Time’S Disquiet and Unrest

In his late lectures of 1975-76, Levinas returns to Heidegger, writing that—behind the phenomenon of death in the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time—it is “death” that “crouches like a question with no givens” (GDT, 38). Levinas grants Heidegger that death is an ending as well as being an end, in the verbal and nominal senses. More, he admits that Heidegger has explored the transitivity of the existential verb “to be,” in this consists his “unforgettable” contribution (GDT, 122).Yet, for Levinas, to the extent that “coming-to-the-end” and “comingat- the-end” mark a signifying thought still tied to logic, Heidegger remains preoccupied with the nominal sense of being, with an “epic of being.” That is, Heidegger posits that the beingness of being and a certain reductive, that is, metaphysical comprehension of it, is at the origin of “all meaning” (GDT, 123). Levinas, who remains never too interested in the later Heidegger, makes no room for departure from the early thesis. He is reluctant to see a change even as, after the mid-1930s, Heidegger shifts from the problematic of being-toward-death, recognizes that the epoch of philosophy itself has reached its end, completed and fulfilled in the dominance of European science, and embarks upon the opportunity to think differently, an opportunity for “thought to rediscover a possible thinking of being” (GDT, 126). As Levinas puts it, what the later Heidegger “calls the thinking of being” remains tied to a certain comprehension of being as having the transcendence of an entity, in the sense that “being is or does its business of being” (GDT, 124). In other words, Heidegger does not move beyond being and fails to think the other of being “as irreducible to the Same,” which would imply a new notion of meaning and a certain ethical relationship, within which one may start out in this search. For his part, Levinas insists not on contrasting or opposing (opposer) being to its beyond, but on “separating” the Other from