Existence and Existents by Emmanuel Levinas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’m not well versed in Heidigger’s work. And as for Levinas, I’ve avoided him for as long as I have heard of him.
This work however, is one of his first, and well worth the read. Much of it stems from his working closely with Heidigger. Heidigger restarted after the mess Hegel and Kant left, understanding that one cannot think through Being, he instead started to think around Being. This book works in much the same way, as Levinas begins with a critique of Heidigger and ends where it seems, he will work through on his own issues separate from Heidigger.
What was surprising for me, is that Levinas develops the same dialectical twists to talk around being as do other masterful dialecticians, such as Lacan, Zizek and the like. Although Levinas first starts with moods, explains the originary ground of such feelings like fatigue in order to highlight where one ends and the world begins, as a relationship to the world, Levinas quickly establishes being as independent of the world, as the ground of the self that is not incorporatable by the self or the world… ending with the there is, the limit of what can be thought… the same limit that Kant reached poised at the limit of the phenomenological.
This brief excursion (brief in page numbers) then takes a sharper turn as Levinas expands on how the self relates to the world in the last chapter. I’m not certain if hypostasis is a concept he turns towards later on in his career, but this last chapter is again, the respelling of the limits of existent in various axial dimensions, such as space, time and of course, language. His rhetorical device is dialectics without being obviously enamored with negation but he spells out a particular parallel between the I, and the present moment vs the existent and existence as a field. This thought remains the limit of the rest of the book, where the irruption in anonymous being of locationalization itself is best expressed temporally as the engagement in being on the basis of the present, which breaks and then ties back to the thread of infinity, contain a tension and a contracting. It is an event. The evanescence of an instant which makes it able to be a pure present, not to receive its being from a past is not the gratuitous evanescence of a game or a dream. A subject is not free like the wind, but already has a destiny which it does not get from a past or a future, but from its present. If commitment in being thereby escape the weight of the past (the weight that was seen in existence), it involves a weight of its own which its evanescence does not lighten, and against which a solitary subject, who is constituted by the instant is powerless. Time and the other are necessary for the liberation from it.
In other words, not only is each being anonymous, but it is also a unique and indistinct instant, a brief encounter in infinity like all other encounters, only this one is mine. You see that Levinas is suspended between questions of one and infinity, unable, at least in this book, to resolve the very question he succinctly ends with: The event which we have been inquiring after is antecedent to that placing. It concerns the meaning of the very fact that in Being there are beings.
Very nice place to end. But one curious thing he brought up at the very beginning regarding how existence and existents were separated: that the existent and existence are understood as separate because life needs to be struggled for; that existence needs to be earned, be it at the level of 19th century biology or immanent within the economic order. While he set this as the stage for outlining fatigue, I think this young Levinas could have been better served to understand how the order of a priori necessarily arises as a special case of the a posteriori… but that is a different approach, a different school, one of the domain of semiotics and dialecticians of the negative (such as Zizek). It will be interesting to read more Levinas and see how this book fits into his work about transcendence and the encounter with the Other.
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