A New Way Of Posing An Old Problem
With hindsight it can be seen that the essay On Evasion published in 1935 announces the issue with which all Levinas's philosophical writings will be preoccupied the issue of the issue from ontology. Why does he state already in this essay that 'the ancient problem of ontology' has to be posed in a new way Why does he consider the new way of posing it attempted by Heidegger in Being and Time 1927 still not new enough 1 Why is Levinas so concerned with the new A historical answer to this...
Lassitude
Lassitude appears as such a state when reflected upon by ontic psychology. What Levinas calls 'phenomenological excavation', phenomenological fouille, uncovers below weariness with regard to particular things or events in the world, below even world-weariness, that is to say, below weariness of the world as a whole, weariness of being as such and of the existent subject's own existence. This lassitude prior to letting-be Seinlassen is internal to and constitutive of the subject's self-position....
Notes
1 Plato, Republic VII, 509b6-b10 Phaedrus 276a5-a9. 2 De Generatione animalium II, 3, 736b28. See also De Anima III, 5, 430a10. 1 M.Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th edn, T bingen, Niemeyer, 1953 trans. J. Macquarrie and E.Robinson, Being and Time, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967. 2 R.Kearney ed. , Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers The Phenomenological Heritage, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984, p. 49 R.Cohen ed. , Face to Face with Levinas, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press,...
Fatigue
Like essential dilatoriness and lassitude, essential fatigue is the self s resistance to existence, a refusal that as such presupposes existence. So the moment of polemic between the existant and its existence can be at most only almost contradictory. It can be only that also because in this very same momentary Augenblick see the first section of chapter 5 below there is, although not a lapse into two moments of time by which contradiction might be forestalled, a certain lateness that Levinas...
Dilatoriness
So when Levinas speaks of the accomplishment of the beginning it is to the beginning as itself accomplishment that he refers, not to something that succeeds the beginning, of which the beginning falls short. In his phrase 'the accomplishment of the beginning' the genitive is subjective. The words denote beginning as accomplishment, and accomplishment as at once realization and revelation. The ambiguity that the preface to Totality and Infinity will discern in production is discerned in...
Between Sleeping And Waking
Sleep, hence consciousness, but not insomnia, is the promise of an exit from the oppression of the il y a of existence. Levinas sometimes compares sleep to the interspace occupied by the gods according to the Epicureans. It is significant that a polytheism is in question here and that the gods are meta-cosmic, nowhere in the world.2 In an essay no less significantly entitled 'God and Philosophy' to which we shall return in later chapters, the very idea of the meta is said to come from what...