FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASsake of the immediate defense of each one’s vital interests. That, writes Levinas, is why
‘‘War is not only one of the ordeals—the greatest—of which morality lives; it renders
morality derisory.’’^12 War is, without doubt, the permanent state of humanity, and thus:
‘‘The art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means—politics—is henceforth
enjoined as the very exercise of reason. Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy
to naı ̈vete ́.’’^13 Like Rosenzweig, Levinas here has as his reference point Hegel’s political
philosophy, but he follows its logic to the end. The unfolding of reason in history leaves
nothing outside itself, and the ego’s pretension to affirm itself as an exceptionparalleling
the general system of Spirit is nothing but a chimera of subjective consciousness. In plac-
ing himself within the Hegelian logic, then, Levinas unmasks Rosenzweig’s procedure as
an illusion engendered by the ego’s narcissism. The point is not, he writes, to set up an
opposition between the experience of the totality and ‘‘the protestation of one person in
the name of his personal egotism or even of his salvation. Such a proclamation of morality
based on the pure subjectivism of the I is refuted by war, the totality it reveals, and the
objective necessities.’’^14 In other words, at the time Levinas was writingTotality and Infin-
ity, that is, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, the obvious fact that no
one could avoid getting caught up in war, and that individual protest would immediately
be negated in the name of a collective logic that usually takes on the appearance of ratio-
nality, had long made the individual revolt championed by Rosenzweig obsolete.
Like Rosenzweig, Levinas turns to Hegel to interpret war as a metaphysical event that
reveals the fundamentally agonistic essence of the real, and therefore of reason itself. But
while for Rosenzweig the link between the experience of war and the idea of totality, even
though it underlies the entire edifice of theStar,remains implicit, Levinas sees in war
(war between consciousnesses, war between states) the very essence of Hegelian philoso-
phy—in other words, the truth of ontology itself: ‘‘Being reveals itself as war to philosoph-
ical thought,... war affects it as the very patency, or the truth, of the real.... Harsh
reality... harsh object-lesson, war is produced as the pure experience of pure being.’’^15
It is in this perspective that Levinas outlines, in the preface toTotality and Infinity,a
phenomenology of war, in which the concrete experiences by which it is characterized are
reduced to their essence. So it is with the experience ofgeneral mobilization, described as
‘‘a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape.’’^16
Similarly, the suspension of individual freedom in a society at war corresponds to a vision
of being as absolute determinism, of freedom as knowledge of necessity, and of man as
‘‘a part of nature’’: ‘‘The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of
totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being bearers
of forces that command them unbeknownst to themselves.’’^17 Indeed, in Levinas the no-
tion of totality designates a vision of man perceived essentially as an object of knowledge,
like a phenomenon given to our observation, which is to be made intelligible by reducing
its apparent uniqueness to the result of a combination of various causal series. Indeed,
man can be perceived from two radically opposed points of view: one quantitative, in
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