Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of
temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both
enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's
thought.
According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which
stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests
on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present
is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of
time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more
or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction,
which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives
from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the
present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of
temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our
authentic temporal understanding.
Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more
significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged,
but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other
that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of
Heidegger's tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and
future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away
from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to
rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present,
without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression
of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that
history visits upon us.
The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of
subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy
introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics,
Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he
accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as
that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation
that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the
feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that
was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his
failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is
structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics
from ethics.
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