The Intersubjectivity of Time: Levinas and Infinite Responsibility

5. From Ethical Time to Political Time

133 FIVE From Ethical Time to Political Time The view of intersubjective time offered by Levinas can be considered as a way to satisfy the discontent with the Bergsonian-Heideggerian egological, synchronic time. This is particularly relevant to diachronic time, which is successful in going beyond the limited viewpoint of the individual. But does Levinas actually succeed in presenting a view that bridges the gap we inherit from Bergson and Heidegger? Does not even Levinas’s interpretation of diachronic time leave us still dissatisfied to some extent? Bergson and Heidegger are confined to the egological perspective of time, and for the most part consider our relations with other people as occurring within the order of public time. Levinas corrects this by understanding time precisely as intersubjective , as constituted through the relationship between the other and the self. But this raises the concern as to whether a view of time grounded in the face-to-face encounter, in my responsible relation with another individual, provides a satisfactory approach; or is it again a limited view, one that does not involve the community of people? The purpose of this chapter is to extend and enrich Levinas’s view of time, and present an original interpretation that recognizes time as constituted through our human existence but also acknowledges its collective aspect. THE QUESTION OF COMMUNAL TIME The ethical relations described in Totality and Infinity as a faceto -face encounter, and in Otherwise than Being as involving proximity and substitution, focus on the subject’s relation with a singular 134 The Intersubjectivity of Time other. But we should keep in mind that “next to the one who is an other to me, is ‘another other’ to me” (EN 229). The human society is not a society of two, but is a complex network of people and relations so that the consequences of one’s acts always to some extent go beyond one’s intentions. Levinas recognizes this difficulty and for this reason he introduces the idea of the third party, le tiers.1 This idea appears already in texts that precede Totality and Infinity, such as “The Ego and the Totality” (1954), but it is developed in his late texts and interviews. My responsibility for the concrete other is not limited to this particular individual, but neither is it a general categorical imperative. Rather, the other I encounter here and now is the disclosure of the possibility of additional unique others. The third person, like the other, is “a neighbor, a face, an unreachable alterity ” (IR 214), so I am tied in an obligation to a variety of others for whom I am infinitely responsible. “Starting from this third person, is the proximity of human plurality,” but this raises a problem: “Who in this plurality comes first?” (TO 106). If I listen to the third, I am at the risk of doing wrong to the second one. Levinas admits that within the multiplicity of humanity it is impossible to establish a face-to-face ethical relation of incomparable individuals, unique to unique, and he believes this is the role of the state (IR 193–94). So it seems that since in a society the individuals are comparable, we are forced to leave the realm of ethics and return to the realm of ontology, which Levinas aims at overcoming. This implies that in the collective society , alterity is covered over. Yet, for Levinas “the saying as contact is the spirit of society” (OB 160); the situation of equality between the different members of a society is founded upon the original structure of asymmetry and nonreciprocity. But here we are faced with the difficulty of describing the relation between the political and the ethical—of sketching the move from ethics to politics, from the other to the community, from asymmetry to equality.2 We are faced with the question whether such a transition requires abandoning Levinas’s ethical demand of alterity, of difference. This difficulty affects the possibility of expanding intersubjective time to a collective view of time. Given the absence of the idea of the From Ethical Time to Political Time 135 third party from Levinas’s discussion of time, indicates that Levinas ignores the essentiality of the move toward a collective, political time. Another problem involves the role of contemporaneous time in his thought. It may seem that like Bergson and Heidegger before him, Levinas considers collective time as a degradation of...