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6 Hearing, Patiently: Time and Salvation in Kierkegaard and Levinas David Kangas and Martin Kavka Martin Kavka So much for ideas. When Aaron Simmons and David Wood first asked us to contribute individual essays to this volume, we thought that it might be more effective to write together or, more precisely, converse in public. If the editors of this volume want to establish a relationship of neighborliness between Kierkegaard and Levinas by setting up a conversation between them, what better way to accomplish this than to embark on a conversation between us? After all, we have been neighbors quite literally, with our offices twenty feet apart, and team-teaching on a regular basis. What’s more, one of us publishes primarily on Kierkegaard while the other publishes primarily on Levinas.1 But projects go awry.When we began conceptualizing this essay, I was away from Tallahassee while you were there. And once I returned, you left Tallahassee for an indefinite period of time. What could such distance philosophically produce, now that our neighborliness has become mediated by telephone calls and emails with attached files? My instinct is to think of neighborliness as something which moves toward that which transcends; the biblical command to love the neighbor is part of a way of life that imitates or emulates divine holiness and therefore counts as historical progress, a development that leaves the “is” behind and moves toward the “ought.” Nevertheless, leaving behind the “is” is dangerous, and invites all sorts of flights of fancy that would allow one the luxury of believing that one is being neighborly without having to cash out that belief in practice. How do I know that your absence will not lead me to turn you into someone you’re not? On what grounds can I hope that this will actually be a conversation, and not simply two people talking past each other? Email hasn’t been a great boon to philosophical conversations. In this regard , I think of a 1998 email exchange between Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo that they published as “Postmodernism and the Desire for God.” By the end of the published transcript, Wyschogrod and Caputo have agreed that in our age of virtuality the language of religion is aptly described as an “erotics 126 David Kangas and Martin Kavka of transcendence” which is incarnated in ethical acts. However, Caputo seems in his final comments to be content to think of religion only in this manner. Wyschogrod both agrees and disagrees with Caputo; she affirms the ecstatic but also critiques it by invoking a Levinasian suspicion of such erotics,“this enthusiasm whose religious and secular versions have been implicated in the horrors of the twentieth century.”2 Caputo leaves Wyschogrod with the last word here. This is certainly polite of him, but the exchange comes to a crashing halt just when they could talk about how they might respond to this difference between them—a difference revolving around how the abstraction of religious desire can maintain itself and attend to the reality of genocide. The critique of metaphysics has not absolved us from the problem of metaphysics and historicity , to invoke the title of Emil Fackenheim’s brilliant little essay.3 And so their conversation—their own neighborliness—ends, just when the reader begins to wonder whether they have really heard each other at all. At this moment, I impatiently want to break the limits of space and history in order to have a conversation with you that could be protected from such risks. This is impossible, of course, and it most likely will not surprise you to read that my reaction to this has only served to heighten my already quite significant taste for melodrama and camp. This time, I have been listening repeatedly over the last months to various recordings of Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” (so often bastardized in English as “If You Go Away”). On one hand, this chanson is to my mind the modern hallmark of the denial of difference and the denial of time. The relationship between the narrator and the beloved who is about to leave can only be salvaged by attending to an imperative to ignore all temporality: “Don’t leave me. One must forget all that can be forgotten, all that already slips away [Ne me quitte pas/Il faut oublier tout peut s’oublier/Qui s’enfuit déjà].” On the other hand, it heightens the stakes of the salvation of the...

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