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15. “DE L’ÉVASION” (1935)
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15. “DE L’ÉVASION” (“ON ESCAPE”: 1935) Levinas’s first original work, “De l’évasion,” was published in 1935 in Recherches Philosophiques. Bruno Roy, the director of Fata Morgana and a friend of Levinas’s, asked permission to republish it, but Levinas demurred until, in 1982, a former student of his, the late Jacques Rolland, resurrected the work with commentaries and notes that so pleased Levinas as to convince him to allow the new edition. The work begins by circumscribing the realm of “traditional” philosophy (and here Levinas seems to be using the term in its etymological sense of “handed down,” i.e. the philosophy of the Western world beginning with the Greeks) to that of a “revolt” against being. That revolt is based on a discordance between “the brute fact of being” and human freedom. The resulting conflict, says Levinas, opposes the human person and world, not human and self. As we read on, it becomes clear that Levinas is moving in the direction of a critique of Western philosophy. To oppose “man to himself” would require a breaking up of the calm simplicity of the unitary self, which is at peace with itself. What is already adumbrated here is Levinas’s critique of freedom (which can only be a “difficult freedom”) and the inner rending of the self into the moi or selfish self and the soi or self responsible for the other — the “same” in the “other.” Levinas’s view of Romanticism confirms his assertion. Since Romanticism is not a philosophical, but rather a broader cultural manifestation, Levinas is referring to a certain Weltanschauung, determined on the basis of a certain understanding of the relation 181 between human beings and the world. This “bourgeois spirit and its philosophy” champions the self-reliant self, as manifested in the triumph of the will, effort, work, imperialism, and capitalism. Its lack of scruples is “the shameful form,” the ugly aspect of its inner serenity or clear conscience. Reading this early text in light of what followed it, how very clearly the later developments are already delineated in it! The main displacement that Levinas’s philosophy will try to bring about is a shift from the human/world dichotomy to a human/ human one, i.e. a splitting of the self, such that a philosophy of scruples — a philosophy in which we question our own intentions vis-à-vis other people, a moral philosophy, is developed. In the “traditional” worldview, which reflects an understanding of being based on the physical object, any insufficiency is an insufficiency of being. Levinas already hints at something other, some other possibility, in the sentence “Their essence and their properties can be imperfect; the very fact of being is placed beyond the distinction between the perfect and the imperfect.”1 In other words, the notion of value and of the justification of being is secondary to the brute fact of existence. But Levinas detects a contemporary malaise during those years between the two wars — a desire to escape, which he sees reflected in literature. It is the reaction to a sense of being riveted (rivé) to being. Passing in rapid review the difference between the desire of Romanticism to escape specific undesirable facets of existence and the “becoming” mode of the élan vital (becoming is not really an escape from being but just an aspect of it), he notes that this new desire has no destination but is just the desire to escape identity, the bond of the self with itself that is the very definition of ipseity. By tracing this desire to escape from being, Levinas will lead us to a renewal of the question of being qua being, an expression that signals the presence in Levinas’s thought of Heidegger’s work in renewing the question of being. Levinas refers in this text to this mode of leaving being by the 182 Part Three: Commentary [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:11 GMT) neologism excendance, from ex- (out of) and ascendere (to rise); in later texts he will adopt a parallel term he borrows from Jean Wahl, transascendance. The analysis of need in this work will subsequently find fuller development in the opening pages of Totality and Infinity, in the form of need versus (metaphysical) desire. From an initial analysis of need, which is seen, contrary to popular belief, to be based not on a deficiency in our...