Levinas's Philosophy of Time: Gift, Responsibility, Diachrony, Hope

Four: The Recession of Time

108 108 FOUR The Recession of Time Creation is the fact that intelligibility precedes me. —Emmanuel Levinas, “Freedom and Command” The 1950s present a fascinating turn in the development of Levinas’s unique philosophy of time. Returning to Jacques Derrida’s analogy that compares Levinas’s thought to waves crashing higher on the shore, we might say that the tide recedes for nearly a decade in terms of Levinas’s development of his concept of time. He declares, as the thesis of his 1947 lectures series, that time is “the very relationship of the subject with the other person” (TO 39). But Levinas then seems to mysteriously suspend his deliberations on time for years on end. The contrast is surprising. In the dozens of papers and presentations that Levinas makes in the 1950s, time is rarely mentioned and even less often invoked with any philosophical force, making way for other concerns. This is not to suggest that Levinas discontinues his reflections on time entirely or that he reverses his earlier positions on the alterity of time and the other. Indeed, the extensive use of time in Totality and Infinity (1961) indicates that Levinas continued to develop his unique understanding of time. Nevertheless, the 1950s present an intriguing complication to the development of Levinas’s philosophy of time. Keeping Totality and Infinity in mind, Levinas’s development of time in the 1950s can also be observed in a few paradigmatic essays including “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (1951), “Freedom and Command” (1953), “The Ego and the Totality” (1954), “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity” (1957), and “Lévy-Bruhl and Contemporary The Recession of Time 109 Philosophy” (1957). However, the lack of explicit work on the concept of time may contribute to some of the blind spots in Totality and Infinity. As we will see later on, by neglecting the concept of time, Levinas slips into spatial and ontological imagery, leading to the troubling analogy of the “dwelling” and its problematic expression of the feminine. Levinas attempts to addresses these problems in Otherwise than Being, in large part by returning to some of his early reflections on time, if only to radically eclipse them. “IS ONTOLOGY FUNDAMENTAL?” Though Levinas will interact with a host of different concepts and thinkers in this decade, his writings most often and most expansively address the insufficiency of Heideggerian ontology. If anything, it seems that Levinas has made his disagreements with Heidegger on the concept of time clear in Time and the Other as well as Existence and Existents, and so he now directs his attention toward the nature of ontology, and particularly what he deems to be Heideggerian ontology. Levinas publishes the important essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (BPW 1–10), in which he attempts to demonstrate the perils of positioning ontology as the foundation for philosophy.1 This exercise is essentially a questioning of Heidegger, or at least of early Heidegger, and it is noteworthy for its explicit appeal to responsibility . Whatever ontology relates to, and whatever we may say about our comprehension of being, ontology simply fails to sufficiently consider the relation with the other. “The relation to the other person is therefore not ontology,” writes Levinas (7). Particularly noteworthy in this essay is the appearance of the face as a spatial and visual phenomena , which begins a steady ascent to the forefront of Levinas’s philosophy, along with the initial signs of Levinas’s shift away from his earlier fixation on time. Throughout his career, Levinas overlays his philosophical discourse with countless metaphors and analogies. Perhaps more than other philosophers, Levinas is aware of the inability of language to articulate the phenomena toward which he gestures. This tendency also allows us to track the notable shift in his vocabulary away from 110 Levinas’s Philosophy of Time temporal imagery and into spatial imagery during this period. The differentiation from Heidegger that Levinas stresses in “Is Ontology Fundamental?” is important in that it lays the groundwork for several sections of Totality and Infinity, but the essays from the 1950s also demonstrate that Levinas nearly abandons the use of temporal metaphors in favor of spatial ones. So focused on his critique of Heidegger’s ontology, Levinas even seems to have forgotten the caution he voices in Time and the Other, where he worries about the use of the term exteriority because of its spatial overtones. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Levinas repeatedly uses the spatial language...