Levinas's Weak Messianism in Time and Flesh, or The Insistence of Messiah Ben David

摘要

From 1947 through 1974, Levinas worked out a first philosophy against fundamental ontology and in a very conscious tension with conceptions of messianism that turn on an other “time” or a “uchrony” of a future of promise or hope. In Existence and Existents, Levinas first began reworking the phenomenology of subjective time toward an interpretation of the “transcendental I” as embodied and caught up in cycles of its own repetitive birth to consciousness (awaking) and escape from consciousness (in sleep, in erotic life, escapism). This “I” is more than an “open” or a “Da-”; it arises from the neutrality of existence, masters and enjoys its world in a present time, anxious about tomorrow. Unfolding the uniqueness of the present brought Levinas to philosophies of the instant and to a different source of transcendence in the present, namely the other person who, like death itself, is neither objectively graspable nor escapable. Because this Other affects a me at a sensuous level, bringing to our encounter something I do not experience in solitude, our conceptions of the hopeful place or moment of redemption are shifted from some future to a present instant. For the uniqueness of the now-moment to come to light in phenomenology, a difference must be secured between the upsurge of sensibility and the flowing, essentially unified and formal time that Husserl had identified with the transcendental ego of phenomenology (thereby formalizing the “times” of bodily sensation, and momentary affects). The question thus arose for Levinas: how can we rethink hope, with responsibility, in light of the double nature of so-called phenomenological time? In answering this question, Levinas considerably reworked the Heideggerian heritage of phenomenology, even as he began to weave his “ethics” together with a profoundly corporeal understanding of Jewish messianism, secular and religious. The author of this article argues that Levinas, long before he is taken for an ethical thinker, is a unique thinker of messianic consciousness. The author compares the way he reopens messianic suffering and remembrance with Walter Benjamin's weak messianic force. We have, the author believes, in Levinas, what may be the most fragile, perhaps the ultimate form of messianic hope, located in a rethinking of the present and the intersubjective body as informal conditions of possibility of a conscience both subjective and intersubjective.