FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASinto an intelligible cosmos. Moreover, the individual, who was supposed to blossom forth
as an autonomous subject in a world regulated by reason, becomes, in a lethal logic
instituted by warfare, a simple object of history, a negligible quantity, a faceless number,
swept away despite himself into the whirlwind of battle, along with millions of others.
The Star of Redemption, conceived between 1916 and 1918 on the Balkan front and
written between July 1918 and February 1919, opens with the evocation of an experience
at the outer limits of the extreme: the anguished cry of the individual before the threat of
imminent death. That cry expresses at once the instinctive revolt of man against the
violence done to him (in this particular case, the violence of history), the affirmation of
a basic, obvious truth: his irreducible identity as subject and the sudden collapse of all the
philosophical constructions intended to make him forget the horror of death. It is at the
moment when the individual, defined as a simple part of a whole, is threatened with
annihilation that the subject awakens to the full consciousness of his uniqueness. This
paradoxical reversal, in which the sudden illumination of the consciousness of man’s
mortal condition reveals to him the irrefutable reality of his personal existence, represents
both the original experience from which Rosenzweig’s thought emerged and the rhetorical
figure that permanently subtends the unfolding of his system. That is what specifically
initiates the very possibility of ethics, or more precisely, that is the point from which,
beyond the violence that seems to make the very idea of ethics obsolete, the meta-ethical
dimension of the subject emerges.
Forty years after the publication ofThe Star of Redemption, the preface toTotality
and Infinity, which may be said to serve as the overture to the general themes of that
work, begins with a meditation on war. War is seen as primal reality, casting doubt on
classic philosophy’s claim to found a universal morals. The homage Levinas pays toThe
Star of Redemption, ‘‘too often present in this book to be cited,’’^1 confirms the impression
produced by a comparative reading of the two texts. The preface toTotality and Infinity
was conceived as a reworking, in a new historical and philosophical context, of the intro-
duction toThe Star of Redemption—prolonging it, echoing it, after the manner of a varia-
tion on the original theme.
What is philosophically common to these two openings is the critique of the idea of
totality. The critique that is the starting point ofThe Star of Redemptionhas been reinter-
preted and reformulated by Levinas as a radical overcoming of the system of being by the
idea of the infinite. But the most remarkable thing about this parallel between the thought
of Levinas and Rosenzweig is that in both cases the experience of war constitutes the
horizon of a fundamental questioning of the whole Western philosophical tradition. Be-
tween these two experiences of historical violence, the 1914–18 war for Rosenzweig and
the war of 1939–45 for Levinas, there are numerous analogies, but also something abso-
lutely different. The Second World War, which from a historical point of view appears as
the prolongation of the First and to a large extent as a direct consequence of it, is never-
theless radically different. Although the idea of ‘‘total war,’’ that is, a war directed not
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