ABSTRACT
But how are we to justify the violence of this formula and to protect it from the misinterpretation of a gnostic reading (I am evidently thinking of Simone Weil)? The first response goes without saying, which states that “…relation with the Other is… not ontology.”2 For, I must insist, Levinas’s point of departure comes under the heading of ontology, although by way of transgression: “The analyses that we are going to undertake will not be anthropological, but ontological.”3 But this assertion itself remains to be justified. It has in fact been so justified since 1946, by the formula of “the anonymity of existing.”4 It can be understood in reference to the most traditional definition of being in metaphysics, from Duns Scotus, Suarez, and Malebranche to Hegel and Nietzsche, as the universal concept, abstract and empty, the first, falling to the understanding, indeed even to the imagination, in this way suggesting another formula: “…the anonymous existing of being in general.”5 Certainly we could be astonished here to see “existing” substituted for the “being” of “anonymous being,”6 since this modification had precisely for its purpose, with Heidegger who had inaugurated it, the destruction of the metaphysical concept of indeterminate being, universal and thus anonymous. But this displacement finds in its turn a reason in the reproach made to Heidegger of not having known or been able to
I wish to acknowledge the generous assistance of Véronique Lyttle, who unlocked some of the difficulties of the French, as well as that of Kevin Hart and Michael Fagenblat, who provided very helpful comments as well as proofreading the text.— Translator
think the true and last existent that existence would have to furnish-the Other, “… the being par excellence.”7 For the ontic exemplarity is no longer due to an ontological privilege of Dasein as for Heidegger, but, with Levinas, to the ethical privilege of the Other. In effect, even in existence taken in the radically new sense conferred upon it by Sein und Zeit, and perhaps especially in this sense, existing is “… never attached to an object which is, and it is for this reason that we are calling it anonymous” or, what is equivalent, it is only a matter of “…an existing which, by itself, would remain fundamentally anonymous.”8 There is indeed existence, but it comes back “…to the there is, to impersonal existence,” to “…the anonymous there is,” and it is “…in anonymous existing [that] an existence arises.”9 In other words, the reason that ontology can no longer claim itself unconditionally radical is because it implies radical anonymity-being, existence, or the there is, it does not mattersuch that it forbids access to the existent or, more exactly, to the Other in his or her own right: “…for me, there is is the phenomenon of impersonal being.”10 The anonymity of being henceforth offends the name of the Other.* If “being is evil,” it owes this in effect not to its finitude (which Heidegger certainly never concluded), but to its limitless anonymity, to its endless prohibition of the naming of the Other as such. Levinas’s task can thus be formulated very clearly: ethics will only become first philosophy in the place and the position of ontology if it definitively transgresses the anonymity of ontology and names the existent as such, that is to say, first as the Other.
