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Fordham University Press - Raoul Moati ,
traduit par Daniel Wyche

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238 pages

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Can we say that metaphysics is over? That we live, as post-phenomenology claims, after "end of metaphysics"? Through a close reading of Levinas's masterpiece Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati shows that things are much more complicated.Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heidegger's ontology as a deeper elucidation of the meaning of "being" beyond Heidegger's fundamental ontology. The metaphor of the night becomes crucial in order to explore a nocturnal face of the events of being beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls "nocturnal events." Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through deformalizing the traditional phenomenological approach to phenomena that Levinas leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications. Following Levinas's account of these "nocturnal events," Moati elaborates the possibility of what he calls a "metaphysics of society" that cannot be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the "metaphysics of presence." Ultimately, Levinas and the Night of Being opens the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the "end of metaphysics".

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Publié par	Fordham University Press
Date de parution	03 octobre 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780823273225
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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L e v i n a s a n d t h e N i g h t o f B e i n g

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Levinas and the Night of Being

A Guide toTotality and Inﬁnity

Raoul Moati Translated by Daniel Wyche

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book was ﬁrst published in French asÉvénements nocturnes: Essai sur “Totalité et inﬁni,”by Raoul Moati © Éditions Hermann, 2012.

This book’s publication was supported by a subvention from the University of Chicago’s Visiting Committee to the Division of Humanities.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

c o n t e n t s

Translator’s Note Foreword: The Presence of the Inﬁnite, by Jocelyn Benoist Preface: The Nocturnal Face of Being

Messianic Eschatology, or The Production of Ultimate Events of Being To Receive the Idea of the Inﬁnite The Sensible Depth of Being The Terrestrial Condition The Utopia of the Dwelling The Metaphysical Context of Intentionality Being toward Inﬁnity

Conclusion: Intentionality and Metaphysics Notes Bibliography

vii xi xv

1 24 38 72 89 110 145

179 193 215

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t r a n s l at o r ’s n o t e

Perhaps the only thing as difﬁcult as translating the work of Emmanuel Levinas is translating a book about Levinas. It goes without saying that Levinas’s prose, choice of technical terms, and so on are very much his own. Indeed, over the course of this translation project, more than one of my conversations with Raoul Moati would end with a sentence of the form, “Yes, it is very strange in French too.” Despite those difﬁculties, one of the greatest strengths of Moati’s reading ofnityTotality and Inﬁ here is his markedly deep insight into, and therefore faithfulness to, Levinas’s own style and its necessity to the latter’s overall project. But it is in turn for that reason that the greatest challenges that arose for me in translating Moati’s Événements nocturnes: Essai sur “Totalité et inﬁ ni” (2012) were ultimately raised by Levinas’s text. Alphonso Lingis, in his translation ofTotality and Inﬁnity, made an ad-mirable attempt to remain faithful to Levinas’s voice, and in so doing he has set the standard for English translations of most of the technical vo-cabulary and important turns of phrase. But despite those efforts, Levinas’s style can still sound odd even to English ears that are used to it and remains all the more difﬁcult for those who are not. It is here that I’ve faced the most daunting task of this project: navigating between a drive toward lucid and properly English prose and the necessity of remaining faithful not just to the content of the original but to the carefully chosen technical terms that populate these texts, however strange or unintuitive they may seem at ﬁrst. My goal then has been to make Moati’s text as fruitful and reward-ing as possible to those who choose to take it up, by rendering it in a way that retains both his voice and that of Levinas but minimizes unnecessary obscurity by translating, rather than transliterating, the grammar, style, and vocabulary into English without betraying any technical necessity. If I have even begun to approach such a balance, then I consider my work here a success. We have had to make several important choices about how to represent a number of technical terms, including when and when not to depart from

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Translator’s Note

Lingis’s standardizations. Such terms are thus noted when they occur for the ﬁrst time, and the French is included in brackets when it is clear that it will help with a distinction that would not be apparent in English. It is worth highlighting some of the more important instances here, and it should be kept in mind that all these choices were made after long and in-depth discussion with Moati. First, in the original, each of the two crucial French terms for “the Other” and “other,”autruiandautre, appear in both capitalized and lowercase versions, depending on an entire range of criteria particular to Levinas’s thought. This distinction doesn’t exist in English, and so Lin-gis addressed this problem by renderingautruias “Other,” andautreas “other,” with the approval of Levinas himself. As he says in an early note on this point, “With the author’s permission, we are translating ‘autrui’ (the personal Other, the you) by ‘Other,’ and ‘autre’ by ‘other.’ In doing so, we regrettably sacriﬁce the possibility of reproducing the author’s use 1 of capital or small letters with both these terms in the French text.” After a great deal of discussion, we have chosen to rigorously follow Lingis’s now standard rendering, insofar as it does not contradict Moati’s explicit goal of demonstrating thatautrui(Other) is the concretization ofautre(other). For Moati’s discussion of concretization in general, see “Nocturnal Phe-nomenology,” the third section of chapter 1, as well as the beginning of chapter 2. We have also decided to follow Lingis in the use of “dwelling” for the termdemeure, the place that the subject inhabits, the place where he or she lives or resides in the full sense explicated by Levinas and here by Moati. This choice has the added bonus of allowing an implicit emphasis on the continuity of this concept with the verb formdemeurer, to “dwell or re-side,” but also to “remain, to stay,” and so on. For the sake of making the distinction between the two concepts clear, the English “home” has been reserved for the Frenchmaison. Le moiappears as “the I” in Lingis, but I have departed from his usage, and this term is translated here “the self ” and “the separated self,” when it appears asle moi separé. The numerous variations on the termêtrealso provided some difﬁculty in attempts to distinguish them in English, although all instances of the word êtreitself are rendered here simply as “being.” The termétantproved more of a challenge, but we have followed Lingis in rendering it as “existent” in all cases. Part of the difﬁculty there, however, comes from Levinas’s, and thus Moati’s, use of the terméxistant, which we have simply transliterated as “existant,” with anarather than ane, as it appears in the French. In all

Translator’s Note

cases in which “existent” and “existant” appear near each other in the text, the original French (étantandéxistant) appear in brackets, and we have 2 included Lingis’s own note on this point, for reference. Finally, we have distinguishedexistencefroml’éxister, by transliterating the former as simply “existence,” and renderingl’éxisterwith “existing,” or sometimes “to exist,” depending on context. Along with these issues of technical vocabulary, it should be noted that many of the sources that Moati refers to in this text are not as yet trans-lated into English. Moati has made ample, and excellent, use of the three extant volumes of the newly publishedOeuvrescomplètes, in which many of Levinas’s early writings are collected for the ﬁrst time. In particular, Moati draws heavily on three pieces, “Pouvoirs et origines,” “Parole et silence,” and “L’écrit et l’oral,” all found inParole et silence, volume 2 of theOeuvrescomplètes. All original translations from these texts are my own, as noted at their respective ﬁrst appearances in this book. Finally, over the course of this translation project, Raoul Moati has cho-sen to rewrite certain passages of his own work,Événements Nocturnes, for this English version. Readers comparing the texts will easily spot certain sentences, and even entire paragraphs, that depart completely from the original French. Any such case is the result of a total rewrite on Moati’s part, integrated into the text according to his instruction. I thank Raoul Moati for the privilege of working on this project, Arnold Davidson for making Levinas clear where he had been obscure, my family for their support over the course of this work, and ﬁnally the members, past and present, of the Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago. Daniel Wyche Chicago, 2015