Toward the Outside: Concepts and Themes in Emmanuel Levinas

10. PROXIMITY AND TEMPORALITY

10. PROXIMITY AND TEMPORALITY “Proximity” and “temporality” are both aspects of the relation between the same and the other. Proximity, the “non-indifference” of one person to the other, is deployed as temporality, which Levinas understands as a continuity across disjuncture. The Centrality of Proximity Proximity is the field that Levinas opens between the same (or the subject) and the other, in which the “intrigue of the infinite” unfolds. It evokes a spatiality of a rather abstract nature since it is the distance between the poles of a relation. The relation between subject and other was central to Levinas’s philosophy long before the term proximity itself emerged in his writing. Proximity appears only seven times (of which six are relevant) in Totality and Infinity (1961), compared to a whopping 259 times in Otherwise than Being (1974). Of particular interest, therefore, will be the examination of the shorter pieces published in the interval between these two major works. What are the inner dynamics of Levinas’s evolving thought over those years that move the concept of proximity to such prominence? The Development of the Concept As Robert Bernasconi notes,1 there is a link between Levinas’s decision to use the word neighbor (prochain) alongside the earlier word Stranger (Étranger) and the ascendancy of the notion 91 of proximity (proximité). Bernasconi draws our attention to an interesting footnote to the essay “Enigma and Phenomenon” (1965) where Levinas writes, “Formerly we refused this term [prochain], which seemed to suggest a community by neighborhood. Now we retain in it the abruptness of the disturbance, which characterizes a neighbor inasmuch as he is the first one to come along.”2 Is there really any “abruptness” in the term neighbor, or any implication that the neighbor is “the first to come along”? In any case, Levinas intends to bestow such a meaning upon the term. French has two words that correspond to the English word neighbor. Levinas is not discussing the term voisin, which is the normal term for the person who lives close by, but the term prochain, which is used in the Bible to indicate one’s neighbor in the sense of one’s fellow man (or woman). A relevant passage from “Transcendence and Height,” which is from Levinas’s response to a question in the ensuing discussion of that lecture, will help us understand the reasons for his initial rejection of the term. A certain Minkowski has just pointed out, in opposition to Levinas’s notion of the absolute difference between self and other, that there is a lot of similarity between human beings, and that the notion of solidarity with one’s fellow human being arises naturally out of this similarity. Levinas responds: In my opinion, transcendence is only possible when the Other (Autrui) is not initially the fellow human being (semblable) or the neighbor (prochain); but when it is the very distant, when it is Other, when it is the one with whom initially I have nothing in common, when it is an abstraction. In all this affirmation of the concrete from which philosophy today lives, one fails to recognize that the relation with the other (autrui) is an element of abstraction which pierces the continuity of the concrete, a relation with the Other qua Other, denuded, in every sense of the term. Consequently , it is necessary to avoid the words neighbor (prochain) and fellow human being (semblable), which establish so many things in common with my neighbor (voisin) and so many similarities 92 Part Two: Themes with my fellow human being. Transcendence seemed to me to be the point of departure for our concrete relations with the Other (Autrui); all the rest is grafted on top of it. That is why the transcendent is a notion which seems to me primary.3 This “element of abstraction which pierces the continuity of the concrete” is certainly a remarkable sort of abstraction. It is not an abstraction in the etymological sense of that term (abstrahere , to drag out of), which tacitly assumes a prior, fuller empirical context from which certain formal elements are removed and isolated for thematization. If my relations with the other are “grafted on top of it” it would be closer in spirit to those transcendent realities Plato called “ideas.” Metaphysical, it is beyond (or on the hither side) of the physical. In this intervention it is not difficult to perceive...