STE ́PHANE MOSE`Sthe I cannot face a radical exteriority unless it bears within itself the memory or trace of
an original independence, precisely that of the meta-ethical ego. The relation of the I to
the commandment is absolutely different from the relation of the autonomous subject to
the moral Law in Kant’s philosophy. In the first part of theStar, Rosenzweig criticizes
Kant’s ethics (and, more generally, the theory of ethics of German idealism) by showing
that the freedom of the subject, believed to be accomplished by submission to the moral
law, in reality disappears in the system of being, which alone confers upon it its supreme
dignity. Through the dialectic of autonomy and the Law, it is in reality the impersonal
principle of reason that, in a continuous process of emanation, takes possession of per-
sonal subjects and entirely absorbs them. Paradoxically, then, it is the relation of the
heteronymous subject to the commandment, that is, to a word come from elsewhere, a
word that constrains us to accomplish even the undesirable, that maintains it in its iden-
tity and its separation. That identity, prerequisite to all injunction and continuing to
subsist after the injunction, is the identity of the meta-ethical ego, the elementary root of
the I, sign of a primordial ipseity that still remains alive at the very moment when it is
being radically put into question. Such is the primordial intuition on whichThe Star of
Redemptionis constructed: the authentic relation can only be established between beings
necessarily separated beforehand. Here, in place of the movement of the procession of
meaning by which, in idealism, the absolute pours forth into the particular, Rosenzweig
sets in opposition the movement of conversion by which the same opens itself to the call
of the absolutely other.
4
To a certain extent, the preface toTotality and Infinitytakes up the meditation on war at
the point whereThe Star of Redemptionhad left it. The whole conceptual edifice of the
Staris constructed on the dissidence of the ego in relation to the system of the totality,
or, if you will, on the possibility of the transcendence of the person in relation to the
immanence of being. In other words, Rosenzweig’s point of departure is the postulate
according to which there can be a space of peace outside a totality entirely governed by
war. That space of peace is that of the I, which the experience of revelation wrests from
the grip of the system of being, and, looked at on the collective scale, that in which the
Jewish people lives its religious existence beyond the tragedies of history. The question
Levinas asks at the beginning ofTotality and Infinityis then: Is the dissidence of the
person in relation to the totality really possible? Is it not, as Hegel thought, an illusion of
subjective consciousness? Specifically, must we not recognize the obvious and admit,
again with Hegel, that war is the necessary law of relations between individuals, and
consequently between nations and states? And if that is true, is morality not the ultimate
naivete ́? Indeed, war—the ‘‘exceptional state’’ par excellence—suspends morality for the
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