FROM ROSENZWEIG TO LEVINASwhich I am a part. The place outside the system of being, and setting out from which the
notion of totality itself loses its meaning, is not the ego: it is the other. The situation in
which the totality breaks up is that in which ‘‘the gleam of exteriority or of transcendence
in the face of the Other’’ is revealed.^20
But even inTotality and Infinity, in which ethics is still described in terms of encoun-
ter and the face-to-face, that is, against the background of a metaphysics of presence, the
uniqueness of the person as the locus of transcendence in relation to the system of being
is no longer, as in Rosenzweig, that of the ego, but that of the other. For Levinas, the
radical questioning of Western ontology implies the repudiation of the concept of the ego
in which Rosenzweig still believed: the ego that, according to Pascal’s expression, quoted
at the beginning ofOtherwise than Being, demands its ‘‘place in the sun.’’ Levinas’s im-
plicit denunciation of the meta-ethical ego in Rosenzweig, qualified as a ‘‘impotent sub-
jectivism’’ in which ‘‘the protest of a person in the name of his personal egotism or
even his salvation’’ is expressed,^21 marks the distance separating the crisis of Western
civilization—whose downfall was presaged by the First World War and consummated
during the Second—fromthe collapse of the idea of humanityas Europe had conceived it.
—Translated by Michael B. SmithPAGE 231231.................16224$ $CH9 10-13-06 12:35:11 PS