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

Five: Between Four Walls

141 FIVE Between Four Walls Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history. —Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity INTRODUCTION Levinas asks in the preface of his own book, “Can one speak of a book as though one had not written it, as though one were its first critic?” (TI 29). Answering this question in the affirmative, the preface to Totality and Infinity presents both a first reading and an initial critique of the work itself. The preface may also indicate that a transition has occurred between the first lines of the book and the ones written last. The first sections of Totality and Infinity abound with spatial imagery , which tends to relegate the experience of time to the economic time that is still a function of interiority and is designated as “history.” However, the last sections of the book renew the use of terms like messianic time and eschatology while configuring the transcendence of the other increasingly in terms of time. This transition across the very pages of Levinas’s book is masked by the use of “eschatology” in the preface. Michael Morgan, for instance, claims that “Levinas does not delay introducing the notion of eschatology in Totality and Infinity.”1 Morgan’s claim is technically correct; Levinas knows that readers will turn first to his preface. But if our interest lies in the development of Levinas’s unique understanding of time, it is significant that the eschatological tone of the preface reflects the final portion of Totality and Infinity. These are the words written last. 142 Levinas’s Philosophy of Time Levinas reinforces the sense of transition with this statement: “How far we are in this preface from the theme of the work announced by its first sentence! Already there is question of so many other things, even in these preliminary lines, which ought to state without detours the intent of the work undertaken. Philosophical research in any case does not answer questions like an interview, an oracle, or wisdom” (TI 29). Furthermore, Levinas concludes the preface with a remark about the “very essence of language” in which his prefatory reflections find themselves situated. A preface consists of “unsaying the said” and of “attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights” (30). It invites us to see the ways that its words already unsettle the book that we, having encountered only the preface, have not yet read. By conceiving of the preface as the final portion of Totality and Infinity, as it came from Levinas’s hand, we can detect the early swells of the final and enduring wave of Levinas’s thinking about time: diachrony. My examination of Totality and Infinity will track the growing tension between the metaphors Levinas invokes to demonstrate alterity. Levinas clearly favored time in his 1947 publications, but in Totality and Infinity he favors spatial configurations. This strain will be evident in the surprising limitations that arise from his references to light, darkness, space, time, distance, interiority, and exteriority. The title of this chapter, “Between Four Walls,” is taken from Levinas’s discussion “The Dwelling,” which is the most spatial and the most problematic section of this book. It is in this section that Levinas utilizes the trope of the feminine to make possible the ethical relation. The pervasive use of spatial language in Totality and Infinity leads to the gender-related consequences of this emphasis, yet we find promising solutions and developments in the direction of time that occur in the conclusion and celebrated preface of the book. The complexity and intricacies of Totality and Infinity defy any facile summary. This is a text of such breadth and depth that 50 years after its initial publication it continues to generate intense interest, exegesis, and ongoing scholarship. Totality and Infinity established Levinas as an important voice in twentieth-century philosophy, Between Four Walls 143 allowing him to transition into official academic positions in the French academy.2 It is an unusual book in the history of philosophy in that its pages are full of vivid images alongside complicated philosophical formulations. Much of Levinas’s style relies on the alignment of philosophy with practical and embodied language that philosophers typically avoid. But this is a difficult book, whose ideas vacillate between subtle and stunning, covert and overt. Levinas draws the reader in with the vivid language...