(106) Her question is whether diachrony provides a more other-centered account of time than fecundity. History is worked over by the ruptures of history, in which a judgmentis borne upon it.
(TI: 210, emph. Levinas argues that this instant of“election” belongs to a temporal order different from thatof everyday existence: the moment of enactment of a “good beyondBeing” (TI: 80, 102–104, 292–293).Some commentators have called Levinas’ work an ethics of ethics,others a meta-ethics, while still others have urged that his thoughtcan accommodate many ethical theories, from intuitionism torationalism (see below). Although commentators likeBatnitzky find in Levinas a project for a modern politics, and thusfor universality, others are skeptical about her claim. (Broch 2008: 43)Levinas’ youthful project approached transcendence secularly, inlight of humans’ irreducible urge to get past the limits oftheir physical and social circumstances.
devouring past and future into the present." (161) The Akedah, by contrast, is a paradigm of "fecund time," for "Abraham obeys God's command in order to keep his covenant with God that promises the extension of his possibilities not as an individual but as the founder of a nation." (164) Likewise, "when Moses takes upon himself the fate of the Israelites and dies in the desert in their place . This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however.
His work is based on the ethics of the Other or, in Levinas's terms, on "ethics as first philosophy".
What I communicate therefore isalready constituted in function of others. (172)The Promised Land, however, is marked by "a surplus of responsibility towards humanity" (178) Levinas's ambivalence over the state of Israel stems from the worry that "Israel, as a Jewish state, [must] prevent the assimilation of its non-Jewish others -- Muslim Arabs, Christian Arabs, Druzes, and Circassians -- and allow them to preserve their alterity." (180) Public Jewish prayer is a reminder of a "pure, absolute, messianic future" in which collective time is continually disrupted by responsibility for those who are not "our own." One senses that Lin positions herself on the Israeli left, but it's hard to see where she takes this politically because her formulations remain so abstract.Levinas's turn to "the other" opens up "the pure, ungraspable future" beyond my finite time: "infinite" in the sense that desire for the good of the other is insatiable and points beyond the life of any particular person towards a messianic future that would itself be open-ended. (In Rolland,ed. In this entry, attention is focused throughout tothe contribution of commentators, with a view to providing a gatewayto recent secondary literature.Would Levinas’ “thanks to God” then stand in theplace of Hegel’s “for-us” account?The supposed priority of the other would thus depend on one’sapproach, which can be ethical or socio-juridical. The thesis of the primacy ofhistory constitutes an option for the comprehension of being in whichinteriority is sacrificed. If no one asks me, I know what it is. (TI: 214)It is not without importance to know—and this is perhaps theEuropean experience of the twentieth century—whether theegalitarian and just State [and its politics] in which the European isfulfilled … proceeds from a war of all against all—or fromthe irreducible responsibility of the one for the other. (DF: 218)[l]anguage makes possible the objectivity of objects and theirthematization. )In order to clarify this, Levinas had to develop further concepts. But itis not clear that Levinas ever decided whether politics implied aboveall war or the means toward a peaceable State. This work represents, along with Existence and Existents, the first formulation of Levinas's own philosophy, later more fully developed in other works. It is theconcreteness where theoretical and biblical wisdom do better thanconverge. An ethic in the strict sense of the term that derives from the death of the other. (OBBE: 157)It is as summons and injunction that expression precipitatestranscendence. Furthermore, responsibility for the other is "always already" given with the face, not rooted in a choice by the subject or a contract between subjects; in this sense it attests to "an immemorial past." In responsibility, Levinas claims, "infinity" is revealed as involving "a future that cannot be fulfilled and a past that was never present." (76)The introduction of "proximity," however, seems to pretty much repeat what has already been asserted. It is of itself the limit ofresponsibility and the birth of the question: What do I have to dowith justice? St. Augustine famously confesses: "What then is time? But to think what does not have the lineaments ofan object is in reality to do more or better than think.