ABSTRACT
THE MOMENT OF WAITING Presencing, it has just been noted, is described by Levinas as a perpetual birth. The perpetual, from peteo, to seek, is some kind of quest. Petition, quest, questioning mean waiting. So too does Gegenwart, the usual German word for the present which means literally a waiting against or toward. This German word is omnipresent in Being and Time. It is widely employed by Husserl in the phrases lebendige Gegenwart and lebendige Selbstgegenwart to be found on pages that are seminal for Levinas and often referred to by him, for instance-an instance particularly relevant to our topic here-in his ‘La philosophic et l‘éveil’ and ‘De la conscience a la veille’ (EN 101-2, CWC 212-13, DVI 34-61). This sense of at-tensionality, the manifest sense of the French attendre, is hinted at in the English adverb ‘presently’. It is not obviously present in Levinas’s le présent. Perhaps it could be argued that it is pre-sent in the original prae-. Whether or not this is argued, it should be recalled that Levinas’s articulation of the modes of this presencing parousia, suspended gerundially between verb and substantive, include dilatory and preparatory par-esse, ‘deferment and delay’. In the moment of presencing momentum is fused with an inclination to stay. It is the moment of waiting to see. And of waiting to hear. The one after the other or the other after the one. Or simultaneously. We must wait and see or hear. It is too early to tell what priority, posteriority and posterity can possibly-or impossibly —be in Levinas’s genealogy of ethics.
