Bettina Bergo

This article offers an overview of my 2020 study, Anxiety: A Philo-sophical History. I discuss the philosophers and theorists examined, and show how anxiety, understood in German as Angst (it has but one term for this affect), moved through Idealism from a largely noxious state (Kant) into the role of an emotion-adjuvant of reason (Hegel), into the sign of imminent birth—of nature (Schelling). I focus on the existential turn given anxiety, as a “state” prior to freedom in Kierkegaard, and draw from his work and Nietzsche’s a unique, affective dialectic. The 20th century opens with Husserl’s “genetic” concern with passivity and affective forces, Heidegger’s “attunements,” and Freud’s perplexity over the meaning of anxiety. Levinas closes the work, considering the intersubjectivity of feelings and its implications for lived time and human interrelationality. Cet article propose un aperçu de mon ouvrage de 2020, Anxiety: A Philosophical History. J’examine la pensée des théoriciens qui y sont étudiés et montre comment la signi????ication de l’anxiété évolue, depuis celle d’un état essentiellement nocif (Kant) à celle de la nais-sance imminente de la nature ou d’un Dieu-Tout (Schelling), en passant par un rôle d’auxiliaire au travail de la raison (Hegel). Je m’attarde par la suite sur le tournant existentialiste d’un Kierke-gaard qui présente l’anxiété comme un état instable précédant la liberté et, sur fond de sa pensée et de celle de Nietzsche, je retire une dialectique singulière, affective. Le XXe siècle s’ouvre sur le volet génétique de la phénoménologie de Husserl, sur son intérêt pour les affektive Kräfte à l’oeuvre dans la mémoire, à la suite de quoi je dis-cute des Stimmungen de Heidegger puis des perplexités freudiennes quant aux multiples sens de l’Angst. J’aborde????inalement la pensée de Levinas en clôture de mon livre, lui qui interroge l’intersubjectivité des affects et ses implications pour notre expé-rience de la responsabilité relationnelle.

These essays unfold a complex picture from phenomenology to Talmudic readings. It shows how radically Levinas expanded genetic phenomenology toward preconscious and intersubjective affectivity. It discusses Levinas' appropriation of Heidegger's early hermeneutics as secular revelation of what-is toward a phenomenology of the unseen, adapting Maimonides' conception of language. The book examines the sources of the ontological difference in Eckhart, and explores the Maimonidean source of negative theology. It then explores two strains of biblical hermeneutics: a Hassidic source, via Buber, and a rationalist one, through Levinas. It closes with a consideration of politics, both revolutionary and that of "difference."

This article offers an overview of my 2020 study, Anxiety: A Philo-sophical History. I discuss the philosophers and theorists examined, and show how anxiety, understood in German as Angst (it has but one term for this affect), moved through Idealism from a largely noxious state (Kant) into the role of an emotion-adjuvant of reason (Hegel), into the sign of imminent birth—of nature (Schelling). I focus on the existential turn given anxiety, as a “state” prior to freedom in Kierkegaard, and draw from his work and Nietzsche’s a unique, affective dialectic. The 20th century opens with Husserl’s “genetic” concern with passivity and affective forces, Heidegger’s “attunements,” and Freud’s perplexity over the meaning of anxiety. Levinas closes the work, considering the intersubjectivity of feelings and its implications for lived time and human interrelationality. Cet article propose un aperçu de mon ouvrage de 2020, Anxiety: A Philosophical History. J’examine la pensée des théoriciens qui y sont étudiés et montre comment la signi????ication de l’anxiété évolue, depuis celle d’un état essentiellement nocif (Kant) à celle de la nais-sance imminente de la nature ou d’un Dieu-Tout (Schelling), en passant par un rôle d’auxiliaire au travail de la raison (Hegel). Je m’attarde par la suite sur le tournant existentialiste d’un Kierke-gaard qui présente l’anxiété comme un état instable précédant la liberté et, sur fond de sa pensée et de celle de Nietzsche, je retire une dialectique singulière, affective. Le XXe siècle s’ouvre sur le volet génétique de la phénoménologie de Husserl, sur son intérêt pour les affektive Kräfte à l’oeuvre dans la mémoire, à la suite de quoi je dis-cute des Stimmungen de Heidegger puis des perplexités freudiennes quant aux multiples sens de l’Angst. J’aborde????inalement la pensée de Levinas en clôture de mon livre, lui qui interroge l’intersubjectivité des affects et ses implications pour notre expé-rience de la responsabilité relationnelle.

"This is a study of the unlikely 'career' of anxiety in 19th and 20th century philosophy, above all. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersectiona of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought beginning from receptions of Kant's transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a symptom of an interrogation that stove to take form in European intellectual culture, *Angst* passes through Schelling's romanticism into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the 20th century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology's exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late Idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of *Angst* in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in 20th century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic "other""--

Søren Overgaard's Wittgenstein and Other Minds (WM) makes two interesting contributions to the Wittgenstein literature. First, it approaches contemporary debates about the problem of "other minds" (WM 2) as a conceptual and ontological problem -- viz., how we conceive of mind in the first place[1] (before turning to determinations concerning the minds of others). It also extends that question to ethics, since the way in which we pose the question of other minds, or subjects, frequently concerns what behaviors are appropriate to adopt in regard to those others.

This dissertation examines the ethical theory of the contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The dissertation is guided by two objectives. First, it examines critically the mature works of Levinas: Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Second, it poses the following questions regarding these works: Why was it that motivated Levinas to write a second magnum opus after Totality and Infinity? What are the contributions of the second work? Commentators, and Levinas himself, argue for a fundamental continuity in the philosopher's project of fundamental ethics. Nevertheless, Otherwise than Being differs stylistically, methodologically and conceptually from Totality and Infinity. ;The contribution of Levinas to ethics, as I explain in Part One, lies in the unprecedented way in which he defines the notion thereof. For Levinas, ethics must be understood as first philosophy. However, ethics can only be first philosophy if it is essential to what is traditionally conceived as first philosophy. This means that Levinas must show how the encounter with another human is prior to, and forms the basis of, all our conceptions of the good. Now, with this claim Levinas is not arguing for a pragmatics of interpersonal relations. Neither is he rejecting metaphysics. Rather, influenced by dialogical philosophy, Levinas argues that the face-to-face relation is the event by which a consciousness comes to place itself in question. This "event" contains the germ of all forms of human sociality, and indeed, of reflection. The dialogical relation is, moreover, misunderstood when described from the position of an observing, "Third Party." Instead, Levinas proposes a phenomenological description of the first person experience of this encounter. ;Part One of the dissertation sketches Levinas's phenomenology of sensibility, willing and intersubjectivity. It examines critically the influences--from Husserl and Heidegger to Rosenzweig--upon his ethics as first philosophy. It inquires into his ontology and his theory of politics. ;Part Two addresses directly the question of the two magna opera. It situates the thematic occasion of Otherwise than Being in Levinas's theory of signification and his definition of justice.

I propose to look at Levinas’ constellation of figures: recurrence, obsession, persecution, substitution and saying, in chapter IV of Otherwise than Being. This is the core of his 1974 work. I tarry with a remark that Levinas makes there, “Our analyses lay claim to the spirit of Husserlian philosophy […] But […] the present work ventures beyond phenomenology”. Substitution thus returns to Husserl’s passive syntheses, arguing that not everything about sensibility and affect is meaningful or enters into associations of intentions. To dig beneath thematizing consciousness required that Levinas adapt Heidegger’s hermeneutic extension of phenomenology, with its pre-structures, to open phenomenology to interpretive dimensions of lived immediacy. The question of passivity would requires reading Husserl through Heidegger. The task of opposing responsibility to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology necessitates a return to Husserl’s phenomenology of passivity.

This article approaches Levinas’s 1963 Talmudic reading entitled “Messianic Texts” in light of the metaphoric numbers 0, 1, and 2. “Zero” will refer to unforeseen silences in the Talmudic text in question (here, Rabbi Eleazar’s sudden silence in the debate about the conditions of redemption, as well as commentator Rashi’s silence on Talmudic discussions about a certain “identity” of the messiah. The number “one” concerns a textual hapax: Rabbi Hillel’s historicist dismissal of the messiah as promise and open future—a position virtually anathema to rabbinics (inter alia) but nevertheless preserved by the Talmud. My metaphoric numbers strategy turns, finally, to the curious presence of “allegorical doubles” in the Bible, which Levinas describes as a configuration of textual “eidetics.” Using my three numbers (0, 1, 2) as an elementary analytic grid, I turn from Levinas’ “Messianic Texts” to André Neher’s biblical commentary on Levinas’s presentation—a commentary similarly concerning messianism but no longer in the Talmud. My purpose is dual: to sketch the context of this complex Talmudic reading, to offer one (idiosyncratic) reading-strategy focusing on two events of “silence,” the future anterior of the “messiah” who will have been but will come no more, and finally the play of identity-in-difference in the biblical doubles. Keywords: “Messianic Texts,” Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Neher, messianisms, world-to-come, the Samozvanetz.

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason—for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility. Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject—and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical—in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?