Traumatic Response

Abstract

Between November 1975 and May 1976, Emmanuel Levinas presented a lecture course under the title "La Mort et le Temps."1 Alongside a course on "God and Onto-theology," presented during the same period (indeed on the same days, an hour apart from one another), this lecture course constitutes the last regular course that Levinas taught at the Sorbonne.2 The lectures warrant attention for a number of reasons. Presented in the year after the publication of Otherwise than Being (1974) and fifteen years after Totality and Infinity (1961), they allow us to develop a new perspective on both these works for which Levinas is best known, along with the intervening essays.3 In particular, the lectures provide the first available sustained critique of the Heideggerian notions of temporality and being-toward-death. References to Heidegger's understanding of death and time are scattered widely throughout Levinas's corpus, and there are one or two texts, such as the early essay Time and the Other (1947), and "Diachrony and Representation" (1982), in which Levinas devotes concentrated attention to the interrelated themes of time and death.4 But it was only with the appearance of the 1975-76 lectures that we were given the opportunity to knit together the context for Levinas's frequent, but often abrupt and undeveloped remarks about Heidegger's conceptions of time and death. These apparently gnomic utterances now take on the character of a well-articulated, albeit partisan, critique of Heidegger's celebrated analyses of being-toward-death. In devoting close attention to Heidegger's Being and Time, the lectures represent a crucial contribution to sorting out the politically and ethically difficult, if not impossible, relationship that Levinas's philosophy bears to Heidegger's.5 They are especially illuminating since they not only constitute a rare instance in which Levinas's published work treats Heidegger's philosophy in any detail or at any length, but they also present a unique record of Levinas's mature meditations on Heidegger. Despite its inestimable importance for his entire thought, Heidegger's work tends not to be the focus of Levinas's developed philosophy. We had to rely until recently on the early essays of the 1930s in En decouvrant 1'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger ( 1949), which, arguably, were written before Levinas had begun to develop a philosophy that is recognizably his own.6 The 1975/6 lectures discuss Heidegger more elaborately, and in the context of key figures of the history of philosophy, thus shedding new light on Levinas's earlier declarations about Heidegger. Not only, then, does Levinas provide here the rationale for the distance he found it necessary to take in relation to Heidegger's attempt to establish an originary concept of time, a distance that until this point had only been intimated; he also gives us considerable insight as to how he thinks the philosophies of Bergson, Kant, Hegel, Bloch, and Fink fare in comparison to Heidegger's. While in some respects these figures remain consonant with the tradition Levinas seeks to go beyond, their philosophies also contain aspects that break with Heideggerian ontology. Heidegger has accustomed us, says Levinas, "to seek in the history of philosophy the very history of being; all his work consists of reducing metaphysics to the history of being" (MT: 66). For Levinas, "Reducing every philosophical effort to the error or errance of ontotheology is only one possible reading of the history of philosophy" (MT: 67). Levinas's own reading of the history of philosophy might be described as affirming that "in the history of philosophy, there can be meaning other than finitude" (MT: 68). Thus Levinas retrieves from Bergson the notion of "duration," the ultimate significance of which is understood not in terms of the vital elan of Creative Evolution but in the sense that Bergson gives it in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, as "the fact that man can emit a call to the interiority of the other man" (MT: 63). …