Levinas and the Possibility of History

Abstract

In Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks disparagingly of history, particularly of what he calls the judgment of history, which he consistently associates with totality.1 It is clear that he has Hegel's teleological conception of history in mind and the idea that it is with reference to the end of history that historical judgment should be made.2 Such a view depicts history as a "privileged plane where Being disengaged from the particularism of points of view . . . is manifested."3 Levinas finds that this view of "history as a relationship between men ignores a position of the I before the other in which the other remains transcendent with respect to me."4 In other words, what is missing here is a relation to infinity. In the Preface to Totality and Infinity Levinas contrasts teleological history with eschatology, which "institutes a relation with being beyond the totality, or beyond history."5 Eschatology establishes a relation with the infinite, with what is beyond being. Reflection upon the contrast between teleology and eschatology reveals that an important part of what is at stake in the difference is a notion of possibility. In a teleological conception of history, history is seen as progressing toward an end that is prefigured in the beginning as a potentiality that is actualized or realized through that progress. In other words, that which is in actuality is possible only because it already was in potentia. This would make history a closed system, a totality. Eschatology, which takes one beyond the totality, presumably entails a transcendence of possibility in this sense. Thus, we might ask: if history remains within being and has no intimation of anything beyond being because of its operative conception of possibility, then is there another notion of possibility at work in eschatology, an idea of possibility beyond "the possible"? And if there is, can this alternative notion of possibility enable the thinking of an alternative view of history? If it is possible to go beyond being, it is possible to go beyond history, and for Levinas going beyond being, as well as history, will require going beyond the time and possibility associated with ontology. What I shall try to show in this essay is that, rather than yielding a separation from history, surpassing the possibility of ontology should permit a return to a kind of historical responsibility.6 There are two facets to Levinas's critique of history that should be highlighted. The first concerns the way in which history tends to efface the singularity of the individual. Individuals produce works or deeds, and these become disengaged from the wills that produced them. This estrangement makes it possible for a work to survive its creator, and it also makes it possible for a work to be appropriated and ascribed meaning by others. History, Levinas maintains, judges works, not the wills that produced them; the meaning of a work is the meaning that it acquires through historical judgment. In this manner the singularity of the will that produced a work is effaced.7 To add to what Levinas says here, it is also worth pointing out that when works or deeds are judged from a historical perspective, not only does their meaning come to be understood in relation to a larger whole, but so does the agency or causality by which they are produced. In other words, works come to be construed as events in history, caused or made possible by historical forces operating in a particular context. From the perspective of history, then, the existing individual who is responsible for these works, and who responds to others in producing those works, disappears. This has implications for our thinking about possibility and being, which brings us to the second facet of Levinas's critique. The impersonal view of history just sketched is typically associated with teleology in which the development of history is analogous to the development of an organism. Just as an entity's essence might be seen as a potentiality that determines the possibilities of its development in time, so historical developments come to be understood as subject to a similar kind of causation. …