ABSTRACT
For Levinas, it is not very helpful to ask about ‘enjoyment or suffering’ as an alternative. Ontologically speaking, existence is both; it has both of these modes. The most important task is not to succumb to some kind of relativism where, depending on individual destiny, one person’s life is enjoyment while another’s is suffering. Levinas’s ethics relies on the insight that life is enjoyment as well as suffering and that they can be distinguished but not separated. “Without egoism, complacent in itself, suffering would not have any sense” (OB 73/93). Suffering is based on the fundamental egoism of enjoyment. Suffering and enjoyment belong together-even though in each individual moment, they seem to exclude each other.1
