” of existing. There is something that is neither sub- 7 "Of course, philosophy has already said a great deal about the role of the word and its relationship to being. Franz Rosenzweig’s thoughts on words, however, may not be especially well known to philosophers. See The Star of Redemption, translated by WW. Halo (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972; Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1985), especially book 2 of part 2 (pp. 156-204); and Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, edited by N.N. Glatzer (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), especially chapters 3 (pp. 35- 41) and 6 (pp. 53-62). “This technique of approaching existence without existents by means of the imagination is also employed in Existence and Existents, pp. 57-58. ‘In 1946 Levinas published an article entitled '’Il y a’’ (Deucalion, vol. 1, pp. 141-54), which he later incorporated into Existence and Existents (pp. 17-18, 57-64). The there is again appears in Totality and Infinity, where it is also called “the elemental.” It is a notion of continued significance for all Levinas’ subsequent thought, and is always assumed when it is not explic- itly invoked. “This expression is doubtlessly meant to recall, at least, Kant’s account of the transcendental esthetic, at the beginning of The Critique of Pure Rea- son; Hegel’s account of ’Force and The Understanding,” at the beginning