ABSTRACT
Since Levinas’ contribution to On Escape is only twenty-four pages, the reader may well wonder why – or even if – it merits publication as a separate book, either in the 1982 French edition or in the English translation at hand. Since Plato, philosophy has interpreted need as a lack. To support his case, Levinas provides a detailed phenomenological analysis of pleasure, for if anything is meant to satisfy need it is certainly pleasure. Pleasure is meant to be ‘an abandonment, a loss of oneself, a getting out of oneself, an ecstasy: so many traits that describe the promise of escape contained in pleasure’s essence’. Based on this discovery, Levinas ends his essay on a larger scale, rejecting one aspect of the underlying idealism of Western civilization, its drive for self-sufficiency, invulnerability, totality, while accepting and underlining another aspect of this same idealism, namely, the ‘primary inspiration idealism seeks to surpass being’.
