STE ́PHANE MOSE`Sonly against opposing armies but equally against civil populations, was already in evidence
in 1914–18, its systematic generalization dates from 1939–45. The main point is that the
conflict of nationalisms, still characteristic of the First World War, gave way to confronta-
tions between ideologies, or more precisely—in the case of national socialism—to the
methodical application of an ideology aimed at the extermination of whole populations,
first and foremost the Jewish people.
From this perspective, the Second World War not only involves, like the earlier war,
the death of millions of individuals but also involves the systematic annihilation of human
groups as such, and to a certain extent the putting into question of the very idea of
humanity. That difference explains the difference of emphasis in the introduction toThe
Star of Redemptionand the preface toTotality and Infinity, and in a more general way the
difference between the philosophies of Rosenzweig and Levinas. While Rosenzweig still
affirms the irreducible reality of the personal subject, that is, of the self (das Selbst) in the
face of the tyranny of war, Levinas no longer believes in the possibility of any such indi-
vidual resistance to the wave of historical violence, or even in its legitimacy. For Levinas,
the subject’s protest against the death that threatens it continues to bear witness to the
vital egotism that stirs within all that seek to ‘‘persevere in being’’ and is the source of the
war of each against all. As opposed to classic war, in which the revolt of the individual is
sustained by the hope that he or she may be able to escape death, eliminative persecution
makes every individual a potential victim, destined sooner or later for inevitable death.
In this absolute forsakenness, there is for the self no beyond war; nor can there spring (as
there could for Rosenzweig) the possibility of a meta-ethics from its anguished cry. That
is why in Levinas the basis of ethics is not to be found in care for self but only in care for
the other person. It is true that the idea of care for self is not absent fromTotality and
Infinity; it can be divined behind such notions as enjoyment, atheism, or separation,
which refer back, as in Rosenzweig, to the ‘‘ipseity of the I,’’^2 a first ipseity that will break
apart with the absolutely new discovery of the transcendence of the other. But more
originary than that primordial possession of self by self, its immemorial investment by
the idea of the infinite carries it—from all eternity, so to speak—outside itself and assigns
it to its responsibility for the other. On the ‘‘historial’’ horizon of total annihilation, the
vision of ethics as it is still found in Rosenzweig—that is, as a second movement, as the
rupture of a primordial egotism—appears anachronistic in relation to the revelation of a
care for the other that is far more fundamental than care for self. Care for the other, to
which, it seems, the last cries of many victims bore witness.
2
Rosenzweig’s inaugural ‘‘speculative gesture’’ in the introduction toThe Star of Redemp-
tionconsists in the link he establishes between the world war and the crisis of Western
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