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. It is an event, not a state: the very event of the constitution or accomplishment of the self. Lassitude is the mode of appearing of what in his earlier essay Levinas calls the need to escape, the besoin that is sooner than the ontic or ontological soin or souci that in Being and Time Heidegger calls care, the Sorge that diversifies itself into concern with things, Besorgen, and solicitude toward other human beings, Fürsorge.
Heidegger misrepresents care, Levinas maintains. Care is not toward being via being toward nothing. It is not existential-ontological through being existential-meontological. Care is immediately ontological. Without detour by way of the void, care goes direct to the fullness of being, burdened by the embarras de richesse that belongs to the existent that also belongs to it. In this respect more Parmenidean than Heidegger is in his account of the belonging together of Sein and Dasein, Levinas's ontology is also in this respect more Bergsonian. However, whereas according to both Heidegger and Bergson the burden is an inheritance from or of the past, according to Levinas what is irksome is the very accomplishment, event or act of beginning the instant of presence in which the existent subject takes on existence in refusing it. Lassitude before negation and nihilation is the existent's pre-predicative gesture of renegation of existence that cannot be refused. It is therefore an impossible refusal—'almost a contradiction', Levinas might say, as he says of fatigue (DEE 51, EE 35). Almost, perhaps because there is full contradiction only where there is diction as dictum, and there is no such diction prior to predication. But there is confliction, and this allows Levinas to say that the instant of hypostasis, the moment of the positing and presenting of oneself, is accomplished or produced dialectically (DEE 31, EE 42).
This dia-lectic is not a dialectic through tri-dimensional time. It is a dialectic of the instant, of hypostasis en ce moment même.
Does this mean that the dialectic cannot be diachronous? Does not the instant have at least a beginning, a middle and an end? For reflection it does. For connaissance it appears as an enduring process or state. But the instant is the sheer beginning of an act of existence or existance: institution, constitution, creation, birth, naissance. It has an existantial status that Levinas compares with that of those statues by Rodin where what matters is the relation between the formed thing and the unformed matter out of which it grows (DEE 88, EE 55). In the sculpture entitled The Creation of Man' the hand that shapes the clay into human limbs itself merges with and emerges in co-creative concrescence from the mass out of which the handful of clay has been scooped, geschöpft.3 This status is prior to statement and to thoughts, feelings or acts of will as reflected-upon states of mind.
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