“But toward what kind of existence does assimilation tend?” Levinas asks: “Is it reducible to a general sociological phenomenon in which a minority dissolves into a majority that encompasses it and fascinates it with its force and the very value of its being a majority?”23 On one level this question and this text are imbued with the fear that assimilation will lead to annihilation. A worry conditioned by the “twentieth century’s true, terrible, gripping history.” But at another, though related, level, the question provokes an answer concerning two kinds of “being”: “the ontological meaning of this existence of the non-Jewish [modern] world toward which assimilation acceded” and the ontological meaning of being Jewish.24 For Levinas, there is an “affinity among all of the non-religious manifestations of this world, and there is an affinity between these and the Christianity that remains their religion.”25 Thus, according to Levinas, the modern world is essentially Christian at least insofar as the ontological meaning of the non-religious and Christian manifestations are compatible. Levinas describes this meaning as “everyday life” that is “essentially a present: to have to deal with the immediate, to introduce oneself into time not by moving through the entire line of the past, but all at once to ignore history.”26 For Levinas, this emphasis on the present at the expense of the past is the fundamental difference between the ontological meaning of the everyday modern world and the ontological meaning of being-Jewish.
For Levinas, this presentist logic is exemplified by “Alexander’s sword, which does not untie knots, which does not redo the knotting motion in reverse, but which slices,”27 this is to say severs the relation with the past. In Christianity, one is born again in the “power of a new birth promised at each instant.”28 In science, it is the discovery that breaks with our previous understanding of the world “that is, without reference to the origin that was implied, still, by the idea of cause.”29 For the nation-state, it is the revolution where politics are created ex nihilo the calendar restarting at the year one. All are predicated on a logic of the now that breaks with the past in pursuit of a perpetual present. In this way the relation with being in everyday life is “action” in the present that the existential philosophy of a Sartre or Heidegger sees as the basis for freedom.
By contrast, Levinas asserts that Jewish existence is not an existence predicated on the present but “refers to a privileged instant of the past and the Jew’s absolute position within being [that] is guaranteed him by his filiality.”30 This is the moment of election, the moment when choice itself was bestowed upon the Jewish people but that was not itself chosen.
Now here, it is important to point out the ways that Levinas’s presentation of the presentist existence of everyday life in contrast to the privileged instant of the past that conditions Jewish existence can be seen to mirror the structure of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein in his 1927 work Being and Time.31 For Heidegger, the issue is the ways that our everyday existence (what Heidegger refers to as “inauthentic being”) has lost track, forgotten, or has fallen from its original or “authentic” relation with being. It is not a stretch to map Levinas’s characterization of the everyday existence of the modern and presentist world onto the forgetful and inauthentic mode of being in distinction from the original and originary mode of being that characterizes both Heidegger’s authentic existence and Levinas’s being-Jewish. Furthermore, Levinas can be said to replicate the distinction between “authentic” and “inauthentic” Jews that he finds so problematic in the text by Sartre insofar as he equates the assimilationist tendencies of the Jewish people with the “everyday” or “inauthentic” mode of being as opposed to the seemingly forgotten model of election that characterizes the essence of being-Jewish, “authentic” being-Jewish.
The symmetry is not entirely unexpected but nevertheless surprising given that at that very moment, in 1947, Levinas was attempting to break with the philosophy of Heidegger. Levinas had begun to distance himself from Heidegger as early as 1933, the year that Heidegger publicly joined the Nazi party. One can see this in the 1934 article, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” where Levinas presented reason, liberalism, and the Judeo-Christian tradition as a counter to the racialist “philosophy of Hitlerians,” and we must assume that Heidegger is to be included in this last grouping.32 In 1935 Levinas’s critical edge and distinction from Heidegger became sharper and better defined in his essay “On Escape” where Levinas took issue with what he saw as the limiting and ultimately solipsistic nature of Heidegger’s philosophy and advocated the need to think beyond being, beyond traditional concepts of metaphysics, and beyond ontology.33 But in both of these essays and throughout the thirties, Levinas’s interest was primarily philosophical and his confrontation focused on the issue of the limits of ontology. While the possibility of accessing something beyond being (such as in his category of the il y a) was present in Levinas’s prewar work, the resolution of this confrontation was not realized until after the Holocaust and the war. Up until the war, the “need for escape,” Levinas tells us, “leads into the heart of philosophy.”34
But Levinas’s emphasis began to shift during his time in a German prisoner-of-war camp. While in captivity, Levinas began to develop his critique and counter to Heidegger’s ontological philosophy but now, segregated with the other Jewish soldiers in a special section of the camp and made to wear the yellow star on his uniform, this counter was predicated on Levinas’s development of “being-Jewish” as a way to think otherwise than Heidegger.35 In the seven notebooks written between 1940 and 1947, with the majority of entries written before 1945, Levinas sought to develop “Judaism” or “being-Jewish” as a category distinct from Heidegger’s Dasein.36 “To start from Dasein or to start from Judaism,” reads an entry from 1942 just above a note that presents “Judaism as a category.”37 The notebooks are filled with fragments and reflections on the role and place of Judaism in relation to philosophy, and specifically to Heidegger’s philosophy, that foreshadow both his later philosophical work and what have come to be known as his confessional writings.38 In the fifth notebook from 1944 he states that “one essential element of my philosophy—and this is where it is different from the philosophy of Heidegger—is the importance of the Other. Another element is that it follows the rhythm of Judaism.”39
But in the years following the war, and specifically after the news that his family in Kovno, Lithuania, had been killed in the Nazi final solution, Levinas expanded his target beyond Heideggerian ontology to include a reevaluation of the entire Western metaphysical tradition. Thus, in an entry from 1946, Levinas defines his philosophy in terms of his Judaism: “My philosophy is a philosophy of the face to face. The relation with the other without an intermediary. This is Judaism.”40 In the notebooks and in his immediate postwar writings, we see a double move by Levinas. As he began to break definitively with the philosophy of Heidegger and to question the viability of Western philosophy, we also see an evaluation of what it means to be a Jew under Nazi rule and then after Auschwitz. Both of these questions, one announced and one performed, eventually led Levinas to the study of Talmud, which completed the inversion of his prewar emphasis on the primacy of philosophy in the investigation of religion. This inversion of priority began with the substitution of “being-Jewish” for Dasein. After the war and the Shoah, it is this category of “being-Jewish” that Levinas sees as the necessary precondition for the study of philosophy and that is manifest in the “joy of having Torah” (Simchas Torah) that Levinas announces in a note directly below the equation of his own philosophy with Judaism.41
The shift in emphasis is presented, albeit in Sartrian or Heideggerian language, in Levinas’s essay “being-Jewish”: “to do the will of God is in this sense the condition of facticity. The fact is only possible if, beyond its power to choose itself, which cancels out its facticity, it has been chosen, that is elected.”42 But it appears fully formed in his 1964 Talmudic lecture on “The Temptation of Temptation.” Here Levinas examined a text f
rom tractate Shabbat (pages 88a and 88b) about the moment in Exodus when Moses brought the Torah to the Jewish people. Rav Abdima bar Hama bar Hasa instructs us that the Lord said: “If you accept the Torah, all is well, if not here will be your grave.”43 The tract is about receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai but the emphasis is again on a seemingly predetermined choice, this time in response to the Lord’s statement. The issue gets more interesting for Levinas as he tells us that the “temptation of temptation” of which he speaks “may well describe the condition of the west.” This temptation of temptation is the temptation of philosophy, the seduction of reason as a tool by which humans can master and control the world around them. This, too, was a theme in Levinas’s prison notebooks where he opposes the “infallibility” that is the subject of “classical philosophy” to the possibility of “being fallible but not feeble, living in a world where many things escape my comprehension.” To this end, for Levinas “faith = knowledge without mastery.”44
We must also be aware that this temptation of temptation is one that seduced Levinas himself in the years before World War II and led him to Martin Heidegger.45 But if knowledge—philosophical, scientific, or historical—is not the answer, then what is? Here Levinas returns to the text: “The revelation which is at stake in the following text will permit us to discover this order prior to the one in which a thought tempted by temptation is found.”46 This revelation is conditioned by the threat of death but it also is the basis for choice: “The teaching, which the Torah is, cannot come to the human being as a result of a choice. That which must be received in order to make freedom of choice possible cannot have been chosen, unless after the fact.”47 This is the election that Levinas earlier articulated as an essential condition of the ontology of “being-Jewish” in distinction from the mechanisms of “choice” in the philosophy of Sartre and Heidegger. “We must advance a bit further into certain notions that the great talent of Sartre and the genius of Heidegger have substantiated in contemporary philosophy and literature.”48 For Levinas, the “transformation of supreme commitment into a supreme freedom” is indicative of the temptation of temptation insofar as philosophical cunning has supplanted the idea of origin. For Sartre, this leads to the formulation that even “not to commit oneself would still be to commit oneself; not to choose would still be to choose.” For Heidegger, it is the resolute choice in the face of one’s own death that results in authentic Dasein and that can be achieved at any moment. “To cut loose the fact from its origin in this way,” be it via the emphasis on contingency or Geworfenheit that undergirds the supreme freedom in both Sartre and Heidegger, “is precisely to dwell in the modern world, which in its science has abandoned the quest for the origin, and in its religion exalts the present.”49 To Levinas’s mind, Sartre and Heidegger have made “choice” and “commitment” into empty categories by cutting through the Gordian knot rather than untying it. “The past that creation and election introduce into the economy of being cannot be confused with the fatality of a history without absolute origin.”50 By contrast, it is through reflection on election and revelation that we discover the “order prior to the one in which a thought tempted by temptation is to be found.”51 But here we return to the revelation conditioned by the threat of death.
In Levinas’s text from 1947, the “meaning of election, and of revelation understood as election” is not initially pronounced in relation to Moses and Sinai but in relation to the rise of Hitlerism and National Socialism. “The experience of Hitlerism was not sensed by everyone to be one of those periodic returns to barbarism which, all in all, is fundamentally in order, and about which one consoles oneself by recalling the punishment that strikes it. The recourse of Hitlerian anti-Semitism to racial myth reminded the Jew of the irremissibility of his being. Not to be able to flee one’s condition.…”52 This is almost immediately followed by a reference to Isaiah Chapter 53 and while Levinas’s portrayal of the experience of Hitlerian anti-Semitism is understated, the wider implications are clear when read in concert with a notebook entry from 1945 that contains the same biblical reference: “In persecution I rediscover the original meaning of Judaism, its initial emotion. Not just any persecution—I mean absolute persecution that chases down being to seal it in the bare fact of its existence. But it is also that, {(ch. 53, Isaiah)} in this despair that no one can comprehend, the presence of the divine reveals itself.”53
In his later Talmudic reading, election is the consent to Torah that is given before the revelation of the laws of Moses, and that is done so when faced with the alternative of death. God chose the Jewish people. But immediately following the war, Levinas presents the signs of this election in the suffering of the Jewish people faced “with the systematic will to extermination that rendered the Geneva Convention nothing more than a piece of paper.”54 In either case, it is this election conditioned by the possibility of death that distinguishes the ontology of being-Jewish from that of everyday or presentist existence and here again Levinas mimics the Heideggerian structure of authentic Dasein, which can only be achieved through Dasein’s confrontation with the possibility of its own death. For Heidegger, death is one’s ownmost possibility, but it is also the possibility of the impossible as the confrontation with one’s own finitude. “In Dasein there is undeniably a constant ‘lack of totality’ which finds an end with death. This ‘not-yet’ ‘belongs’ to Dasein as long as it is.”55 Dasein does not complete itself until the moment of death, when all possibilities disappear for Dasein. After death Dasein has no more possibilities; it is completed, which is to say it has finished.56 Levinas agrees with Heidegger’s presentation of Dasein as a temporal construct but does not agree with Heidegger’s understanding of the finitude of being localized in the singular Dasein as defined in Being-toward-death and thus the “not yet” that signifies the lack of totality takes on a different significance for Levinas.
As a prisoner of war, faced with the pressing possibility of death at any moment, Levinas came to divine a parallel between his own condition and that of Abraham as he rode out to sacrifice his son. Levinas understood this period of delay before the terrible event to come as a time of reflection and meditation. “It is because of this [Abraham’s] journey and the time that it took that the test has meaning. It is because of the misery suffered by the Jewish prisoner that he could become aware of Judaism and the seeds of a future Jewish life that transports him who only knew torture, death and Kiddush-Hashem [a martyr’s sanctification of the divine name].”57 Thus in captivity Levinas came to fashion an understanding of the ontology of being-Jewish as a temporal construct between an elected past and a “future Jewish life” to come. Whereas the Heideggerian structure is predicated on the finite temporal totality of Dasein as a whole, Levinas’s presentation of “being-Jewish” eschews completion in that it is always situated in the “not yet” of an “infinite time behind us” and the promise of a messianic future to come.58 This move also allowed Levinas to differentiate this ontology of “being-Jewish” from the ontologies proffered by Heidegger and Sartre in that the Jewish “fact” of existence “receives the structure of his personhood from election. In fact, there is a contradiction in the notion of ‘ego’ [‘moi’] that defines this notion. The ego is posited as a simple part of reality and, at the same time, as endowed with the exceptional privilege of the totality. The ego is equivalent to the whole of being, of which it constitutes nevertheless only one part. This is a contradiction that is overcome in the emotion of election.”59 Thus, for Levinas “being-Jewish” is a privilege and election but only insofar as it announces the ethical imperative of understanding the ego as commencing from a position of a responsibility and not absolute freedom.
But this reconciliation of the finite ego with infinite being is only possible as an alternative to the “presentist” or “everyday” understanding of existence (itself a sort of annihilation by assimilation) where the finite ego retains its dominant position. In turn the move requires that Levinas refute Heidegger’s presen
tation of Dasein’s radical finitude as demonstrated in “being-toward-death” via Levinas’s own presentation of the infinite time of transcendence and the possibility of an election, which is the ontological condition of being Jewish.60
It is this ontology of being-Jewish that Jacques Derrida finds both instructive and obstructive. Derrida phrases this in terms of a question:
How, and by what right, can one distinguish for example between that which, in my experience, touches in part my “being-jew” at its most intimate, its most obscure, its most illegible (however one takes “being-jew,” and later I will in fact complicate the stakes of this expression—one cannot do everything at once) and in part that which, let us say, seems to belong in a more legible fashion to my work, the public work of a good or a bad student, which does not necessarily, nor always, bear visible traces of my “being-jew,” whether it concerns itself with writing, teaching, ethics, law or politics, or civic behavior, or whether it concerns itself with philosophy or literature.61
At one level, this distinction between a public everyday existence and a private individualized existence evokes the distinctions offered by Levinas to counter Sartre. The everyday public existence of a social, a political, or a professional life bears no obvious mark of “being-Jewish” (they are just another painting or literature) but nonetheless at its most intimate, its most illegible, the ontological category remains.
But on another level, Derrida challenges this distinction when he asks by what right one can distinguish between the two. Derrida brackets this question in order to “act for awhile as if these two orders were distinct, to seek to determine later on [not yet], here or elsewhere, at least as a disputable hypothesis, the rule of what passes [ce qui passe] from one to the other, the rule of what occurs [ce qui se passe] between the two, and for which I would have, in sum, to respond.”62 It is in this “in between” that Derrida finds his response to the “Jewish Question.” “Yes, it is a matter, once again, of responding. And yes, of responding ‘yes.’ ”63 Here, too, the work of Levinas is in play as this statement echoes one Derrida made on the occasion of Levinas’s death on December 27, 1995. In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida cites Levinas’s lecture on “The Temptation of Temptation,” expressing his debt to “all the great themes to which the thought of Emmanuel Levinas has awakened us, that of responsibility first of all, but of an ‘unlimited’ responsibility that exceeds and precedes my freedom, that of an ‘unconditional yes.’ ”64 In Adieu, this unconditional yes is articulated (by both Levinas and Derrida) as a movement stronger than death that in this way “sets out on a path that ran counter to the philosophical tradition extending from Plato to Heidegger.”65 Thus, we must keep the earlier reference to the “Temptation of Temptation” in mind as Derrida continues his response:
The Trace of God Page 7