What can the passage of time mean for Levinas? Is there a passage of diachronic time? In its many iterations, passage—an expression that easily goes unnoticed, for it is ordinary, perhaps self-evident, yet almost pervasive in the French language—turns out to be at play throughout Levinas’s last major work. This paper traces the role of the notion in Otherwise than Being and shows its stakes for the remarkably numerous topics that it connects: Levinas’s critique of Husserlian temporality, the relation between (...) the Infinite and the finite, as well as, most generally, justice and the ethical relation itself. Specifically, because the equivocal expression “se passer ” means both passing and happening, diachronic time not only passes but happens. (shrink)

Adopting Kantor’s Masochean turn within Levinas, this article challenges the anthropocentrically limited purview of Levinas’s ethical relation. Incorporating Kantor’s legalistic reading of Levinas, informed through his literary analysis of Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’, the article details the inescapable, legalistic plight that is to be the Levinasian ethical subject. Extending upon Kantor’s introductory conceptualisation of the Levinasian subject through Masoch, reveals a subject for whom suffering and sacrifice must be embraced; necessary acts of penitence before an irrepressible Other who they adore. (...) The Other is presented through Masoch’s text as an insatiable, inescapable deity of Law who cannot be refused and demands subservience. A god manifest in Exteriority whose influence upon the subject extends beyond the frame of the interhuman relation and is a necessary component of the subject’s existence and, more broadly, their world. The Levinasian subject’s relation with alterity poetically portraying all the potency, affirmation and urgency of dear Severin’s with his Venus, a relation which destroys, haunts and affirms the subject completely as only Law can. (shrink)