Levinas’s Diachronic Thought
Committee: Andrew J. Mitchell (director), Jill Robbins, John Lysaker.
Abstract
My dissertation lies at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of time. Specifically, it argues that Levinas’s rethinking of time is part of a larger project of rethinking experience, so as to allow for an experience of the other person as radically exterior to the subject. This is possible if our interpersonal relations take place through temporal modalities that do not reduce to the subject’s own time. For instance, the other person has a past which I cannot remember, since it was never present for me; and a future which I cannot anticipate, since it will never arrive for me. Yet, the other’s past and future can matter to me now; in other words, they can impact my present without reducing to it. The result is that a non-reductive relation between self and other is made possible by a new concept of time which Levinas calls “diachrony.” My dissertation shows two things about this concept: (1) its sources in Levinas’s engagement with the history of philosophy; and (2) how this concept is concretized in a set of phenomenological analyses (insomnia, fecundity, the caress, hope, aging, and the political).
My dissertation lies at the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of time. Specifically, it argues that Levinas’s rethinking of time is part of a larger project of rethinking experience, so as to allow for an experience of the other person as radically exterior to the subject. This is possible if our interpersonal relations take place through temporal modalities that do not reduce to the subject’s own time. For instance, the other person has a past which I cannot remember, since it was never present for me; and a future which I cannot anticipate, since it will never arrive for me. Yet, the other’s past and future can matter to me now; in other words, they can impact my present without reducing to it. The result is that a non-reductive relation between self and other is made possible by a new concept of time which Levinas calls “diachrony.” My dissertation shows two things about this concept: (1) its sources in Levinas’s engagement with the history of philosophy; and (2) how this concept is concretized in a set of phenomenological analyses (insomnia, fecundity, the caress, hope, aging, and the political).
