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 denominates essential fatigue. This 'almost' is not enough to distinguish from negative dialectic the dialecticality Levinas admits into the moment of self-positing and, as we shall discover, elsewhere. For by the standard of the principle of contradiction of purely formal logic all dialectic, including that of Kant's dialectical antinomies, Hegel's logic and Hegel's phenomenology, is a dialectic of the almost contradictory. In this respect the dialectic articulated in Levinas's emphasiology is no different.
How does fatigue, as another modality of the moment of beginning, differ from dilatoriness and lassitude? It will be found that many dictionaries enter each of these terms under each of the other two. Etymological dictionaries point in the direction of greater precision. We have observed how etymology suggests that in Levinas's use of the wordparesse is preparatory to the beginning of the act. It is in some way directed upon a future (DEE 39, EE 29). Levinas says 'in some way' because it is not projected toward the future in the manner of Dasein's being ahead of itself in the world. What could be called Levinas's existantials (sic) are more fundamental than the Seinsweisen of the self-styled fundamental ontology of Being and Time. 'The only task this entire work sets itself, he writes, 'is to make explicit the implications of this fundamental situation' (DEE 52, EE 36). The situation here referred to is not a site in the world but the act of positing by which the self, before it finds itself as found (befunden), as described in the analysis of the state of Befindlichkeit conducted in §29 of Being and Time, founds itself as existant. The future of the act upon which dilatoriness is somehow directed is the future of the act of hypostasis. The manner in which it is directed upon the future is abstention, holding back. So there is some sort of oppositing in the act of positing. There is a tension between abstention and what is in some way a pretension. There is what could be called an existantial protension. So if tragedy implies some sort of contradiction, there is some basis for speaking, as Levinas does, of the tragedy of being.
Levinas speaks also of dilatoriness as fatigue of the future. This reinforces the impression dictionaries give that the three terms are casually interchangeable. But by Levinas's own analysis of these terms his description of paresse as 'fatigue with regard to the future' must be understood as a figure of speech. Strictly speaking, the direction of fatigue is not the pre- of preparation but the re- of retardation. Décalage can be an opening up of distance by unwedging. It can also be the putting back of a clock. Fatigue, like dilatoriness, has to do with the act. Whereas dilatoriness is a sort of fear of beginning, fatigue is that in spite of which an effort already begun may continue to exert itself. Fatigue troubles the forward flight of effort. It is that from which, ex, effort forces itself forth. To speak in Bergson's terms, there is no pure élan or pure durée in the travel of the travail of existence. That Erfahrung is conditioned by arrest, stayed, étayée, by stay. For what is under consideration here is an activity that may be inactivity. Levinas is purporting to describe the remainence or maintenance of the existant's being here, whether or not the existant is covering any distance in the space of its being in the world, as according to Heidegger Dasein, the being of distances, is doing all of the time. Hence, when Levinas contrasts dilatoriness with repose he means repose as contrasted with movement in the world, not the existantial repose that is the restlessness of worldly rest and the re-positing of self-positing.
Hence also, to speak the language of Newton, rest and so-called uniform motion in a straight line always have internal forces acting upon them where existantial effort is concerned. Inertial forces are not extrinsic to effort's ex. The so-called dynamism of the élan is not just anticipation of the future. It is the resultant of anticipation and fatigue in the instant of an existant's self-presenting. Fatigue is what accomplishes the di-stance in which the stance of presenting eventuates as existantiation. This distance is essential if the present is constituted by the taking on, the prise en charge, of the present (DEE 49, EE 34), and if the being of the existant being that accomplishes this present and presentative prae-esse is the dialectical assuming of being not heroically, but as the affirming of being in refusing it (DEE 51, EE 35).
Whereas Heidegger (followed by Sartre) says that each Dasein has to be its being, je sein Sein als seiniges zu sein hat (SZ 12), Levinas says of the existant that it exists itself, on s'est (DEE 38, EE 28). In Existence andExistents fatigue, dilatoriness and lassitude are shown to be concrete ways in which this reflexivity of assuming one's existence, which is not yet an assuming of the world or its time, maintains with regard to its own personal existence what with regard to impersonal existence in the essay De l'évasion considered above in chapter 1 was called a need for evasion.
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