ABSTRACT
Both Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas reject the Freudian/Lacanian association between father and law and instead associate fatherhood with promise. Ricoeur suggests that in the Old Testament God can be identified as the Father of Israel through God's covenant with Israel. The covenant is both Law and promise; the covenant is a divine contract of sorts. Like Ricoeur, he proposes an ontology of paternity that takes us beyond the Freudian psychoanalysis of paternity, which he claims reduces sexuality and paternity to pleasure and egology. On Levinas's analysis the father discovers himself in the gestures, the substance, the very uniqueness of his son. Fecundity engenders the subject as desiring and therefore as an infinite subject who transcends the limits of subjectivity. In Altared Ground: Levinas, History, and Violence, Brian Schroeder points out that Levinas separates eschatology and apocalypse.
