FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASseparation of the ego is maintained. This is why the transformation of the tragic hero
(that paradigmatic figure of the meta-ethical ego) into the man of revelation is presented
as both radical conversion and expression of a profound continuity. In Rosenzweig’s
thought, accession to the world of revelation implies no renunciation of the pagan sub-
structure of life. The latter is neither forgotten nor disowned, but remains present and
legible beneath its obliteration. There remains, in the figure of the man of revelation,
something heroic and quasi-Nietzschean: it is in the name of a radical freedom that he
decides to give up his autonomy and submit to the call of the other. More generally, for
Rosenzweig the order of revelation is dependent on the temporal order. ‘‘Life, all life,
must first become wholly temporal, wholly alive, before it can become eternal life.’’^10
In the conversion of meta-ethical man into the man of revelation, the elementary self
is transformed into ‘‘I,’’ a substantivized adverb into a speaker. Indeed, this is not a return
to traditional morals but rather the discovery of a different conception of ethics, based
on the structures of dialogical discourse. In the experience of revelation, as Rosenzweig
lays it out in the central chapter of the second part of theStar, what was self becomes I,
the subject of a discourse addressed to a Thou; but this I does not become itself except to
the degree that, even before that first word, in an anteriority more anterior than all anteri-
ority, it had been addressed as a Thou by another I.^11 There is, at the origin of this
linguistic model of revelation, a fundamental asymmetry: the experience of the I is always
preceded by that of the Thou, or to put it another way, the I does not become what it is
except in response to the call of the Thou. That perennial anteriority of the other—
‘‘immemorial anteriority,’’ Levinas will say—is inscribed in the very stuff of experience,
since the moment self-consciousness is awakened, the others, those surrounding the ego,
are already there (always there since forever). That is why the I is defined in Rosenzweig
as an essentialheteronomy. More precisely, the moment of revelation, the moment in
which the meta-ethical ego is transformed into I, is exactly the moment it discovers its
dependency upon a reality investing it from without. That reality, interpreted as the reality
of God in the foundational experience that is revelation, immediately takes on the form
of the other, the neighbor, as soon as the I, in the second moment of its constitution,
turns toward the world. The truth is that the subordination of the I to God and its
subordination to the other are two aspects of the same structure of experience. (Let us
note in this connection that, in the analysis of the constitution of the divine identity in
the Bible that Rosenzweig develops in the same passage, God himself only defines himself
as I after man has been constituted as I opposite him.)
This fundamental asymmetry in the I-Thou relation, in which the Thou always pre-
cedes the I, translates, from the ethical point of view, into the subordination of the subject
to the commandment. The commandment, independently of its specific content, signifies
a shattering of human autonomy, the submission to an absolutely other who invests
subjectivity from without. From this point of view, the commandment shatters the auton-
omy of the subject and deprives it of its freedom—or so it appears. But more profoundly,
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