Levinas - The Levinas Reader (ed Hand)

Time and the other 41other possibilities, 2 and consequently makes possible the very feat of graspinga possibility - that is, it makes possible activity and freedom. Death inHeidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems toreach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed,and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit ofidealism.I even wonder how the principal trait of our relationship with death couldhave escaped philosophers' attention. It is not with the nothingness ofdeath, of which we precisely know nothing, that the analysis must begin,but with the situation where something absolutely unknowable appears.Absolutely unknovyable means foreign to all light, rendering every assumptionof possibility impossible, but where we ourselves are seized.Death and the Future 3This is why death is never a present. This is a truism. The ancient adagedesigned to dissipat the fear of death - 'If you are, it is not; if it is, you arenot, 4 - without doubt misunderstands the entire paradox of death, for iteffaces our relationship with death, which is a unique relationship with thefuture. But at least the adage insists on the eternal futurity of death. Thefact that it deserts every present is not due to our evasion S of death and toan unpardonable diversion at the supreme hour, but to the fact that death isungraspable, that it marks the end of the subject's virility and heroism. Thenow is the fact thjlt I am master, master of the possible, master of graspingthe possible. Death is never now. When death is here, I am no longer here,not just because I am nothingness, but because I am unable to grasp. Mymastery, my virility, my heroism as a subject can be neither virility norheroism in relation to death. There is in the suffering at the heart of whichwe have grasped this nearness of death - and still at the level of thephenomenon - this reversal of the subject's activity into passivity. This isnot just in the instant of suffering where, backed against being, I still graspit and am still the subject of suffering, but in the crying and sobbing towardwhich suffering is inverted. Where suffering attains its purity, where thereis no longer anything between us and it, the supreme responsibility of thisextreme assumption turns into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy. Sobbingis this, and precisely through this it announces death. To die is toreturn to this state of irresponsibility, to be the infantile shaking of sobbing.Allow me to return once again to Shakespeare, in whom I have overindulgedin the course of these lectures. But it sometimes seems to me thatthe whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare. Does not thehero of tragedy assume death? I will allow myself a very brief analysis ofMacbeth's end. Macbeth learns that Birnam Wood marches on the castle of