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From Rosenzweig to Levinas Philosophy of War Stéphane Mosès 1 It seems that through the work of Franz Rosenzweig, and subsequently that of Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth century has seen the birth of a radically new conception of ethics. It appeared against the horizon of the two great historical catastrophes that left their mark upon that century , the First World War, in the case of Rosenzweig, and in that of Levinas, the Second World War and the massive extermination of the Jews by Nazi Germany. Rosenzweig’s generation experienced the First World War as the collapse of an age-old order bearing testimony to the stability of a European civilization that, wars and revolutions notwithstanding , had managed to guarantee a minimum of political equilibrium between nations and an appearance of civic tranquility in society, in which mankind seemed to occupy its natural place in the general harmony of the world. Rosenzweig’s thought was born of that collapse. For him, the battlefields of 1914–18 marked not only the end of an old political order but also the ruin of any civilization founded, since the Greeks, on a belief in the capacity of the Logos to illuminate the ultimate rationality of the real. In his view, the entire Western philosophical tradition could be summed up in the affirmation that the world is intelligible , that it is ultimately transparent to reason, and that man himself only achieves his dignity to the degree that he is a part of that rational order. For Rosenzweig, it was precisely those two propositions that the First World War denied forever. Faced with the spectacle of the mad carnage to which the nations of Europe gave themselves over—the very nations that had embodied the philosophical ideal of a world ordered by the Logos—it was no longer possible to affirm that the real is rational or that in the light of reason original chaos is necessarily transformed 2 20 FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINAS into an intelligible cosmos. Moreover, the individual, who was supposed to blossom forth as an autonomous subject in a world regulated by reason, becomes, in a lethal logic instituted by warfare, a simple object of history, a negligible quantity, a faceless number, swept away despite himself into the whirlwind of battle, along with millions of others. The Star of Redemption, conceived between 1916 and 1918 on the Balkan front and written between July 1918 and February 1919, opens with the evocation of an experience at the outer limits of the extreme: the anguished cry of the individual before the threat of imminent death. That cry expresses at once the instinctive revolt of man against the violence done to him (in this particular case, the violence of history), the affirmation of a basic, obvious truth: his irreducible identity as subject and the sudden collapse of all the philosophical constructions intended to make him forget the horror of death. It is at the moment when the individual, defined as a simple part of a whole, is threatened with annihilation that the subject awakens to the full consciousness of his uniqueness. This paradoxical reversal, in which the sudden illumination of the consciousness of man’s mortal condition reveals to him the irrefutable reality of his personal existence, represents both the original experience from which Rosenzweig’s thought emerged and the rhetorical figure that permanently subtends the unfolding of his system. That is what specifically initiates the very possibility of ethics, or more precisely, that is the point from which, beyond the violence that seems to make the very idea of ethics obsolete, the meta-ethical dimension of the subject emerges. Forty years after the publication of The Star of Redemption, the preface to Totality and Infinity, which may be said to serve as the overture to the general themes of that work, begins with a meditation on war. War is seen as primal reality, casting doubt on classic philosophy’s claim to found a universal morals. The homage Levinas pays to The Star of Redemption, ‘‘too often present in this book to be cited,’’1 confirms the impression produced by a comparative reading of the two texts. The preface to Totality and Infinity was conceived as a reworking, in a new historical and philosophical context, of the introduction to The Star of Redemption—prolonging it, echoing it, after the manner of a variation on the original theme. What is philosophically common to these two...

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