Abstract

My text addresses the problem of time in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, primarily in an effort to show the essential proximity of these two phenomenologists with respect to the radical alterity of Being and time, and the inadequacy of phenomenology to think it. I suggest that in thinking what I call the propriety and a-propriety of time, Heidegger and Levinas provide us with a way to approach what subtly announces itself in their work as a crisis of phenomenology. ;My argument is that while both Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas explicitly consider themselves phenomenologists and approach their divergent subjects accordingly, their gestures intimate that each of them in varying degrees and ways understands phenomenology quite differently. Nevertheless, when we consider their respective conceptions of phenomenology and its limits specifically with regard to the question of time, we not only find that these two philosophers are actually much closer in both their concerns and their conclusions than they might otherwise appear, but that each philosopher's thought moves beyond phenomenology in such a way as to implicitly call its basic concepts into question, thus effecting the equivalent of what Heidegger calls a scientific crisis. I contend that while it is Heidegger who first discovers the unaccountable trace of a dimension to time refractory to the intuitive thinking of phenomenology, and thus a fundamental point of instability in the basic concepts of phenomenology understood as a rigorous science of Being, and while it is Heidegger who initially suggests that the trace of this other time is linked to man's relation to the holy, it is Levinas who recognizes time to be the product of a transcendent, ethical relationship with the holy, personal other, and thus finds the possibility of a redemptive escape from the finitude of Being. Thus, the work of these two thinkers effectively paves the way toward a radical rethinking of phenomenology and a resolution of the crisis