Judaism, Ethics, and Time: On Levinas’s Re-Interpretation of Rosenzweig’s Concept of the Kingdom of God

Abstract

Abstract Since Emmanuel Levinas declared in Totality and Infinity (1961) that Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption is “too often present” in his own work “to be cited,” an uninterrupted affinity between the two authors has been assumed. Nevertheless, throughout his æuvre, Levinas frequently underlines the philosophical differences marking his and Rosenzweig’s thought. In this article, I endeavor to demonstrate that the concept of redemption and salvation are wholly incompatible in Rosenzweig’s and Levinas’s philosophies. Whereas Rosenzweig pleads for a Jewish redemptive model that turns towards Judaism’s past, Levinas seeks to mobilize Judaism’s salvific potential in the name of a common human future. It is this conjunction between salvation and futurity that allows Levinas to establish a notion of the Kingdom of God that can redeem humanity from its own catastrophe after the Shoah.