Continental Philosophy Review (2007) 40: 251–273

DOI: 10.1007/s11007-006-9022-5 
c Springer 2007

The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy

JOHN CARUANA
Ryerson University

Abstract. The motif of the ‘drama of being’ is a dominant thread that spans the entirety of
Levinas’s six decades of authorship. As we will see, from the start of his writing career, Levinas
consciously frames the tension between ontology and ethics in a dramatic form. A careful
exposition of this motif and other related theatrical metaphors in his work—such as ‘intrigue,’
‘plot,’ and ‘scene’—can offer us not only a better appreciation of the evolution of Levinas’s
thought, but also of his proper place within the western philosophical tradition. Levinas accuses
western philosophers of being exclusively attuned to what he calls the ‘drama of existence.’
And even then, philosophers have eluded the implications of the tragic fatalism that define this
drama. Philosophers are generally unaware of an ‘other scene’ that radically alters the fatalistic
logic of the ontological drama. Levinas calls this other scene the ‘ethical intrigue.’

For Levinas, there are two essential dramas that define who we are. The first
is the ontological drama. This drama involves the self in relation to its own
being and being in general. If there are other selves or players within this drama
they are to be understood as other egos competing for the same finite terrain.
The western philosophical tradition has been for the most part concerned
with sketching out this drama and finding possible solutions to the inevitable
violence that defines it. As Levinas sees it, the principal problem with most
traditional accounts of the drama of being is that they manage, in one way or
another, to evade what is truly problematic with it. This blind-spot is intimately
connected to the fact that these attempts fail to take notice of another, more
essential, drama. Levinas refers to this other drama, one that implicates the self
and the Other, as the ethical intrigue—the dramatic connotation of “intrigue”
should not be lost on us. For Levinas, only a proper understanding of the
ethical intrigue can offer us an honest appraisal of the ontological drama.
These two dramas are not meant to be understood as discrete and separate,
for they are intricately intertwined.1 What transpires in the second drama has
the potential to place a human face on the drama of being. More to the point,
the ethical intrigue offers the only legitimate response to the indifference and
widespread cruelty of the existential drama.

(i) The drama of being: Incipit tragoedia

In the final period of his work, Levinas insists that we must strive to express the
ethical—even at the risk of sounding “strange” (OB 183). Levinas certainly
252 J. CARUANA

sounds strange when in a 1976 lecture he states that “there is no experience

of the ethical; there is [only] an intrigue” (GDT 200 [trans. modified]). If we
accept Levinas’s view that ethicality is always prior to that which manifests
itself within the light or clearing of being, we can then appreciate the limi-
tations of the phenomenological category of ‘experience.’ After all, it makes
little sense to speak of an experience of ‘something’ that technically speaking
never appears or happens us such? Even so, how does ‘intrigue’ add to our un-
derstanding of the ethical? Levinas often chooses a term because its semantic
richness lends itself to conveying the multiple shades of meaning required to
represent a complex idea or phenomenon. Like the English use of ‘intrigue,’
the French intrigue connotes a dramatic plot, that is, a theatrical device. That
Levinas should employ a theatrical trope to characterize the ethical moment
is at once startling and unsurprising. Levinas’s recourse to theatrical terms in
his very endeavor to dethrone ontology as first philosophy is certainly unex-
pected if we focus on the fact of his notorious distrust of aesthetics. Yet, in
another way, it is not entirely surprising when we recall his lifelong love of the
classical dramatists. His entire work is replete with allusions and references
to renowned writers of the theatre like Racine, Corneille, and Shakespeare. 2
They, perhaps, more so than even many of the great philosophers of history 3
have underscored the tensions involved in what Levinas repeatedly refers to
as the “drama of existence”—a pregnant phrase that appears in virtually every
period of his oeuvre. But Levinas’s admiration for the great dramatists is not
sufficient to account for his persistent use of the term ‘drama.’ In any case,
this fact sheds little, if any, light on his peculiar use of the term.
John Llewelyn comments that Levinas’s fondness for the term “drama”
may have something to do with the etymology of the term. 4 The root of
the word—draô—suggests, as Aristotle was probably the first to point out
in his Poetics, action or activity. 5 When Levinas employs the term ‘drama’
he does so frequently in a context that implies a process that is underway,
or on the verge of being fulfilled—this is especially the case with the phe-
nomenological trajectory of the self that he adumbrates in a series of texts that
lead up to, and include, Totality and Infinity. As we endeavor to make sense
of how Levinas understands the word ‘drama,’ another general and useful
point to keep in mind is the common usage of ‘drama’ to convey something
extraordinary, the dramatic, we might say. Both the ontological and ethical
dramas that Levinas outlines for us have an urgent quality to them. The dramas
that interest Levinas are being played out on a world, indeed, cosmological
stage—with the interhuman drama at its center-stage. Llewelyn, once more,
reminds us of a germane footnote in Totality and Infinity, where Levinas ex-
presses sympathy with Nietzsche’s reluctance to understand ‘drama’ merely
as action. As Llewelyn comments, ‘drama,’ for Levinas, is to be understood
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 253

“not simply as deed but as religious event, occurrence, or enactment or rit-

ual performance (Ereignis).” 6 This is certainly true. And for that reason,
the more important connection in this regard might not be to Nietzsche, but
rather to Franz Rosenzweig, whose fascinating appraisal and critique of the
structures of tragic drama, along with his discussion of a redemptive drama
of life centered around the overlapping faces of the human being and God,
resonates more deeply with Levinas’s invocation of ‘drama’ and ‘intrigue.’ 7
It is probably not a coincidence that on the same page of Totality and Infinity
that contains the footnote in question, Levinas acknowledges his tremendous
debt to Rosenzweig. As a result of this affinity, it might not be too much of a
stretch to suggest that the “eschatological drama” (TN 154), a phrase that Lev-
inas employs in relation to Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, applies equally
to the Levinasian drama.
Let us begin with the first drama, the intrigue of being. As it will become
clear, the defining feature of this drama, for Levinas, concerns its fatalism—a
profound futility that is at once acknowledged and simultaneously disavowed
by many of the great thinkers of the west. Levinas, from his earliest writings
onwards, sets out to show how we underestimate the tragic dimension of being,
even as we pay lip-service to it. It is only by recognizing the inherent problems
of the drama of being that we can begin to appreciate the hidden presence of
another drama that unfetters us from the tragic consequences that plague
the ontological drama. Levinas’s corpus traces the self’s highly ambivalent
relationship to the various manifestations of being. These manifestations span
two extreme poles: one end is occupied by being in its most general diffuse
state (the il y a), and at the other limit of ontology, we find the totalizing
expression of the most determinate forms of being. In the drama of being, the
self finds itself in a state of constant struggle as it attempts to navigate the
arduous terrain marked by these two extreme tendencies of being. For this
reason, as early as 1935, Levinas avers in his essay, De l’évasion, that the
relation of the self to its existence “takes on a dramatic form” (OE 55). What
is the nature of this drama? The essential drama of the self centers around its
need to escape being. This need is fuelled by the self’s suffocating relationship
to being. The self is “riveted” (rivé) to its being (OE 52, 64). Cemented to
being, the self “suffers.” Modern literature, Levinas points out in this early text,
testifies to this existential unease with its constant references to the desire for
flight, novelty, and transformation. In his own analysis, Levinas underscores
the futility of this deep-seated need to disengage our selves from the weight
of being. The self’s vain efforts to recoil from its own being issue in further
“restlessness,” one that Levinas at this time characterizes as “desperate.” The
self finds itself in a state of utter passivity with respect to its own existence.
No wonder Levinas will associate “nausea” with this perpetually thwarted
254 J. CARUANA

existential reflex: overcome by its awareness of the burden of its own being,
the self, nevertheless, is helpless in acquiring any relief from it (OE 66–68).
In the two texts that were published shortly after the Second World War, Le
temps et l’autre (Time and the Other) and De l’existence à l’existant (Existence
and Existents), Levinas continues to highlight the self’s profound ambivalence
vis-à-vis being, and in particular, to indeterminate being, existence shorn of
existents. “One possesses existence,” he notes in 1947, “but is also possessed
by it” (EE 47). At this time, Levinas views the self as an impressive achieve-
ment given the hurly-burly (le remue-ménage) 8 nature of anonymous being,
the il y a. Like Blanchot’s notion of le neutre and Sartre’s l’être en-soi, Lev-
inas’s concept of the il y a suggests a disquieting indifference at the heart of
general being. That a self could even emerge from such a hostile environment
strikes Levinas as virtually miraculous. These post-war works conceive of the
self as an instant that temporarily suspends the meaningless noise and disorder
of the il y a. But the self, despite its achievement, is simultaneously ridden
with a kind of double-mindedness. In establishing a place for itself within
being, the self demonstrates a formidable mastery, as it momentarily halts the
violent intrusion of the il y a. There is a price, however, to be paid for this
mastery. For in the process of constituting itself, the self takes on the “weight
of existence” (EE 77). The accomplishment of the self represents therefore
a double-edged sword: it signifies an instant or moment of freedom from
anonymous existence and, at the same time, the locus of an acute awareness
of one’s boundedness. The embodied self acts as the base for the possibility
of enjoying the natural elements, but this attachment simultaneously commits
the self to the perpetual vagaries of elemental life. In his own chilling descrip-
tion of the self’s ambivalent relationship to the elements of being, Blanchot
will write some time later, “the sky, the same sky,” that only moments before
bathed the self with its rays of life and splendor, now “suddenly open[s], ab-
solutely black and absolutely empty, revealing . . . such an absence that all has
since always and forevermore been lost therein. . ..” 9 The severity of this on-
tological vacillation— between enjoyment and terror—represents more than
just a persistent nuisance to the ego. For Levinas, the self’s inherent inability
to resolve this ambivalence undermines the very constitutional possibility of
selfhood. By underestimating the urgency of this problem, Levinas would have
us understand, we fail to appreciate what finally saves the self from psychic
incoherence.
The central argument of both Existence and Existents and Time and the
Other is that no matter how hard it tries, the self cannot release itself from
the contract that binds it to its own being. The self, as Levinas describes it in
both of these works, finds itself in the same unenviable position as Faust, who
signs away his soul for the most remarkable of powers, only to discover that
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 255

the contract with Mephistopheles entails a form of indenture whose terms

are so rigid that even death cannot breach it. 10 But this comparison with
Faust, however, has to be carefully qualified, because the self’s contract with
existence is not a “decision taken prior to the drama, before the curtain rises”
(EE 21). In Goethe’s story, it is Faust who ultimately consents to accepting the
diabolical promise of unlimited knowledge in exchange for his soul. The self
in general, on the other hand, at least as Levinas understands it in the period
immediately following the War, is immersed in the drama of being to such
an extent that it can never be in a position to assume or deny its wearisome
existence.
For both the early and the later Levinas, it is imperative that the urgency
of this drama be properly gauged. The drama of existence warrants a serious
response in view of the indifferent and totalizing propensities of being. In
Otherwise than Being, a text which represents the culmination of Levinas’s
lifelong reflections on the dilemma of the ontological drama, he once again
draws attention not only to the eerie features of being in its most diffuse
state but also to the onerous nature of determinate formations of being. The
totalizing effect of being is particularly conspicuous for Levinas in language
itself, what he refers to in shorthand as the Said, that is, the myriad of signs
and utterances that constitute our forms of communication: “[t]he Being of
beings and of worlds, however different among themselves they may be,
weaves among incomparables a common fate; it puts them in conjunction. . ..”
Every profundity, every novel saying, is eventually woven back into the web
of being. “Our languages,” Levinas continues, “woven about the verb to be
would not only reflect this undethronable royalty, stronger than that of the
gods; they would be the very purple of this royalty” (OB 4; cf. BPW 83).
This “undethronable royalty” is, as the rest of the passage makes clear, a
reference to what the Greek religious poets called Moirae, to what their Roman
counterparts referred to as the Parcae, and to what in Greek philosophy was
given the name Ananke (Necessity). There is a “fate that reigns in essence, in
that its fragments and modalities, despite their diversity, belong to one another,
that is, do not escape the same Order, as though the bits of the thread cut by the
Parcae were then knotted together again” (OB 8 [trans. mod.]). The Parcae, as
we know, are responsible for spinning and cutting the thread that corresponds
to an individual’s life span. In carrying out this task, the Parcae are guided by
nothing more than sheer whim. From our human perspective, it would appear
that being, like the Parcae, metes out its life and death sentences with the
same indurate nonchalance as the faceless executioner. Levinas’s words here
are carefully chosen: at the heart of the drama of existence, its very intrigue,
the self is intricately, and inexorably, ensnared in the web of being and its
harsh indifference.
256 J. CARUANA

Levinas contends that with very few exceptions, western philosophy has
failed to come to grips with the challenge of the drama of being. In this
regard, western thought never successfully extricated itself from the problem
of fatalism, despite the fact that it has from its origins presented itself in
opposition to mythological thinking. As long as philosophy insists on the
exclusivity of being, then the specter of fatalism hangs over it indefinitely.
Yet this specter has hardly deterred philosophy from asserting the supremacy
of being. Consequently, Levinas suggests, philosophy seems to suffer from
a refusal to face up to the implications of its own assertions. Even the most
sober-minded philosophers—like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Nietzsche 11 —fail to
notice the consequences of their own thought as it concerns the drama of being.
But we must be precise as to the nature of the disagreement between Levinas
and modern philosophy. Levinas does not take issue with the picture of being
that modern philosophy paints. Spinoza’s notion of the conatus essendi, for
example, presents us, according to Levinas, with a forthright assessment of the
drama of being. In the Ethics, Spinoza stipulates that “[e]ach thing, in so far as
it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being. . .. The conatus with which
each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence
of the thing itself.” 12 As far as Levinas is concerned, Spinoza’s depiction of
being as moving simultaneously along the two parallel axes of preservation
and enhancement is fundamentally sound. In words that effectively repeat his
earlier comments in De l’évasion, Levinas consents to the claim established
by modern philosophy that “[b]eing’s interest takes dramatic form in egoisms
struggling with one another, each against all, in the multiplicity of allergic
egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus together” (OB 4 [my
emphasis]). The classical expression of this view is Hobbes’s bellum omnium
contra omnes, the war of all against all. “War,” Levinas concurs, is at the very
heart of “the drama of essence’s interest” (OB 4). As the Latin interesse—
being (esse) and ‘to be between’ (inter)— suggests, the essence of being “fills
every interval of nothingness that would interrupt it,” a kind of “strict book-
keeping where nothing is lost nor created” (OB 125). The ontological drama
is indeed cramped, suffocating, with little, if any, breathing room for respite
or peace.
The problem with modern philosophy, however, for Levinas, is that the var-
ious moral, social, and aesthetic solutions it puts forth to address the conflicts
inherent in the drama of being are radically insufficient. The philosophers
of power, like Spinoza and Nietzsche, undertake to present an alternative
account of morality and politics—in opposition to the transcendental expla-
nations proffered by certain philosophers and theologians—that begins and
ends with being. According to the theorists of power, order and community
derive from each being’s recognition that its own self-interest is best served
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 257

when it is integrated into a larger web of other self-interested beings. Con-

sequently, the exponents of such views argue that there is no need to appeal
to a conception of a transcendent good in order to account for peace and
stability. Spinoza, for example, holds that we need not resort to any princi-
ple other than the conatus to conceive of a good: “we do not endeavor, will,
seek after or desire because we judge a thing to be good. On the contrary,
we judge a thing to be good because we endeavor, will, seek after and desire
it.” 13 Similarly, Nietzsche argues that all human values can be accounted for
as the consequence or product of a modified will. A genealogical analysis
of ethics, Nietzsche contends, demonstrates that moral principles always rest
on some degree of power. If values, therefore, are not bound by any prin-
ciple outside the will, then it is possible to conceive and to adapt values so
that they might conform to our own desires. The challenge posed by exis-
tence, for philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche, need not entail renounc-
ing being or the interests of the ego. The key to establishing a moral order
that can offset the excesses of being involves nothing more than modulating
the ego’s interests so that they overlap with a larger network of interests or
desires.
The view that egotistical calculations or compromises with being are suffi-
cient for a life-enhancing morality is, for Levinas, a kind of deus ex machina
that substitutes for, or masks over, a deeper non-ontological truth. Do these
various calculations, Levinas asks rhetorically, actually “dramatize the other-
wise than being?” (OB 4). In other words, are these compromises with power
and being that modern philosophy speaks of really sufficient to free the self
from the pressing weight of its existence? Or “must [we] ask if even the dif-
ference between what separates essence in war from essence in peace does
not presuppose” the Good (OB 5). Despite the claims of its adherents, the
philosophy of being cannot, for Levinas, adequately provide for a means to
address the fatal interests of being. The problem is that these remedies presup-
pose the redemption of being. An accommodation with being for the purpose
of establishing a more peaceful world makes sense only after being has been
redeemed—as a consequence of ‘something’ that infuses the drama of being
with a breath of new life and hopefulness. As long as philosophy does not
acknowledge the source of this redemption we will always remain in danger
of succumbing to the logic of finality or fatalism that being fosters. By legit-
imizing the interests of being, philosophy, according to Levinas, demonstrates
certain affinities with the tragic dramatic structures that underpin mythology
and its dangerous fascination with fate.
If Nietzsche is correct in arguing that exploitation “belongs to the nature
of the living being . . . . and that furthermore it is the fundamental fact of all
history: let us be so far honest towards ourselves!” 14 then, indeed, we must be
258 J. CARUANA

honest to admit that no permutation of being could be responsible for “the little
humanity that adorns the world” (OB 185). Being, in and of itself, cannot be the
springboard for what we value most in life—like peace, tolerance, respect—
for the simple reason that being is too callous, too unresponsive to the frailties
of human beings, and, in particular, to the most vulnerable in society. We
ought not to conclude from Levinas’s assessment of being that the resources
of being, such as power or nature, should not, or cannot, be used in the service
of goodness. Levinas is not a utopian thinker, that is, he does not renounce
the realm of being for the sake of some higher spiritual truth. The upshot of
Levinas’s critique is that it is legitimate to appeal to a theory of calculations
and compromises with power, but only after a moral stance has been taken
with respect to being. Before then, we live at the mercy of the inhumanity of
being.
Another strategy that philosophers have adopted to conceal the problem of
the fatefulness of being is to suggest that the totalizing propensity of being or
fate is disrupted by non-being. Hegel, of course, is the most influential expo-
nent of this view. Hegel presents a theory of sublation [Aufhebung] to explain
why he believes that the human spirit is not a hapless victim of fate; why in-
dividual minds and cultures do not slip into a state of perpetual sclerosis. The
negation of being, for Hegel, ensures that arcane forms of understanding and
social relations give way to increasingly more progressive mental structures as
well as more just political orders. But for Levinas, the negation of being is no
more a legitimate remedy than the affirmation of being proposed by thinkers
like Spinoza and Nietzsche. Rather than generating a dialectical recovery or
sublation of the ruins of the past into a new and higher equilibrium, the nega-
tion of being prompts the swarming and deafening bustle of the il y a. In Time
and the Other, Levinas observes that Shakespeare is one of the few great writ-
ers to grasp the limitations of the tragic outlook’s fascination with negation.
Hamlet “understands that the ‘not to be’ is perhaps impossible and he can
no longer master the absurd, even by suicide” (TO 50). If Hamlet “recoils
before the ‘not to be,”’ it is because he recognizes that every negation—be it,
for example, war, suicide, or death in general—far from representing an exit
from being actually condemns us to the clutches of being. Neither being nor
non-being can resolve Hamlet’s dilemma. Either way, being demonstrates its
persistence.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil 15

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas repeats the same conclusion that he had
arrived at in his earlier work: the negation of being does not liberate us from
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 259

fate, but serves to seal our fate in being. Whereas Hegel’s modern individual,
standing at the threshold of the end of history, believes that she can take so-
lace in the new world to come after the “slaughterhouse of history,” Levinas’s
post-Holocaust individual hears only the chilling, inconsolable whimpering
of its survivors: “[t]he void that hollows out is immediately filled with the
mute and anonymous rustling of the there is [il y a], as the place left va-
cant by one who died is filled with the murmur of the attendants” (OB 3).
This point extends Levinas’s earlier insight that even the certainty of one’s
death does nothing to alleviate the “horror” or “perpetuity of the drama of
existence, necessity of forever taking on its burden” (EE 63). The despair
that is implied in these statements does not mean that hope is illusory for
Levinas. Far from it. His point is simply that hope is not generated from
being or its correlative, negativity. It is by a sleight of hand that philosophy
claims, without any reference to the good beyond being, to find redemption
either in being or non-being. Despite the rebellious stance that philosophy
takes towards the hopelessness of mythology, Levinas remains unconvinced
that philosophy, and in particular, modern philosophy, has offered a gen-
uine response to the problem of fatalism and impersonality in the drama of
existence.
Levinas also assesses Heidegger’s thinking in relation to the question of
the ontological drama. In his very first essay on Heidegger, Levinas reminds
us that at the centre of the Heideggerean drama of being is a demand for Da-
sein to adopt a resolute stance towards its existence. Thus Levinas comments
that the “passage from implicit and inauthentic understanding to explicit and
authentic understanding comprises the fundamental drama of human exis-
tence” for Heidegger (MHO 16, cf. 26). This early article does not yet hint at
the critical position that Levinas will later assume towards Heidegger. That
stance is made quite explicit, however, when four decades later Levinas notes
in a seminar that occidental philosophy is an “intrigue of knowledge, an ad-
venture of experience between the clear and the obscure” (GDT 208 [trans.
mod.]). The reference to the “clear and the obscure,” no doubt, alludes to
Heidegger’s view of truth as aletheia, or the unconcealment of being. From
Levinas’s perspective, Heidegger’s position, whether before or after his Kehre,
is dominated by the problem of being. The fundamental question of the Hei-
deggerean drama amounts to one question: “what does being signify?” (GDT
58). This exclusive concern with being means that Heidegger’s philosophy—
with its view, at least during the period of Being and Time, that nothingness or
being-towards-death holds the key to the meaning of human being—is, as far
as Levinas is concerned, fundamentally in line with the tragic-comic vision.
The implications of this vision of the drama of human existence are rarely
appreciated:
260 J. CARUANA

Nothing is more comical than the concern that a being destined to de-
struction takes for itself, as absurd as him who questions the stars, whose
verdict is without appeal, in view of action. Nothing more comical, or
nothing more tragic. It belongs to the same man to be a tragic and a comic
figure. (CP 138)

The tragic position underestimates the significance of the limitations of

being or finitude. As an exemplary figure of the tragic outlook, Heidegger
turns Dasein’s absolute limitation, its imminent death, into its “ownmost pos-
sibility.” 16 Dasein has, as its highest noble possibility, the choice to exist
authentically, affirm the finitude of its existence. For Levinas, however, the
nature of being—in its most general or diffuse form, the il y a—is such that
it violently thwarts any such possibility. The self is lodged in being in such a
way that it is never in a position to either affirm or negate it. The claim for
authenticity, ultimately, rests on an illusory wish. Ambivalence, rather than
the possibility of resoluteness, defines the existential condition of the human
being: “Suffering at the same time despairs for being riveted to being—and
loves the being to which it is riveted. It knows the impossibility of quitting life:
what tragedy! What comedy. . .” (TI 146). As Levinas sees it, every heroic at-
tempt to surmount the menacing indifference of being is laughable. Tragedy
quickly becomes indistinguishable from comedy. This is why, for Levinas,
Goncharov’s portrayal of Oblomov comes much closer to the truth of who we
are as characters in the existential drama—in particular, our relationship to
indeterminate being—than Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein (EE 29). Oblomov
is both tragic and comic because in his very attempt to escape the hustle and
bustle of life—chores, tasks, and obligations — he inadvertently becomes
hyperaware of the commotion of his bare existence. Even, and precisely, as
he remains ensconced in the comfort of his bed, reduced to his minimal self,
Oblomov finds that his life’s most formidable burden concerns not so much
what he has to do, but that he is. Heidegger’s thought—and all tragic visions,
in general — does not fully acknowledge the futility of human existence as
it is played out in being. In his own description of how the immensity and
impersonality of nature overshadows us, Goncharov more accurately charac-
terizes the existential disquietude that corresponds to being in its elemental
form:

. . .what is the good of the grand and the wild? The sea, for instance . . ..
merely makes one sad. . .. Fear clutches the heart at the sight of the bound-
less expanse of water, and there is nothing to rest the eyes aching with the
endless monotony of the view. The roar, the wild onrush of the waves do
not caress man’s feeble hearing; they repeat a melody of their own, gloomy
and mysterious, the same since the world began; and the same old wail is
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 261

heard in it, the same complaint as though of a monster doomed to torture,

and piercing, sinister voices. . . . [I]n the hardly perceptible swell of the
[sea] man sees the boundless force, slumbering for the moment, that can
mock, so bitterly his proud will and bury so deeply his daring schemes and
all his labour and toil. 17
To imagine that one could somehow exit—through self-resolve, for
example—the tragic indifference of being outlined here is to risk the comical
consequences that befall someone like Oblomov, or the pompous character in
Tolstoy’s short-story, “What Men Live By,” who insists on having a pair of
boots made for him that will last precisely a year, only to die the same evening
that he places his order. 18
The tragic view of life—at least the one Levinas has his sights on—is
disingenuous, because it shirks the grave implications of its own assumptions.
One after the other, the representatives of this tragic vision recount the severity
or the absurdity of the drama of being only to introduce, at the last possible
instant, an escape clause that is meant to relieve the self of the burden of
its existence. 19 Levinas is unyielding in his effort to expose the subterfuge
of this position. We must resist, he insists, the temptation of imagining that
the conditions that are responsible for the most meaningful features of our
existence—whether it be friendship, love, or forgiveness—can be supplied by
impersonal or anonymous being. Consequently, we must ask a very different
question from the one posed by the philosophers of power and the author of
Being and Time: “Are there not ‘things’ [‘choses’] that happen within this
being of ours,” Levinas inquires, “that do not primarily concern our being?”
(GDT 58 [trans. mod.]). To “state the radical question” that life demands of
us necessitates asking “whether the humanity of man, whether meaning, is
reducible to the intrigue of being as being” (GDT 63). For Levinas, the tragic
drama or “intrigue of being” simply cannot do justice to the transcendent
character of the defining and pivotal moments of our lives. Instead, he requires
us to be vigilant in our efforts to trace the path to an “other scene,” 20 the “ethical
intrigue” 21 —a drama that cuts deeper into the heart of what it means to be
human precisely because it addresses the moral cry against the catastrophic
ambivalence of existence.

(ii) The intrigue of the other: Incipit ethica

Levinas’s work from the early 1930s onwards can be understood as an attempt
to find a proper solution to the problems that plague the ontological drama. The
search for a response that would interrupt the drama of being reaches its apex
262 J. CARUANA

in Otherwise than Being—in particular, in the second chapter of that work

where he inserts his own thought into an imaginary dialogue between Plato
and Heidegger. 22 According to Heidegger, at least in the 1920s, Plato was
one of the first great thinkers to appreciate the importance of thinking through
the question of being in its full complexity. 23 Heidegger begins his magnum
opus, Being and Time, with a quotation from Plato’s Sophist. The epigram
reads: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you
use the expression ‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it,
have now become perplexed.” 24 The epigram chosen by Heidegger succinctly
expresses the essential task that occupies him in Being and Time, namely, to
reawaken in us the same puzzlement that Plato supposedly experiences with
respect to being. The goal of uncovering the ontological, as opposed to the
ontic, nature of Sein, requires philosophers to forgo—as Plato counsels—the
commonsensical view of being. Aside from this epigram, Heidegger briefly
alludes to another passage from the Sophist in the introduction of Being and
Time: “If we are to understand the problem of Being, our first philosophical
step consists in not ‘telling a story.”’ 25 That ‘story’ is the uncritical view
that the being of beings is itself some being or entity. If we are not to repeat
that story, then the “question of Being,” Heidegger adds immediately after
citing this particular passage, “requires [the] right way of access.” While
respecting their radical differences, and while acknowledging exceptional
moments in their respective work, in particular, Plato’s ‘good beyond being,’
and, even, an afflicted admission of debt to Heidegger (OB 189n.28), Levinas
nevertheless maintains that neither Plato nor Heidegger can properly articulate
the limitations of the drama of being.
As a former student of Heidegger, Levinas, of course, can appreciate the
significance of choosing a passage from the Sophist—one of the foundational
texts of occidental metaphysics—as an opening epigram of Being and Time.
26
Hence it should come as no surprise that Levinas also appeals to the Sophist
at a crucial point in his own major work, Otherwise than Being. Just as Hei-
degger launches Being and Time with a reference to the Sophist, similarly the
beginning of the second chapter of Otherwise than Being—which in effect
represents the start of this text, since the first chapter is really a synopsis of
the book—is filled with allusions and direct references to both Plato’s Sophist
and Heidegger’s Being and Time. 27 And just as Heidegger wishes to intro-
duce a critical wedge into the metaphysical discourse opened up by Plato, in
order to set it on a different course, similarly, Levinas will do the same with
both Plato and Heidegger, with the intention of allowing us to glimpse the
workings of an invisible drama that takes place within—or more precisely, to
use the language of Otherwise than Being, this side of [en deçà de]—the very
scene of being.
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 263

Levinas focuses his opening discussion on two questions that an informed

reader will quickly recognize as central to Being and Time: “what shows itself,
in truth, under the name of being? And who looks?” (OB 23). 28 According to
Heidegger, Dasein poses the first question, ‘what shows itself?’ even before
it explicitly recognizes the ontological difference between being and beings.
Heidegger calls this Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding. 29 The second
question that Heidegger poses concerns the ‘who’ who inquires into the be-
ing of what shows itself: “In which entities is the meaning of Being to be
discerned? From which entities is the disclosure of Being to take its depar-
ture?” 30 This question leads Heidegger to the discovery that Dasein is that
‘who’ whose being is an issue. 31 If fundamental ontology is to successfully
map out the problem of being, then it must begin its inquiry— the “right
way of access”—from Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of itself and
its world. The rest of Being and Time is spent demonstrating how Dasein’s
self-questioning calls it back to its proper course, to the open clearing of
being.
Levinas contends that Heidegger’s questions demand “from the start” to be
answered “in terms of being” (OB 23). These questions, in other words, are
ontologically biased: the manner in which Heidegger frames the questions of
the ‘who?’ and of the ‘what?’ of being—the starting point of fundamental
ontology—can only validate the privileged status conferred onto Sein. Lev-
inas is particularly critical of Heidegger’s unquestioned assumption that the
question ‘who?’ refers back to being.

We have shown that the question ‘what shows itself in truth?’ questions
the being that exhibits itself in terms of this being. The question ‘who is
looking? is also ontological. Who is this who? In this form the question
asks that ‘the looker’ be identified with one of the beings already known .
. . the question ‘who?’ asks about being. (OB 27; my emphasis)

If we are correct in assuming that Heidegger is the unacknowledged object

of Levinas’s criticism here, or at the very least, that Heidegger’s philosophy is
representative of that tradition that Levinas challenges in the above passage,
one may, nevertheless, have justified concerns with this attack. Levinas, as
others have noted before, is not always entirely subtle in his critical remarks of
Heidegger. 32 After all, does not Heidegger alert us to the need to differentiate
‘the what’ from ‘the who’ of Dasein? In the 1927 lectures, published as The
Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger, as in Being and Time, states
unequivocally that we “gain access to [the] being [of Dasein] only if we ask:
Who is it?” the uniqueness of ‘the who,’ along with the other manifestations of
being, makes the problem of the ontological difference “more complicated.” 33
264 J. CARUANA

Even if we, rightfully, acknowledge the complexity of Heidegger’s presenta-

tion here, Levinas’s criticism retains a significant degree of validity, if only
because ‘the who’ for Heidegger—while distinct from ‘the what’—is ulti-
mately to be understood with reference to being. As Heidegger himself puts
it, the “question of the possible multiplicity of being” is inseparable from “the
unity of the concept of being in general.” 34
If the questions ‘who?’ and ‘what?’ always return us to the broader question
of being (Seinsfrage), then Heidegger would be right in regarding being as
“what is most intelligible,” as the only horizon worthy of our attention and
meditation. “And yet,” Levinas immediately interjects, “this intelligibility is
questionable.” Prior to the question of ‘what is?’ and the ontologically tainted
‘who is?’ there is, according to Levinas, a “question about the question” (OB
24). Heidegger’s attention is solely focused on the question of being, that is, for
him, the question is ultimately posed by being itself. Being questions Dasein,
for Heidegger. Levinas, on the other hand, hears a more penetrating question:
a question that questions being. The question that Levinas attends to is in the
form of an accusation: being is asked to account for itself. Consequently, the
“question about the question” that Levinas hears, allows us to catch a glimpse
of another drama. Are we certain, Levinas would have us ask, that the ‘who’
who hears the question is a ‘what,’ or some other manifestation of being? And
is the ‘who’ who asks or initiates the process of questioning the same one
who hears it? Who questions Dasein’s immanence or being-in-the-world? In
Being and Time, Heidegger states that this ‘who’ is ultimately the voice of
conscience. And the source of the call is being itself: “the question of Being is
nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which
belongs to Dasein itself.” 35
But Heidegger’s insistence that the source of this voice need not be under-
stood as anything other than the being of Dasein robs that voice of its personal
and moral authority or force. How else, Levinas compels us to ask, are we to
hear that question that supposedly tears us from our immediate involvement
in the world if not as a personal plea from a questioning or accusing other?

How is it that the ‘what?’, already steeped in being so as to open it up

the more, becomes a demand and a prayer, a special language inserting into
the ‘communication’ of the given an appeal for help, for aid addressed to
another? (OB 24)

Failure to hear the question in its proper register has serious implications
for Levinas. Hence, Levinas writes:

If one is deaf to the petition [demande] [that is, the demands made by the
Other to the self] that sounds in questioning and even under the apparent
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 265

silence of the thought that questions itself, [then] everything in a question

will be oriented to [ontological] truth, and will come from the essence of
being. (OB 26 [my emphasis])

There is an entreaty—“the question about the question”—at the basis of

all questioning that is voiced by someone other than Dasein, other than being
altogether. To ignore this questioning plea is to resign oneself to the ubiquity
of being. To ignore the radical origin of the Other is to consign the self to
a state of tragic immanence. The first awakening of thought does not, as the
Greeks and Heidegger suggest, stem from the astonishment of the self before
being. The mind is awakened by the reproachful gaze of the Other.
Already in 1947, Levinas voices an unwavering conviction that the drama
of human existence that Heidegger endorses is deeply flawed because its
vision, like that of all tragic standpoints, is too preoccupied with the wanting
solitariness of the existential drama.

. . . from the start I repudiate the Heideggerean concept that views solitude
in the midst of a prior relationship with the other. . .. The relationship with
the Other is indeed posed by Heidegger as an ontological structure of
Dasein, but practically it plays no role in the drama of being or in the
existential analytic. All the analyses of Being and Time are worked out
either for the sake of impersonality of everyday life or for the sake of
solitary Dasein. (TO 40 [my emphasis])

However much Heidegger strives to undermine the unquestioned assump-

tions behind traditional metaphysics, he inevitably succumbs, according to
Levinas, to a similar problem that also seduces Plato. Philosophy, since Plato,
assumes that “the end of violence”—that is, the end of the problem of fatalism,
of the destructive movement of being—is possible by means of a special dia-
logue or mode of engagement that “brings [together] opposed beings inclined
to do violence to each other.” Henceforth, philosophy proposes to reconcile
the problem of beings that are allergic to one another by “find[ing] a dialogue
to make these beings enter into dialogue” (GCM 142). Plato claims to find this
foundational dialogue or drama within the soul itself. Heidegger locates it in
the silent solicitation of Dasein’s conscience. For Plato, the question ‘who?’
refers back to the imprisoned soul that recognizes that something is amiss in
its terrestrial life. It dawns on this soul—or at least, some such souls —that
there is perhaps a greater truth behind the veil of sensory experiences. In the
Sophist, Plato accounts for this awareness by drawing on the idea of the soul’s
silent conversation with being as it strives to recover or recollect the latent
meaning of its manifest experiences. 36 The recollection of this knowledge
can be potentially employed in an effort to establish a political order that
266 J. CARUANA

approximates the ideal of perfect justice. According to Levinas, this idea has
been a mainstay of western philosophy ever since Plato first articulated it:
“[f]reedom will triumph when the soul’s monologue will have reached uni-
versality, will have encompassed the totality of being . . .” (CP 49).
Levinas is persuaded that much of the philosophical tradition, Heidegger
included, has blindly inherited Plato’s supposed dialogical—for its structure
is indeed monological—model of the soul. Neither Plato’s idea of the self-
conversing soul nor Heidegger’s picture of a self-questioning Dasein does
justice to the core of the human drama—in particular, that point where hu-
manity is periodically released from the stifling grip of anonymous being.
Both philosophers are blind to the dilemma posed by the hopelessness of vi-
olence that is at the centre of the intrigue of being. For Levinas, the drama
or dialogue that occupies thinkers like Plato and Heidegger—centered on the
relationship between the soul (or Dasein) and being—presupposes a far more
important intrigue that binds the self to the Other.

The silent coming and going from question to response, with which Plato
characterized thought, already refers to a plot [une intrigue] in which is
tied up [se noue] the node [noeud] of subjectivity by the other commanding
the same” (OB 25). 37

Here then is the second sense in which Levinas uses the word
‘intrigue’—one which is closely related to the first sense of intrigue as ‘drama.’
An intrigue—the Latin intricare means ‘to entangle’—is a knot or a twisting
(la torsion). Levinas’s original insight is to have caught sight of the fact that
the key element of subjectivity involves the intrigue or knot that fastens the
Same to the Other. The human being is “the Gordian knot of this ambiguity
of the idea of the Infinite” (DR 117), or the “interweaving of the Infinite with
the finite” (BI 113), the juncture where the finite self and the infinite Other
are firmly intertwined.
The motif of ethical entanglement, which is central to the ethical drama, is
pervasive in Levinas’s later writing. Entire passages are constructed around the
theme of the binding of self to Other. In “God and Philosophy,” for example,
he speaks of “an imbroglio [that is] to be taken seriously; this is a relation to
. . . that which is without representation, without intentionality. It is the latent
birth, in the other [autrui], of religion . . .” (GCM 72 [my emphasis]). The two
key terms here are ‘imbroglio’ and ‘religion.’ An imbroglio, of course, is an
intricate situation—in other words, another name for intrigue. Imbroglio also
suggests an embarrassment; a quarrel or involvement with another that one
would rather have avoided. Levinas employs the term “religion” for similar
reasons. According to one etymological tradition, religare means literally to
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 267

tie more firmly. And like another related term, religion is an obligation, 38 an
imposition that binds one to others. Levinas’s use of the term ‘religion’ thus
departs from the ordinary meaning of the word. Religion, as Levinas conceives
of it, refers to the singular and insoluble cement that joins self to others. “We
propose to call ‘religion,’ ” Levinas announces in Totality and Infinity, “the
bond that is established between the same and the other without constituting
a totality” (TI 40). 39 Finally, in the same section of Otherwise than Being that
I have been discussing above, Levinas goes on to describe the ethical intrigue
as “an allegiance (une allégeance) of the same to the other” (OB 25). Again
the language that he employs is deliberate and carefully chosen. Allegiance 40
originally referred to the feudal relation between a vassal and a lord. That the
self is in a relationship of allegiance with respect to the Other resonates with
Levinas’s conviction that this relationship is asymmetrical: the self is beholden
to the Other, who is master and lord. Ethical subjectivity, therefore, involves
neither a monologue, nor a dialogue between two individuals (OB 25). In this
intrigue, it is clear who has the upper hand. Within the ethical drama the self has
no say in the intrigue that ties it to the Other. Not surprisingly, the allegiance or
intrigue of the ethical is not something that the ego welcomes. It is “imposed”
on the self, and it is “preliminary to all consciousness” (OB 25). We would be
terribly mistaken to conceive of this intrigue as a form of slavery or bondage.
The intrigue of the Other is paradoxically liberating. As Levinas points out in
a late lecture, the “intrigue attaches us to that which detaches itself [rattache
à ce qui se detache]” (GDT 198). If in the ethical intrigue, the Other binds me
in obligation, it is to set me free—in the responsibility that I assume—from
another bondage, the irremissable one that rivets the self to being, thrusting
the self into a state of perpetual ambivalence. Paradoxically, it is the Other’s
imposition in the ethical intrigue that makes dialogue a possibility. There is,
of course, no guarantee that dialogue will take place. I can always decide
to evade the call of the Other. But before making this decision, I will have
heard—for this is not in my control—the Other’s call as a demand directed
at me.
Levinas often describes the ethical intrigue with the neighbor as the Other
in the Same. But he warns us to avoid reading the ‘in’ of this phrase as though
it had ontological relevance. The ‘in’ of the drama of the Other in the Same
does not, if we keep to the theatrical metaphor, refer to an actual scene or
location within the stage of phenomenality. If the Other is transcendent he or
she is so because the Other interrupts the interests of being. Thus, the ‘in’
of the ‘Other in the Same’ speaks of a disturbance, a break-in: the Other’s
commandment “slips into me ‘like a thief’ ” (OB 148). For the later Lev-
inas, the subject is first and foremost a conscience, a troubled consciousness.
Traditional philosophy misconstrues subjectivity because it falsely presumes
268 J. CARUANA

that moral consciousness is a component of general consciousness. Conscious-

ness is in principle always correlative with the being it represents to itself. But
the Other is a thorn in the side of consciousness, for the Other does not let him
or herself be assimilated by the representational operations of the ego. Given
that philosophy, since Parmenides, is committed to a project of completely
filling the gap between being and thought, it cannot acknowledge the problem
of the Other; alterity for traditional philosophy is always conceived as that
which is only provisionally unknown. “The logos as said,” that captures the
western imagination, “lets the ‘who?’ get lost in the ‘what?”’ (OB 27). This
is a snare that has repeatedly entrapped philosophers. 41 The philosophical
tradition has typically heard “what?” for the question “who?” and in this way
it has reduced the Other to a moment of the Same. But the Other is not a
manifestation to be experienced by the ego. The Other in the Same entails a
self that faces a presence which in principle cannot be represented. Before
appearing, the Other disturbs in his or her nearness. The Other’s ‘power’ stems
from the fact that he or she comes from elsewhere than being. By reducing
the Other to another character in the drama of being, an entity that I observe
at a safe distance, without obligation, philosophy, not only effaces the Other’s
alterity, but also colludes with the ego in its desire to evade the demands of
the ethical drama, that is, to blunt the critical awareness that others rouse in
me.
The seemingly unbreakable thread of fate—and the violence that is of-
ten condoned in its name—is finally cut by the Other’s power to provoke
my transcendence. But if the word ‘transcendence’ is to have any genuine
value it cannot be thought independently of the drama of being. The word
‘transcendence,’ therefore,

has to be put back into the signification of the whole plot [intrigue] of
the ethical or back into the divine comedy without which it could not have
arisen. That comedy is enacted equivocally between temple and theater, but
in it the laughter sticks to one’s throat when the neighbor approaches—that
is, when his face, or his forsakenness, draws near. (GCM 141)

Transcendence, as Levinas understands this term, is closely related to ‘in-

spiration.’ Levinas reaffirms what he had already suggested in his 1934 essay
on the philosophy of Hitlerism, the drama of human life reaches its highest
point with the awareness of an “inspiration” that is higher than each of us. 42
But whereas the earlier essay speaks of inspiration in almost abstract terms,
in his more mature writing, it is concretely conceived as entering the world
in the relation of proximity. It is through its relation with the Other, that the
“subject is inspired by the Infinite” (OB 148), who never appears as such,
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 269

always already receded into an immemorial past. Inspiration—breathing new

life into being—transpires at the level of pervious skins. The Other gets under
my skin, hollowing out a ‘site’ within my being, where his or her reproachful
presence is etched like a scar that never properly heals. In the presence of the
questioning Other, the play or game of being—the movement between disclo-
sure and concealment, the incessant oscillation between the destructiveness
and the expansion of being —loses its exclusivity: “[i]n this intrigue, I am
bound to others before being tied to my body” (OB 76 [trans. modified]). The
“seriousness of the human intrigue,” that is, the relationship I have with the
Other, is “the opposite of the vanity of vanities” (EN 216) that so troubles
the author of Ecclesiastes 43 and that thoroughly imbues the consciousness of
tragic finality.
One certainly hears strong echoes of Rosenzweig’s theologically inflected
drama—involving the irreducible realities of God, the human being, and
creation—when Levinas writes that the “invisibility of God belong[s] to an-
other game,” a “drama with several personages” (BPW67); “three personages,”
to be precise, consisting of I, You, and the “trace of Illeity” (BPW 76). This
deeper drama, which Levinas qualifies as a “necessary staging” or “interhu-
man intrigue,” is “perhaps . . . also the way for the wisdom of heaven to return
to earth” (BPW 158).
As Rosenzweig noted before Levinas, the tragedian mistakes the silent,
unredeemed world for a permanent state of affairs. In so doing, the tragic
thinker, unlike the Hebrew prophets, fails to see that the “world is not yet
finished . . . . [that] [t]he tears are not yet ‘wiped from every countenance.”’ 44
Levinas’s ethical intrigue closely parallels this prophetic distrust of the drama
of being. The deafening silence of our indifferent universe is shattered in the
transcendent encounter with the Other who bears the trace of the divine. Like
Rosenzweig, the isolated, narcissistic self becomes fully human, for Levinas,
when the shell of its tragic heroic comportment—itself a necessary stage of
our being, given the hardship of reality—is fissured in the encounter with the
Other. As Rosenzweig notes:

The self lacks all bridges and connections; it is turned in upon itself
exclusively. And this in turn drenches divine and worldly things with that
peculiar darkness in which the tragic hero moves. [To come to grips with
guilt and fate] would [mean] hav[ing] to break their silence . . . [and]
stepping out of the walls of their self, and they would rather suffer in
silence than do this. 45

In the ethical intrigue, the centrality of the everyday worries and anxi-
eties that the self undergoes in relation to itself and to its environment is dis-
placed. The Other’s power to intermittently unhinge the self from the drama of
270 J. CARUANA

being, and the unresponsiveness of interesse, is precisely what Levinas means

by transcendence. It is in the vulnerable condition of proximity, where the self
finds itself stripped of its typical ego-defenses, that self and Other no longer
appear as actors in a game (OB 5–6, 56–58, 117), but flesh-and-blood in-
dividuals whose lives are embroiled in the most real of dramas. The tragic
drama of fatalism and powerlessness loses its grip on the human imagina-
tion, to be replaced by the promise of hope, frankness, and accountability.
And, again, like Rosenzweig, the ultimate significance of the ‘other’ drama,
for Levinas, is not meant to be understood as that space which magically
leads one out of being into some pristine world beyond this world, but rather
as that site which returns us, our egos chastened, as the final two words
of The Star of Redemption state, “INTO LIFE,”46 into the community of
others.

Abbreviations of levinas’s works

BI “Beyond Intentionality.” In Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan

Montefiore. Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press,
1983.
BPW Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. Robert
Bernasconi, Simon Critchley, and Adriaan T. Peperzak. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996.
CP Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1986.
DR “Diachrony and Representation” In TO.
EE Existence and Existents. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Mart-
inus Nijhoff, 1978.
EN Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other. Trans. Michael B.
Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press,
1998.
GCM Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998.
GDT God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford : Stanford
University Press, 2000.
MHO “Martin Heidegger and Ontology.” Diacritics 26:1 (1996): 11–32.
OB Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
OE On Escape. Introduced by Jacques Rolland. Trans. Bettina Bergo.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 271

RH “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” In Critical Inquiry 17

(1990): 63–71.
TI Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
TN In the Time of the Nations. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1994.
TO Time and the Other. Trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1987.

Notes

1. As Derrida compels Levinas to acknowledge more explicitly after Totality and Infinity.
See, in particular, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1978).
2. In particular, Levinas’s two texts of 1947, Existence and Existents and Time and the Other,
abound with references to drama and theater.
3. See, for example, TO 72: “[I]t sometimes seems to me that the whole of philosophy is only
a meditation of Shakespeare.”
4. John Llewelyn, Emmanuel Levinas: The Genealogy of Ethics (New York: Routledge,
1995), p. 13. Llewelyn, it ought to be noted, is one of the few English commentators to
have picked up on the importance of Levinas’s conception of ‘drama.’
5. Aristotle, The Poetics 1448b1.
6. John Llewelyn, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 69.
7. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William H. Hallo (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1972), pp. 76–8, 244ff.
8. Levinas frequently associates this phrase with Maurice Blanchot. See, for example, Éthique
et infini : Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo (Paris: Fayard, 1982), p. 48. Blanchot’s thought,
especially his fiction, captures the mute despair provoked by neutral being. An excellent
example is the novel, L’arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
9. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Anne Smock (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 72.
10. Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York and London: Anchor Books, 1961).
11. These three philosophers are either alluded to or explicitly mentioned in the opening
chapter of Otherwise than Being.
12. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis,
Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1982), Part III, propositions 6, 7.
13. Ibid., Part III, Proposition 9, Scholium.
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1966), 259.
15. Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.66–7.
16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New
York and London: Harper and Row, 1962), (SuZ 250). All references to the pagination of
the German edition, Sein und Zeit; hereafter SuZ.
272 J. CARUANA

17. Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Nathalie Duddington (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.,
1960), p.96.
18. Leo Tolstoy, “What Men Live By,” The Raid and Other Stories (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999). Levinas recounts another similar story by Tolstoy, also
involving an order of boots, but with slightly difference circumstances, (OB 129).
19. In Time and the Other, Levinas writes: “Prior to death there is always a last chance, this
is what heroes seize. . .. The hero is the one who always glimpses a last chance . . .”
(TO 73). In particular, Levinas cites Juliet’s bold affirmation of death—“I keep the power
to die”—as paradigmatic of this tragic ruse (TO 50). Interestingly, Levinas suggests that
Shakespeare is fully aware of this ruse.
20. Levinas borrows this phrase from Philippe Nemo (GCM 129).
21. See, for example, GCM 69.
22. Levinas does not actually explicitly refer to a dialogue between Plato and Heidegger.
I am suggesting, however, that the first part of the second chapter of Otherwise than
Being can be better understood if we read it as an imaginary exchange between Plato and
Heidegger—one that Levinas interrupts.
23. Until the end of the 1920s, Heidegger’s attitude towards Plato was for the most part
sympathetic. After his famous Kehre, however, Heidegger adopts an increasingly critical
stance towards Plato’s philosophy. For the later Heidegger, Plato represents the beginning
of the ossification of ontology that Heidegger claims undergirds western thought right to
the present.
24. Plato, Sophist 244a; cited in Being and Time (SuZ 1)
25. SuZ 6. This is a direct reference to Sophist 242c.
26. Levinas explicitly refers to Heidegger’s peculiar reading of the Sophist in the 1932 study,
“Martin Heidegger and Ontology” (MHO 15).
27. Even though only Plato’s name is explicitly mentioned in these opening pages of the second
chapter of Otherwise than Being, Levinas’s remarks demonstrate quite clearly that he has
both Plato and Heidegger in sight.
28. It is not entirely clear from Levinas’s discussion if the question of the ‘who?’ that he
attributes to Heidegger refers to Dasein or Das Man. In at least one part of Being and
Time, Heidegger states explicitly that the question ‘who?’ refers to the ‘they-self,’ and
not Dasein (SuZ 114–117). But perhaps Levinas has Heidegger’s discussion of conscience
in mind, where the ‘who’ behind the voice of conscience corresponds to Dasein itself
(SuZ 276–7). For the purposes of my discussion, I will assume that Levinas is referring to
Dasein.
29. SuZ 15–17.
30. SuZ 7.
31. SuZ 8, 11–12.
32. I am thinking primarily of Derrida, and his numerous attempts to demonstrate the nuances
that are frequently omitted in Levinas’s critique of Heidegger; even as Derrida acknowl-
edges the general legitimacy of many of Levinas’s criticisms.
33. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Re-
vised ed., Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, p. 120.
34. Ibid.
35. SuZ 15.
36. “[T]hinking and discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely,
the inward dialogue carried on by the mind with itself without the spoken sound” (Sophist
263e).
 THE DRAMA OF BEING: LEVINAS AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 273

37. In his translations of Levinas’s work, Lingis consistently translates the French word intrigue
as “plot.”
38. “[T]he relation to God called faith does not primordially mean adhesion to certain state-
ments that constitute a knowledge for which there is no demonstration. . .. To me, religion
means . . . the excellence proper to sociality. . . .” Levinas goes on to describe transcendence
as that which “bind[s] men among one another with obligation, each one answering for
the lives of all the others” (TN 171).
39. Cf. CP 23, BPW 7–8.
40. From the Late Latin, laetus, meaning, ‘serf.’
41. Levinas briefly mentions an episode in the Phaedrus where Socrates “denounc[es] those
who . . . instead of listening to a statement, ask about the one that states it” (OB 27).
Levinas is probably referring to Socrates’s rebuke of Phaedrus for being more concerned
about the source—‘who is it?’—of an important story that he has just recounted, than
whether or not the story is true or false—‘what is it?,’ that is, the ontological validity of the
story (Phaedrus 275c). The context of Levinas’s analysis implies that he in turn rebukes
Socrates for subsuming the utterer (‘who’) under the utterance (‘what’).
There is a passage from the Theaetetus—which Levinas does not mention—that I think
illustrates his point quite effectively. Socrates is addressing the popular perception that
philosophers are useless and clumsy. He invokes the story of the maidservant who ridicules
Thales after he falls into a well while attempting to study the stars. What good is his
preoccupation with the heavens, she asks mockingly, if Thales does not even pay attention
to the ground beneath his own feet? In defense of Thales—and all ‘genuine’ philosophers—
Socrates notes that while it is “true that [the philosopher] is unaware what his next-door
neighbor is doing, hardly knows, indeed, whether the creature is a man at all,” the true
philosopher “spends all his pains on the [far more important] question, what man is. . . .”
(174a-b [my emphasis]). In other words, for Socrates, who your flesh-and-blood neighbor
might be is of little significance compared to the question ‘what is man in general?’
42. In the immediate wake of Hitler’s rise to power, the young Levinas observes that liberalism
has lost touch with the “transcendent inspiration” that originally motivated Judaism, and,
later, Christianity, to tear humanity from the “bedrock of natural existence” (RH 65–66). In
failing to grasp what is at stake in the denaturalization of humanity— the rupture with the
oppressive values of the mythological outlook—liberalism eventually “evades the dramatic
aspects of [the Judeo-Christian] liberation” (RH 66 [my emphasis]).
43. “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ec. 1:2) [King
James Version]. See also OB 182.
44. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, p. 219.
45. Ibid., p. 78.
46. Ibid., p. 424.

I would like to thank the Ryerson Faculty of Arts for granting me a SIG Research Grant
to help complete this article.