Levinas mainly deals with the notion of eschatology in the preface of Totalité et infini (1961).
There it appears in the context of his agreement with an entire tradition of philosophers
claiming that the very nature of being is one of violence and war, which becomes manifest in
the pervasive waging of political battles and wars. He further contends that a conception of
morality based on the “pure subjectivism of the I” is powerless to shield humankind against
such violence. The alternative he offers to such an impotent morality is an ethics of alterity.
Eschatology is Levinas’s answer to how such an ethics of alterity would be capable of insulating
humankind against calculative reason and the pressures of politics and war. To understand
how eschatology succeeds in doing so and how Levinas fills in the notion, I argue that it should
be understood within the context of his conceptualisation of time.
Levinas offers novel analyses of the forms and the work of time. Time, in Levinas, is the
very inner structure of an existent’s movement of existing – I refer in this regard to the inherent
chronological inconsistency of the human condition. In Levinas’s ethical metaphysics this
inherent chronological inconsistency is theorised as the other (autre) within the self, an affective
infection that dates back to a past that has never been present – it hails from the diachronic
time of the Other – and is opened to the future, “to the newness of the unknown”. While this
past is impossible to grasp, it nevertheless concerns me. I cannot remain unaffected in relation
to it; it has left a trace. This alterity within the self becomes manifest as an inherent Desire
for time, time that can only be given by the other person, which for Levinas is the Other
(l’Autrui). This means that the singular time of my being is not yet time, does not yet have
time, but the singular I bears an inherent Desire for time within. This Desire for time, then,
emanates from the inherent chronological inconsistency which typifies the existent being “out
of sync” with itself, a diastasis or a “standing apart from itself”. To be sure, this Desire is not
a need to be filled, but as Desire, it is essentially insatiable. This Desire conquers the ecstatic
time of need and satisfaction and the inevitable return to the self, the collapse back upon
oneself that follows when needs are satiated, and the return of the unbearable heaviness of
being that it signals. The early Levinas (De l’évasion, 1935) was looking for an escape from
this irremediable Being. Only four decades later in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence
(1974) will Levinas come to fully plot out “a new path out of being,” a temporal path that he
started to chart in Le temps et l’autre (1948), which forges a fundamental link between time
and ethics. The time that the future brings is not merely the recurrence of the present instant
or its continuation, but the possibility of another instant or a new beginning. How can an
existent in the instant recommence otherwise? The coming of the future announces another
original instant that cannot be approached but that comes; that cannot be assumed, since it
appears as an epiphany. The existent is able to welcome the absolutely strangeness of the
epiphany of the future because of the inherent susceptibility to fraternity and sociality, which
is made possible by time. This, however, is not time that the existent has like a possession but
a capacity to welcome time that springs from an existential chronological inconsistency – a
being temporally out of joint. To further specify, this “capacity” is not a power that the
individual instant is endowed with. Quite to the contrary, faced with the radical strangeness
of the future, with the alterity of the face of the Other, the existent is reduced to a “radical
passivity.” Passivity is the radix or root of ethical agency. The capacity that time gives, is the
capacity for generosity, the power to be able to give of the riches accumulated. This is not to
turn away from one’s egotistical selfish life once and for all, but a being turned to be able to
welcome the Other without being obliterated in the face of an absolute Mystery. The instant as an interruption announces the possibility of a new beginning, which is not
the effacement of the past, but the pardon that purifies the past and the injustices committed.
Pardon consists in a retroactive action that inverts the natural temporal order of things and
implies the “reversibility of time”. Now the past instant has not passed but can be lived again,
differently.
In Levinas we find a non-teleological conception of time. Truth, Levinas contends, requires
both an infinite time and a completed time conceived as “messianic time”. Messianic time,
more precisely, may be conceived as the “extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness”,
since it is only such vigilant consciousness that can protect us against the revenge of evil –
which infinite time cannot do. This notion of “messianic consciousness” is encapsulated in
Levinas’s conceptualisation of eschatology, which is the infinity beyond totality or beyond
history, without denying history. The eschatological is not realised at the end of time but rather
in each instant in which our responsibility vis-à-vis the Other is realised. If this responsibility
exempts us from the jurisdiction of history and the future, salvation is not to be found at the
end of history but remains at each moment possible.
When Levinas speaks of eschatology in Totalité et Infini he does not refer to a doctrine
but to a vision: “the eschatological vision” that consummates moral experience. It is not a
spiritual relationship; it leads to action. To see (envision) is already to act. This action is
evoked in feeling responsible in the face of the future one hopes for others. The future one
hopes for others – a better future – is the eschatological vision realised in the eruption of the
present as a purified past.
In hierdie essay word die plek van eskatologie in Levinas se tydsbegrip krities onder die loep
geneem. Daar word aangevoer dat Levinas se nadruklike aandrang in Totalité et infi ni (1961),
naamlik dat eskatologie etiese verantwoordelikheid fasiliteer, nie onafhanklik van sy konseptualisering
van tyd verstaan kan word nie. Eskatologie in Levinas is nie die leer van die laaste
dinge nie, maar die verklaring wat Levinas bied vir hoe ’n etiek van alteriteit daartoe in staat
is om die mensdom teen die geweld van berekende rede en die druk van politiek en oorlog te
beskerm. Hoe eskatologie presies hierin slaag, word uiteengesit aan die hand van Levinas se
oorspronklike analises van die vorms en werk van tyd.
