ABSTRACT
CONCRETENESS More than once Of Evasion couples together the nouns that appear in the title De l’existence à l’existant of the book published in 1947 incorporating a discussion of the there-is, the il y a, published as a separate article in 1946. Just as this book, published in English under the title Existence and Existents, is announced by Of Evasion, so it in turn postpones but explicitly promises the more detailed analyses of time and the Other begun in Le temps et l’autre (Time and the Other) which will also be published in 1947. In Existence and Existents ‘Le temps et l’Autre’ is the subheading of a brief section only, following one that claims to be only on the way to time, ‘Vers le temps’. Levinas is touching there on topics which, as he says of eternity in Totality and Infinity, exceed the limits of the present study (DEE 147, EE 85). The approach is again provisional. It is as though Levinas is writing within the framework of Being and Time in order the better to engage with it and explode it at its seams. Heidegger advises his prospective reader that his study is prospective: ‘Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of “Being” and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.’1 It could be said that any aim is pro-visional, vorläufig, and that Heidegger’s adjective is redundant. The redundancy would be avoided if the provisionality of the aim meant that the aim is not the ultimate one, but one adopted for the time being. That is how one might describe the aim of an analysis of Dasein that will give way to an analysis of being as such, as the third division of the first part was going to do under the title Time and Being’. That too is how one might describe the aim of the first division of the first part of Being and Time, which is concerned with the existential analysis of the being of Dasein and qualified as preparatory (vorbereitend) in the index of the book in relation to the second division of the same part which proceeds to express the preceding analysis in terms of
temporality. That progression at least is mirrored in the agenda drawn up for himself by Levinas.
