Abstract

Transcendence, Levinas tells us, is not a failed immanence. It presupposes an Exteriority that cannot be integrated into a totality. Such is its excellence: a surplus that rends Being's monism and allows for a pluralism that is not a "missed union". In the first sections of this article I show how the ethical relation with the Other is the only one that, for Levinas, satisfies the conditions he thus imposes on a metaphysical — i.e. transcendent — relation. I subsequently link this 'return' to Plato's idea of a 'Good beyond Being' to the problem of Evil. If Evil is the refusal of the Good, we should, of course, first understand what it means that, as Levinas contends, the Good has chosen us before we could choose it. Are we to think of this 'election' as a command or as an invitation? Concretely: is the appeal of the Other something one cannot not hear, or does it only have the force to disturb those who "retain it"? In other words: should one think of Evil in terms of a choice for irresponsibility which is already situated in the horizon of a responsibility one cannot refuse; or should what in the former case is called Evil, not rather be thought of in terms of a deafness that is sui generis and not the privation of a hearing that ought to be there? Could there not be an irresponsibility that is not the refusal of responsibility, and that, instead of being situated within ethics, would rather complicate our way of conceiving the ethical relation? In the last section I oppose to Levinas's way of conceiving the relation between transcendence and immanence a different approach: the Good is inevitably incarnated and thus pluralized to a point where it becomes difficult to still present it as the Good. Incarnating the transcendent is not merely wrapping it in a context which leaves it unaltered. The incarnans is not just the envelope for the incarnatum. It is its "originary supplement" (Derrida). But then, inevitably, the relation between 'the' Good and 'Being' becomes anti-platonic: transcendence becomes mortal and fragile. It can bleed! It is in terms of such bleeding that we ought to look at some of the conflicts that trouble our societies — multiculturalism being one example amongst others