“Catching Sight of the Permanent Possibility of War:” Images of Totality and Words of Peace

摘要

In Totality and Infinity (1969), a landmark critique of the Western philosophical tradition, Emmanuel Levinas poses the provocative question: u22Does not lucidity, the mindu27s openness on the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of waru22 (21)? Levinas asks, in other words, whether knowledge of the truth as truth has been u22seen” in the western philosophical tradition? is in some fundamental way related to the war.