“The future of death in the present of love”: Eros as an ethical _pas encore_ in Levinas's _Totality and Infinity_

This article reinterprets Levinas’s account of ethical subjectivity by centering the temporality of the pas encore (“not yet”) and drawing on new materials in Œuvres complètes. I argue that, in Totality and Infinity, eros and ethics are internally continuous: eros generates a responsible not yet of time, secured by fecundity and oriented to the Third. Unpublished notebooks and drafts show Levinas grounding subjectivity in the hopeful openness of the present and discerning in erotic life a hidden orientation toward the future—the not-yet that gives a yet-to-come, a surplus that becomes responsibility. On this basis, time appears not primarily as projection toward a distant horizon but as an ethical delay within the present, a not yet that resists closure. The dossier of Totality and Infinity clarifies the links among enjoyment, Desire, fecundity, and mortality, and explains why the phrase from Entre Nous—“the future of death in the present of love”—becomes legible only in light of this background. The result is a distinct account of erotic temporality: love’s time is a responsible not yet that opens the present for the Other and, through fecundity, widens into the time of the Third.