Abstract

Mortal being is not being pure and simple, not posit-ive being alone, as the lived experiencesuggests it to be. Living being is always a living of mortal flesh, a living taunted by death as “thenothingness that wearies it.” This taunting doggedly pursues the living being and turns it inward inwhat Levinas terms “inter-esse.” In living its mortality, essence is always inter-esse — inside ofitself — in the for-itself of self-interest.This paper attempts to track the opening of essence from its “innocent” lived mortality, through the“thinking” awakening that brings it to an awareness of the violences entailed in its living, to itsopening as an ethical being where self is abandoned, ruptured, sacrificed for the sake of thesuffering other. This paper also addresses the larger question of what, if anything, is missing inLevinas’ account of living being. In his fidelity to a monadic view of isolated existence with itsmeaning-appropriations, is Levinas bound to maintain the “innocence” of all living beings, even intheir most vile acts against others? Can Levinas account for the ability of the existent to leap outsidehis enclosed world to effect the destructive works that we witness every day in the human world?Can Levinas, committed to the “innocence” of living being, do justice to the injustices of theholocaust that motivate his work, or to the endless parade of holocausts that mark the history of thehuman species even to the present day? Finally, this paper entertains whether Levinas’ weddednessto this view of living being as isolated self-enclosure compels him to overlook the degree to whichour meanings are preordained by the socio-politico-economic realities of our cultural contexts,whether the phenomenologist, as much as the existent, must remain blind to the powers of histories and institutions and systems to dictate the meanings that we find as the borders that give us the stable lifeworld