Levinas Studies

Volume 13, 2019

Levinas Reading

The Passage and Happening of Time in Levinas’s Otherwise than Being

What can the passage of time mean for Levinas? Is there a passage of diachronic time? In its many iterations (passage, le se passer, se passe, and passe), passage—an expression that easily goes unnoticed, for it is ordinary, perhaps self-evident, yet almost pervasive in the French language—turns out to be at play throughout Levinas’s last major work. This paper traces the role of the notion in Otherwise than Being and shows its stakes for the remarkably numerous topics that it connects: Levinas’s critique of Husserlian temporality, the relation between the Infinite and the finite, as well as, most generally, justice and the ethical relation itself. Specifically, because the equivocal expression “se passer ” means both passing and happening, diachronic time not only passes but happens.