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Levinas Emmanuel Collected PHAENOMENOLOGICA COLLECTION FONDEE PAR H.L. VAN BREDA ET PUBLIEE SOUS LE PATRONAGE DES CENTRES D'ARCHIVES-HUSSERL 100 EMMANUEL LEVINAS COLLECTED PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS Comite de redaction de la collection: President: S. Usseling (Leuven) Membres: L. Landgrebe (Koln), W. Marx (Freiburg i. Br.)> J.N. Mohanty (Oklahoma), P. Ricoeur (Paris), E. Stroker (Koln), J. Taminiaux (Louvain-La-Neuve), Secretaire: J. Taminiaux COLLECTED PHILOSOPHICAL PAPERS EMMANUEL LEVINAS Translated by Alphonso Lingis 1987 MARTINUS NIJHOFF PUBLISHERS k* a member of the KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP Rip DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER *~ Distributors for the United States and Canada: Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 358, Accord Station, Hingham, MA 02018-0358, USA for the UK and Ireland: Kluwer Academic Publishers, MTP Press Limited, Falcon House, Queen Square, Lancaster LAI 1RN, UK for all other countries: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, Distribution Center, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Lovinas, Emmanuel. Col lee ted philosophical papers of hmmanucl Levmas. (Phaenomenologica ; 100) Contents. Reality and its shadow — Freedom and command — The ego and the totality — Philosophy and the idea of infinity — [etc.] 1. Philosophy—Collected works. I. Title. 11. Series . B2430.L482E6 1986 194 85-28430 ISBN 90-247-3272-7 ISBN 90-247-3272-7 (hardback) ISBN 90-247-3395-2 (paperback) Copyright © 1987 by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, P.O. Box 163, 3300 AD Dordrecht, The Netherlands. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS CONTENTS TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION VII 1. REALITY AND ITS SHADOW 1 2. FREEDOM AND COMMAND 15 3. THE EGO AND THE TOTALITY 25 4. PHILOSOPHY AND THE IDEA OF INFINITY 47 5. PHENOMENON AND ENIGMA 61 6. MEANING AND SENSE 75 7. LANGUAGE AND PROXIMITY 109 8. HUMANISM AND AN-ARCHY 127 9. NO IDENTITY 141 10. GOD AND PHILOSOPHY 153 11. TRANSCENDENCE AND EVIL 175 VII TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION This volume contains translations of the most important texts of Emmanuel Levinas in which his own philosophical positions were elaborated; we have excluded his studies on other philosophers and on religious issues.1 These writings originally appeared separately as lectures or in various journals. Our Introduction will try to help the reader by first mapping out the terrain and then outlining the most important findings.2 A. TOPOGRAPHY OF THE PROBLEMATIC The theoretical structure of Levinas's work begins in an ontological - or in "ontic" - elucidation of what it means to be an existent. And in a new analysis of the intentional or transcending movement in our existence. These investigations lead Levinas to a region "otherwise than being". 1 An early text, "De Invasion," published in RecherchesPhilosophiques V> 1935-36, pp. 373-92, was excluded in accordance with the wishes of the author. 2 An Introduction is of course a partial view into a work. And here we join the sentiments of Jacques Derrida {Writing and Difference\ trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 312, n. 7): "Partial not only due to the point of view chosen, the amplitude of the works, the material and other limits of this essay. But also because Levinas's writing, which would merit an entire separate study itself, and in which stylistic gestures (especially in Totality and Infinity) can less than ever be distinguished from intention, forbids the prosaic disembodiment into conceptual frameworks that is the first violence of all commentary. Certainly, Levinas recommends the good usage of prose which breaks Dionysiac charm or violence, and forbids poetic rapture, but to no avail: in Totality and Infinity the use of metaphor, remaining admirable and most often - if not always - beyond rhetorical abuse, shelters within its pathos the most decisive movements of the discourse. By too often omitting to reproduce these metaphors in our disenchanted prose, are we faithful or unfaithful? Further, in Totality and Infinity the thematic development is neither purely descriptive nor purely deductive. It proceeds with the infinite insistence of waves on a beach: return and repetition, always, of the same wave against the same shore, in which, however, as each return recapitulates itself, it also infinitely renews and enriches itself. Because of all these challenges to the commentator and the critic, Totality and Infinity is a work of art and not a treatise." VIII 1. Existence and Existents Mental processes and states - even representations, even feelings - were all to be reinterpreted as behaviors - as spontaneous and self-organizing forms of movement teleologically directed to exterior objects or objectives. Directed to objects not in order to capture them, or their reflections, in one's own substance, but in order to grasp them, operate them or with them, or support oneself on them in proceeding toward the next term, in a field that opens in paths and horizons. The mental sphere in man was to be conceived not as a substance a subsistent core receiving modifications upon itself from the outside and supporting effects and affects, but as movement, intentional or ecstatic and not physical movement - as ex-istence. Existential philosophy proposes that ex-istence is man's essence. Man's existence is teleologically oriented toward presence (Husserl), or is a concern for the world (Heidegger). The world is not only the stage on which man pursues his destiny; articulating a world is his destiny. In bringing out the ecstatical character of man's way of being, existential analysis meant not only to define the specific form of the movement common to all his dealings with objects, whether instrumental, affective, or comprehending, but to characterize the movement that sets up objects - the primary objectification or the articulating of a world, by which appearances acquire identity or by which a clearing opens and a field of entities takes form. Thus existential anthropology becomes a transcendental inquiry. Further, it becomes ontology: subjectivity and objectivity, more fundamentally, beings ex• isting into the world and beings that are within the world, do not only differ by virtue of distinctive properties nor even by virtue of different categories predicable of them. Beings ex-isting into the world cannot be categorized in the same sense as the mundane objects and objectives of their movements; it is the way they have being that is distinctive. They break forth from their own being unto the being of all things. Heidegger's Being and Time set out to analyze the essential structures of mundane things and of the behaviors of Dasein, especially in the aspects they show when they first take form, so as to determine the different ways of being characteristic of beings within the world and of beings existing unto the world. The formulation of the ways of being of the principal types of entities was to prepare for an explication of the meaning of being in general. Being is not a supposit or a substance; this verb designates an event. The separation of entities into beings existing unto the world and beings that are within the world is not just that of a de facto multiplicity comprised within being in general - nor is it brought about by a power of our existence to separate itself from, and confront, the rest of what is. The separating is internal to being and is its work. Heidegger went back over the metaphysical thought which distinguished becoming, appearance, thought, and the ought in the Physis and contrasted them with being, so as to see and to show how these IX dimensions - reconceived as earth, heavens, mortals, and immortals - form the inner play of the process of be-ing that differentiates into beings. Levinas in his first writings directed his attention to elucidating the meaning of beings. He observes that Heidegger takes as given the fact that there are beings, in order to study the sense of this "there are", this being they have or that holds them, but does not deduce, or show the formation of, existents within existence. Later Levinas will argue for a certain priority of existents - a priority for intelligibility, for existents which begin in the midst of immemorial existence, which form beginnings, initiate intelligibility.3 Levinas elaborated a form of ontical discourse which does not simply itemize the determinations of and the relations between entities, but aims to elucidate the hypostasis by which substrates, terms, identities, take form in existence.4 One may be tempted to object that the ontological inquiry in Heidegger's sense was intended to do just that, by showing how a space-time, a clearing, opens, an ordaining order, within which entities can take a stand and be exposed. But for an existent to take form it is not enough that there be opened a space for it to take place and an order or context in which it a could acquire significance. An existent takes form through a certain relationship with existence; it assumes its existence, it is a term which has its existence, determines its existence. The ancient thesis of the analogical meaning of being implies that existence does not simply sustain or maintain existents, but is positively determined by them - that an existent possesses existence as its own.5 An elucidation is then called for of the movement by which an existent receives its existence, contracts it as its own, and thereby becomes an existent. Such an inquiry is necessary to make intrinsically intelligible the entities that are posited and that bear identities in the world. It is in particular necessary in order to elucidate that existent which can disclose entities and ascribe identity because it first identifies itself, maintains itself in identity by identifying itself.
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