Emmanuel Levinas - Quotes

It is as though subjective life in the form of consciousness consisted in being itself losing itself and finding itself again so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said. Eyen an empirical, individual being is broached across the ideality of logos. Subjectivity qua consciousness can thus be interpreted as the articulation of an ontological event, as one of the mysterious ways in which its 'act of being' is deployed.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

It is the very transcending characteristic of this beyond that is signification. Signification is the contradictory trope of the-one-for-the-other. The-one-for-the-other is not a lack of intuition, but the surplus of responsibility. My responsibility for the other is the for of the relationship, the very signifyingness of signification, which signifies in saying before showing itself in the said.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

Obsession is irreducible to consciousness, even if it overwhelms it. In consciousness it is betrayed, but thematized by a said in which it is manifested. Obsession traverses consciousness countercurrentwise, is inscribed in consciousness as something foreign, a disequilibrium, a delirium.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

But anarchy is not disorder as opposed to order, as the eclipse of themes is not, as js said, a return to a diffuse 'field of consciousness' prior to attention. Disorder is but another order, and what is diffuse is thematizable. Anarchy troubles being over and beyond these alternatives.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

Recurrence is more past than any rememberable past , any past convertible into a present. The oneself is a creature, but an orphan by birth or an atheist no doubt ignorant of its Creator, for if it knew it it would again be taking up its commencement . The recurrence of the oneself refers to the hither side of the present in which every identity identified in the said is constituted.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

The oneself does not rest in peace under its identity, and yet its restlessness is not a dialectical scission, nor a process equalizing difference. Its unity is not just added on to some content of ipseity, like the indefinite article which substantifies even verbs, 'nominalizing' and thematizing them. Here the unity precedes every article and every process; it is somehow itself the content.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

The expression 'in one's skin' is not a metaphor for the in-itself; it refers to a recurrence in the dead time or the meanwhile which separates inspiration and expiration, the diastole and systole of the heart beating dully against the walls of one's skin.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

It is not by chance that Plato teaches us that matter is eternal, and that for Aristotle matter is a cause; such is the truth for the order of things. Western philosophy, which perhaps is reification itself, remains faithful to the order of things and does not know the absolute passivity, beneath the level of activity and passivity, which is contributed by the idea of creation.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). Substitution. 1968.

The solitude of the subject results from its relationship with the existing over which it is master. This mastery over existing is the power of beginning, of starting out from itself, starting out from itself neither to act nor to think, but to be.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

Concretely, the relationship of identification is the encumbrance of the ego by the self, the care that the ego takes of itself, or materiality. The subject - an abstraction from every relationship with a future or with a past - is thrust upon itself, and is so in the very freedom of its present. Its solitude is not initially the fact that it is without succour, but its being thrown into feeding upon itself, its being mixed in itself. This is materiality.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

All enjoyment is also sensation - that is, knowledge and light. It is not just the disappearance of the self, but self-forgetfulness, as a first abnegation.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

Reason is alone. And in this sense knowledge never encounters anything truly other in the world. This is the profound truth of idealism. It betokens a radical difference between spatial exteriority and the exteriority of instants in relation to one another.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

In work - meaning, in effort, in its pain and sorrow - the subject finds the weight of the existence which involves its existent freedom itself. Pain and sorrow are' the phenomena to which the solitude of the existent is finally reduced.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

While in moral pain one can preserve an attitude of dignity and compunction , and consequently already be free; physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

The whole acuity of suffering lies in this impossibility of retreat. It is the fact of being backed up against life and being. In this sense suffering is the impossibility of nothingness.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

This way death has of announcing itself in suffering, outside all light, is an experience of the passivity of the subject , which until then had been active and remained active even when it was overwhelmed by its own nature, but reserved its possibility of assuming its factual state.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed, and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Richard A. Cohen (Translator). Time and the Other. 1946.

This impersonal, anonymous, yet inextinguishable 'consummation' of being, which murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself we shall designate by the term there is. The there is, inasmuch as it resists a personal form, is 'being in general'.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

The anonymous current of being invades, submerges every subject, person or thing. The subject-object distinction by which we approach existents is not the starting point for a meditation which broaches being in general.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

When the forms of things are dissolved in the night, the darkness of the night, which is neither an object nor the quality of an object, invades like a presence. In the night, where we are driven to it, we are not dealing with anything. But this nothing is not that of pure nothingness.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

Nothing responds to us, but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

The exterior - if one insists on this term - remains uncorrelated with an interior. It is no longer given. It is no longer a world. What we call the I is itself submerged by the night, invaded, depersonalized, stifled by it.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

For the insecurity does not come from the things of the day world which the night, conceals; it is due just to the fact that nothing approaches, nothing comes, nothing threatens; this silence, this tranquility, this void of sensations constitutes a mute, absolutely indeterminate menace.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is, since the existence of a consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subject of existence, that is, to some extent a master of being, already a name in the anonymity of the night.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

The sensible qualities of the sacred are incommensurable with the emotional power it emits and with the very nature of this emotion, but their function as bearers of 'collective representations' accounts for this disproportion and inadequateness.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

To kill, like to die, is to seek an escape from being, to go where freedom and negation operate. Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

Spectres, ghosts, sorceresses are not only a tribute Shakespeare pays to his time, or vestiges of the original material he composed with; they allow him to move constantly toward this limit between being and nothingness where being insinuates itself even in nothingness, like bubbles of the earth...
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

To deny the totality of being is for consciousness to plunge into a kind of darkness, where it would at least remain as an operation, as the consciousness of that darkness. Total negation then would be impossible, and the concept of nothingness illusory.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Alphonso Lingis (Translator). There is: Existence without Existents. 1946.

If to be means to exist the way nature does, then everything which is given as refractory to the categories and to the mode of existence of nature will, as such, have no objectivity and will be, a priori and unavoidably, reduced to something natural.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

As long as the naturalistic ontology is accepted, existence, including the existence of nature, is not determined by the meaning of life. Rather, life itself must, in order to exist, be conceived on the model of nature. That is, life must be integrated in causal chains and granted reality only inasmuch as it belongs to them.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

It is necessary to dig deeper, down to the very meaning of the notion of being, and to show that the origin of all being, including that of nature, is determined by the intrinsic meaning of conscious life and not the other way around.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

Someone may object that material things extend beyond the realm of our present perception. It belongs to their very essence to be more than what is intimated or revealed in a continuum of subjective aspects at the moment of perception. They are also there when we do not perceive them: they exist in themselves.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

In the background of conscious life there is a multitude of cogitations. This background is not a vagueness beyond the reaches of analysis, a sort of fog within consciousness; it is a field already differentiated. One can distinguish in it various types of acts: acts of belief (the dawning of a genuine belief, a belief that precedes knowledge etc.) of pleasure or displeasure, of desire, etc.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

In summary, the existence of an unperceived material thing can only be its capability of being perceived. This capability is not an empty possibility in the sense that everything that is not contradictory is possible; rather, it is a possibility which belongs to the very essence of consciousness.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

Things are never known in their totality; an essential character of our perception of them is that of being inadequate.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

A material thing refers t o a double relativity. On the one hand, a thing is relative to consciousness - to say that it exists is to say that it meets consciousness. On the other hand, since the sequence of subjective phenomena is never completed, existence remains relative to the degree of completion of the sequence of 'phenomena', and further experience may, in principle, falsify and reduce to a hallucination what had seemed to be acquired by a preceding perception.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

We could formulate the result of our analyses in the following way: the existence of material things contains in itself a nothingness, a possibility of not-being. This does not mean that things do not exist but that their mode of existing contains precisely the possible negation of itself.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.

What exists for us, what we consider as existing is not a reality hidden behind phenomena that appear as images or signs of this reality. The world of phenomena it-self makes up the being of our concrete life.
Levinas, Emmanuel and Andre Orianne (Translator). The Phenomenological Theory of Being. 1930.