FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASWhen he is cut off from this context, which alone ties him to the universal, he falls back
into a purely natural existence, that is, into his particularity, which is egotistical and
therefore fundamentally amoral. From this point of view, war is the paroxysmal event in
which the individual is called back, despite himself, to his ethical destination: ‘‘This rela-
tion and the recognition of it is therefore the individual’s substantive duty, the duty to
maintain this substantive individuality, i.e. the independence and sovereignty of the state,
at the risk and the sacrifice of property and life.’’^4
Now it is precisely the annulment of the self at the heart of the totality that, for
Rosenzweig, ruins the very foundations of true ethics. In his view, ethics can only spring
from a radical freedom, an original possession of self by self. The Hegelian deduction of
ethics, in which the individual rises to ever-increasing generality, realizing himself finally
in the renunciation of selfhood, defines him from the outset as a simple part of a whole,
as an element, insignificant in himself, of a system that alone confers meaning and dignity
on him. Against the horizon of war, this speculative construction falls apart. The immi-
nence of a death that strikes at random, far from lifting the individual above himself, casts
him down upon the most elementary affirmation of his physical existence. In relation to
that foundational experience, in which ‘‘the compassionate lie of philosophy’’ is demysti-
fied once and for all,^5 ethics only becomes possible again after the vindication by the
individual of his most personal existence, that is, his refusal to allow himself to be caught
up in the system of the totality. Whereas in Hegel it is in war that the ethical destination
of man is accomplished, for Rosenzweig it can only be revealed beyond war.
3
In the conceptual structure ofThe Star of Redemption, the emergence of ethics from the
experience of the anguish of death, that is, the rupture of the totality, is only one step,
though admittedly a primordial one, in a more essential process, which leads the ego (das
Selbst) toward the discovery of the central experience of its history, revelation. Revelation
will, in turn, lead it to the conclusion of its adventure, its new conception of life. The
dual link of revelation with death, on the one hand, and life, on the other, explains the
secret logic that commands the spiritual itinerary of the ego.
In the history of Rosenzweig’s thought, the notion of an original subjectivity, positing
itself outside the system of being, is prior toThe Star of Redemptionbut not to the experi-
ence of war. It was in October 1917, on the Macedonian front, that this groundbreaking
intuition came to him. A few weeks later, he developed its implications in a letter to a
friend, in which he would later recognize the ‘‘original cell [Urzelle]’’ ofThe Star of Re-
demption. In it, the affirmation of the radical extraterritoriality of man with respect to
the domain of Being corresponds to the interpretation of the Hegelian system as the
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