ABSTRACT
In Works of Love Kierkegaard says that the question ‘who is my neighbour?’ can be a form of procrastination1 and in a radio programme on Levinas, Derrida tells Alain Finkielkraut that for Levinas: ‘Anyone is my neighbour!’2 Neighbours cannot easily be pointed out, nor can my duties in respect of them. Kierkegaardian ethics makes no reply if I say: ‘But look how much I have done!’ Levinas does not want us to say: ‘Look how responsible I have been!’ Objectively, death may conclude the task, but for you it is subjunctive. Nobody finishes the task until the task has finished with them (CUP 163; SV VII 149). As Pattison puts it: ‘An ethical choice is never a choice that has been made: it is always a choice waiting to be made’.3 And Levinas asks us to be radical by acting as if causality could be discounted:
To posit praxis as conditioning truth is to take time seriously. It is to understand by ‘future’ that which really has not come to pass and which does not preexist itself in any way – neither as implicated in the folds of the explicit, nor as deep within the mystery of intimacy […]. (OGCM 37; Dvi 68-69)
Levinas’s celebration of the saying over the said, is also relevant here. Just as love or – in the phenomenology of Totality and Infinity – ‘Eros’, awaits the uncertain future of the beloved’s movement, so, in other communications, saying is linked to anticipation. Levinas promotes love as communication and vice versa. This is not alien to the Dane, for all he may be seen as one who deals only with an individual,
1 ‘When the Pharisee, “in order to justify himself”, asked, “Who is my neighbour?” he presumably thought that this might develop into a very protracted inquiry’ (WOL 96; SV IX 115).
