As palestras que Levinas apresentou como seu último curso na Sorbonne em 1975 e que foram publicadas em 1993 como Deus, Morte e Tempo também fornecem um contexto importante para a forma como este tema foi desenvolvido por Derrida.. Através de uma leitura crítica pormenorizada da análise da morte feita por Heidegger em Ser e Tempo, Levinas procurou explicitamente ultrapassar aquilo que considerava ser a sua concepção demasiado restrita da autêntica finitude como sendo compreensível apenas a partir da perspetiva da mortalidade individual. Em vez disso, também ele procurou abordar a morte a partir da experiência do outro que está a morrer, insistindo que a morte não reduz simplesmente o outro a cadáver ou decomposição, mas que, em vez disso, permite que o outro seja “confiado” a mim, como minha “responsabilidade”. Assim, ele poderia argumentar a favor da necessidade de ir além da análise supostamente solipsista e centrada no sujeito da finitude pessoal de Heidegger, em direção a um domínio de finitude partilhada e, em última análise, também a uma experiência mais profunda da finitude pessoal. E aqui ele sugeriu que talvez seja apenas a morte do outro que revela verdadeiramente o temporal na vida e que é o cuidado com o outro morto que “abre o pensamento” em direção ao infinito. Quando o outro se desloca para fora do tempo, para o tempo do passado, tornando os sobreviventes responsáveis por essa passagem, então estabelece-se também um novo tipo de relação com algo totalmente outro, com um tempo para além do tempo e com a transcendência, forjando uma nova comunidade entre os mortos e os vivos, um mundo onde os mortos podem prevalecer e onde os vivos podem estar com eles.
The lectures that Levinas presented as his last course at the Sorbonne in 1975 and published in 1993 as God, Death, and Time also provide important background for how this theme was developed by Derrida. Through a detailed critical reading of Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time, Levinas explicitly sought to move beyond what he found to be its too-restricted conception of authentic finitude as understandable only from the perspective of individual mortality. Instead he too sought to approach death from the experience of the dying other, insisting that death does not simply reduce the other to corpse or decomposition but instead lets the other be “entrusted” to me, as my “responsibility.” Thus, he could argue for the need to move beyond the supposedly solipsistic and subject-centered analysis of personal finitude in Heidegger, toward a domain of shared finitude, and ultimately also a more profound experience of personal finitude. And here he suggested that it is perhaps only the death of the other that truly reveals the temporal in life and that it is the care for the dead other that “opens thinking” toward the infinite. When the other moves out of time, into the time of the past, making the survivors responsible for this passage, then a new kind of relation is also established to something wholly other, to a time beyond time and to transcendence, forging a new community between the dead and the living, a world where the dead can prevail and where the living can be with them.
Like Patocka, Levinas is looking for ways of transforming the experience of loss of the other into a phenomenology of living-after, while avoiding commitment to a metaphysical belief in afterlife. More radically than (21) Patocka he seeks to let the unique experience of the death of the other become a critical lever for destabilizing the experiential horizon of the subject itself. At the heart of this experience is the standing before a nonresponse that is at the same time a responsibility and a duty to a living spirit or “soul” of the other. This experience does something to the subject; it affects and ruptures its identity, exposing it to a passivity in itself where it is affected by a non-presence. In the end “intentionality” is no longer the final word on human existence, since it is not only a future-oriented drive or conatus but also “a disinterestedness and adieu.” It is not its own mortality that exposes the ego to its ultimate fate but its exposure to what transcends it in the gesture of farewell.
In his detailed critical reading of Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time, Levinas repeatedly returns to what he diagnoses as the latter’s inability to understand death as anything other than annihilation and end of being-in-the-world. There is, he argues, a sharing of the other’s death that goes deeper than one’s own mortality, precisely through this shared responsibility. It is when looking for other ways to conceptualize this relation that he also comes upon Hegel’s analysis of burial. In caring for the dead through burial, Levinas writes, the subject demonstrates that the “act of burial is a relationship with the deceased, and not with the cadaver.” It is an act whereby the family makes the dead a “member of a community” and thus is also a way of transforming the dead into “living memory.” But whereas Hegel saw the act of burial as a way of symbolically manifesting the universal and free nature of spirit across the threshold of individual death, Levinas is here pointing toward another dimension. In his reading, the encounter with the death of the other and with the other as dead reveals a unique temporality at the heart of subjectivity that is connected precisely to a responsibility for the one no longer there.
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