Who would still dare to undertake projects that would require thousands of years for their completion? For what is dying out is the fundamental faith that would enable us to calculate, to promise, to anticipate the future to them . . .
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Of peace there can only be an eschatology.
—Levinas, Totality and Infinity
The Death of God
Nothing separates the thinking of Nietzsche and Levinas more than the question of the “death of God,” its extent and significance, and yet despite this distance they are drawn together in this very questioning, even if this signals an impossible resolution. In the case of Nietzsche, philosophical and theological arguments concerning the death of God abound, ranging from the simple assertion of God’s nonexistence, to the paralysis of nihilism attending such an event, to the absolute release into a total freedom. For Levinas, the matter is more obscure, but it is perhaps best construed as the demise of a certain conception or set of interpretations about God (OB 185). Nietzsche incisively realizes that the death of God is foremost an ethical issue: the primary questions for the “philosophers of the future” (GS §§289, 343, 372) are those of the meaning and value of existence, not of epistemic certainty or metaphysical being. It is precisely here that these two very different nomads wend their paths over similar ground. More than indicating simply the loss, end, or completion of certain ideal grounds of truth, value, and meaning, the death of God is—and here is arguably the most important point of convergence between the generally disparate positions of Nietzsche and Levinas—the seeming withdrawal of any determinate sense of ground (Grund). If the only ground left after the death of God is a certain (in the sense of both surety and particularity) groundlessness, then what remains is a perpetual nomadic exile, an endless tarrying that leaves us vulnerable and exposed, but also for this reason wholly responsible not only for ourselves but for the Earth and its inhabitants or, as Levinas would have it, for the other. Nietzsche avers this only by affirming the death of God, but this is an affirmation closed to Levinas, who nevertheless acknowledges, accepts, and avows the same sense of destitution and responsibility.
There is an ironic seriousness in thinking the relationship between Nietzsche and Levinas on the grounds of their respective interpretations of the meaning of the death of God, a matter about which Levinas is taciturn but which is nevertheless pivotal in his critique and subsequent rejection of onto-theological metaphysics on the grounds of its violent totalizing tendencies, as well as its nihilistic impulses. This “greatest event” for Nietzsche, the watershed of so-called European nihilism, is for Levinas the culmination of Western ontology insofar as it represents the rejection or abandonment of absolute alterity and the subsequent theoretical totalization of being and the other. For both, however, the death of God also represents the great challenge for any fully active and affirmative thinking of the future, and herein lies the irony: even if the “violence” of Nietzsche’s “non-saying of dance and laughter” may well be the very affirmation needed to overcome the egological self and the nihilism of history, as Levinas admits, one still “must return to language to convey, even if in betraying them, the pure and the unutterable” (CPP 147–48). With the death of God follows the death of the subject, and yet the subject is the one who is not only constituted by language, be it the logos, historical consciousness, or the voice of the other, but also the one who commands language and thereby shapes and gives meaning to the world. Language is thus both the liberator and the prisoner.
Who is this subject that has died along with God and yet still endures? She is the fecund moment of future possibility, whether construed in relation to the “innocence of becoming” (Nietzsche) or as “persecuted” and “hostage” (Levinas). Zarathustra’s metamorphosed child (TZ “The Three Metamorphoses”) bears a striking resemblance to the “youth” that Levinas affirms, albeit with an important caveat: “But youth here does not mean simply the incompleteness of a destiny newly entered upon, possibly calling for the essence. Youth, which the philosopher loves, is the ‘before being,’ the ‘otherwise than being’” (CPP 147). Here is precisely the tension, perhaps irresolvable, of the matter at hand—namely, how the death of God gives rise, in Nietzsche’s words, to “we who are homeless . . . we children of the future” (GS §377), and yet who are also, for Levinas, the “trace” of the infinitely other. Put another way, if the death of God signifies an irreversible forward movement of history and thought, then is it possible to respond to the trace apart from an ultimately backward movement, a movement to the absolutely primordial or “pre-original” (OB 5–6 ff; cf. EI 88; LR 183), as Levinas would have it?
While defined in relation to the yet to come, such a youthful subject has found, writes Levinas, several “marvelous moments” of previous historical expression (CPP 147). While acknowledging that the “Nietzschean man above all was such a moment,” he nevertheless sees Nietzsche’s work and vision as being ultimately nihilistic “poetic writing . . . laughter which refuses language” (OB 8). “The philosopher,” moreover, “finds language again in the abuses of language of the history of philosophy, in which the unsayable and what is beyond being are conveyed before us. But negativity, still correlative with being, will not be enough to signify the other than being” (OB 9). Perhaps what attracts Levinas to Nietzsche is that which paradoxically also distresses him: such laughter may all too easily forget what is required for its very sustenance and continuance, namely, responsibility.
The heart of the difference between Nietzsche and Levinas—the status of the “beyond”—leads each to seek a path whereby an absolute affirmation is possible on the part of the subject, without an invariable lapse or fall back onto the negativity of either a dialectical negation or a simple refusal or denial. Nietzsche names the moment of this future affirmation the Übermensch; for Levinas, however, such a naming is impossible. The difference between the actuality and the impossibility of this sovereign act of naming is qualified for our purposes here as the distinction between the terms “apocalypse” and “eschatology.” The question that haunts any possible relationship between Nietzsche and Levinas hinges on whether this difference/distinction necessarily entails an absolute disjunction of terms. In other words, is the “logic” that governs the relation between this actuality and impossibility a logic of exclusion, of either/or, or does it admit the possibility of a radical conjoining that refuses the totalizing impetus of a dialectical framework?
At once the culmination of the modern consciousness in all its self-alienation and also the marker of the advent of postmodernism, which understands itself philosophically as postmetaphysical or postsubjective, the death of God not only denotes the so-called end of history but also invokes the question of origin. From an apocalyptic perspective, as represented philosophically in Hegel and Nietzsche, the genesis and the death of God are inseparable moments of the same forward process, made possible as such by the kenosis of Godhead itself, effectively abolishing all pure transcendence and securing immanence as the fullness of actuality.1
For Nietzsche, the apocalyptic death of God is final and irreversible. Here Nietzsche breaks from Hegel, in that the negativity of this event is absolute and culminates in the complete negation and dissolution of the conscious subject via the affirmation of the eternal recurrence by and as the will to power in the person of the Übermensch. For Levinas, however, the death of God marks the very ending of everything that the West has known previously as “God,” and this poses perhaps the ultimate challenge to his Judaism. Viewed positively for Levinas, the modern death of a certain God helps clear the way for the “metaphysical” desire for the Other, for the eschatological dimension of messianic peace embodied in the “youth” of the future.
Apocalypse and Eschatology
It is difficult, if not impossible, to consider any possible engagement between Nietzsche and Levinas without reference to the religious and theological grounds out of which their thinking emerges. Indeed, it is the very problem of ground that both unites and separates their thinking. If there is one consequence of the modern realization of the death of God that stands out, it is the disappearance or dissolution of the concept of ground, and most of all an ethical ground. This is the advent of nihilism, yet perhaps it is only in this context that a transvaluation of the concept of ground can occur. Nietzsche and Levinas are in agreement that all previous ethics are groundless and ultimately illusory, either because they refer back to a metaphysical nothingness (Nietzsche) or because they manifest a totalizing, violent ontology (Levinas).
The common problem that confronts Nietzsche and Levinas is how to think from a new standpoint that is removed from all traditional conceptions of ground and yet is still open to a thinking of the future from the standpoint of the “subject.” If the ground of subjectivity is groundless, then the conventional ways of conceiving origin and end, arché and telos, must also be radically rethought. Here is where the history of Western philosophy comes up short for both Nietzsche and Levinas and why it is necessary to consider their relationship to the theological and religious traditions.
The terms “apocalypse” and “eschatology” are often conflated in meaning even though in actuality they are significantly different. Both terms convey, however, a sense of terminus. What distinguishes their respective meanings though is the dimension of knowledge—specifically, knowledge of the end of history. That is to say, even though both concepts connote a teleological dimension, only apocalypse truly conveys this meaning insofar as it posits a telos able to be comprehended as such. Eschatology, on the other hand, makes no determinative proposition regarding the nature of the end or completion of time or history, or even whether it will of necessity occur. This difference is fundamental and crucial; however, it is still not decisive for determining the relationship between Nietzsche and Levinas with respect to the meaning of God’s death.
Apart from its etymology, the definition of eschatology is also significantly shaped by Greek thought, which first apprehends philosophically, Levinas notes, the concept of radical transcendence, as expressed initially in Plato’s idea of the Good “beyond being” (TI 103). Yet ever since Aristotle, much philosophy and theology has tried to either distance itself from or defend itself against such transcendence, declaring it outside the bounds of rational thought and therefore but a figment of phantasmal imagination. Hegel stands out as the culmination of this effort and is also the first purely apocalyptic philosopher, declaring that all truth is disclosed and known via its linguistic articulation. Divine reason, Geist as history itself, is thus the voice of the apocalypse, but a voice ultimately silencing all dissonant voices within the totality. Philosophically, apocalypse thus signifies the uncovering or disclosure of the world and history as fundamentally rational in their totality, exposing along with myth and mystery all transcendent conceptions of reality, all metaphysical dualisms, as groundless insofar as they are essentially unknowable.
A simpler tactic would be to cast the distinction between apocalypse and eschatology principally in terms of the relation between Christianity and Judaism in order to consider the relationship between Nietzsche and Levinas. Their thinking is too complex, however, to be reduced solely to such a move, even if it cannot be understood adequately without reference to that relation. For, despite his trenchant critique of Platonist and Christian metaphysics, the proclamation of the death of God is for Nietzsche a theological assertion and in full continuity with the Christian theological tradition, even if it is a full reversal of it and thereby apocalyptic in its bringing to a close all previous conceptions of the absolute in naming the death of God as the will to power and eternal recurrence. And Levinas’s recourse to the phenomenon of prophetic eschatology to counter what he will call “ontology,” or apocalyptic philosophy, is grounded in the tradition of post-exilic Israel that gave rise to Judaism, which in its turn is a response to Christianity. While this is a refusal on Levinas’s part to engage in theology (cf. OB 196n19, 197n25; OG 56), that is, to name God, and especially the death of God, it is nonetheless a breaking of a certain silence in that it finds a voice not only in the scriptures but also in the philosophical tradition. “The totality that includes all eschatology and every interruption,” he writes, “could have been closed if it were silence, if silent discourse were possible, if a writing could remain for ever, if it could, without losing its meaning, renounce all the tradition that bears it and interprets it” (OB 171). Levinas employs terms such as “prophetic” and “messianic” in relation to “eschatological” not to provide reactive tropes with which to counter philosophy but to express the uneasy but intertwined relationship between Jerusalem and Athens. Clearly, the messianic is a Jewish notion, one never entertained by Greek thinking and never fully realized by Christianity, but the eschatological dimension of an exteriority beyond the totality is decidedly Greek, even if it is also present in the prophetic revolution of Israel.
The early apocalypticism of Christianity broke with all previous conceptions of time and history, becoming quickly estranged even from its original historical ground in Judaism, especially after the Diaspora. Christian orthodoxy negated the initial apocalyptic orientation of the early faith and replaced it with only a different variant of primordial thinking (that is, a thinking predicated on the return to the origin), so that in time apocalypse became an almost foreign and dangerously heterodox concept. The pervasiveness of the traditional or “orthodox” perspective is now such that its effect has clearly extended beyond theology, affecting even the secular world of postmodernity, as denoted by this world’s apparent incapacity to project and advance a genuinely new sense of beginning. This issue is whether any primordial ground—and this includes the thinking of Levinas—is actually open to the future. From an apocalyptic standpoint, only the death of God absolutely reverses all backward looking primordial thinking and reveals the ground of such thinking as abstract, illusory and perhaps even delusional. The postmodern world is characterized in part by its inability to recognize the actual dissolution of previous forms of consciousness and hence prior conceptions of history. Yet this is a contradiction within postmodernity itself, for no other age so completely embodies apocalypse and forms a totally new horizon, even if that horizon is nihilistic, and so much so that the ethical ground in apocalyptic thinking is conspicuously concealed. The challenge, then, is the determination of a new “ground,” a veritable groundless ground, one that is not a Grund but an Abgrund for meaning, truth, and value. But this is not tantamount to naming such a ground “nothingness” and simply falling back into the traditional metaphysical thinking of ground. Rather, it is to understand ground in a wholly new way—as the activity of ungrounding (Ungrunden) that reveals the fundamental way of being in the world as nomadism.
Nietzsche and Apocalypse
A fundamental aspect of apocalyptic thinking is its serious engagement with the question of nihilism, an engagement that seeks not only to overcome nihilism but also to affirm its necessity as the groundless ground of freedom. Nihilism is moreover precisely apocalypse itself, and far from designating an ultimate collapse, it actually demarcates the fullness of historical continuity, drawing us necessarily into the domain of the ethical, or of our fundamental dwelling with others in the world.2 This is in fact the very nihilistic point of apocalyptic thinking: the absence of an absolute ground that makes possible the proliferation of multiple grounds, the manifestation of creative imagination and willing itself, thus enabling the negation and overcoming of nihilism as a purely negative ground.
Does apocalyptic thinking bar the path or portal to the possibility of an unforeseen possibility, a future possibility that is not coincidental with death—an impossible possibility? In other words, are apocalypse and eschatology, inasmuch as these concepts apply to the thinking of Nietzsche and Levinas, mutually exclusive? Or is it possible to think both concepts together in a way that brings together not only the past and present in terms of an openness to the future but also, and perhaps more important, in such a way that the past and future coalesce in the here and now, in a present always already past and always yet to come? What would be the name of this moment, this Augenblick? Is it “Infinity”?
If Nietzsche is that thinker who has impressed most upon modernity the need to reconceive Infinity (cf. GS §§124, 125, 374), then it is Levinas who has most ardently taken up that task. Despite their profound differences, they are united in their mutual eschatological orientations. Both retain the element of surprise, of radical transformative potential, as essential to the realization of the future. But the ground of that orientation is decidedly different.
Marking the highest affirmation of this existence, even if it is the nihilistic event par excellence, the death of God is for Nietzsche also the reversal of nihilism. Only thus is its negativity overcome by its transfiguration into an absolute Yes-saying that can only occur simultaneously alongside an equally powerful No-saying. While this is a dialectical movement, unlike the death of God in Hegelian idealism, Nietzsche’s construal of this death refuses the teleological dimension of Spirit that remains bound to a version of the archaic myth of the eternal return, and therefore to a conception of temporality that is not fully open to the future, in the sense of being unbound to a determining logic or logos. In the eternal return, time moves both forward and backward, endlessly creating, destroying, and re-creating itself, but all the while remaining bound in its infinite reversibility to an absolute primordial beginning. The death of God signifies a dual movement of diremption and conjoining: a break with the past but also a new non-metaphysical unity, a bonding of transcendence and immanence, of Infinity and finitude, of eternity and space-time. This is evinced most prominently in Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal recurrence,” wherein time is reconceived and experienced as irreversible and forward moving, thereby realizing what is impossible for a purely primordial thinking, namely, the radical dimension of futurity. At the heart of this teaching is the relation between the apocalyptic and the eschatological.
Hegel is the first to announce philosophically the death of God, and while this does have a direct impact on Nietzsche’s thinking, there is a significant difference between the two accounts. Hegel only comprehends the death of God on the purely conceptual level, ultimately returning the concept (Begriff) to itself, and so he does not fully break with the orthodox theological conceptions of the transcendent Godhead. According to Hegel, the death of God is continually enacted in the dialectical unfolding of Spirit, whereas for Nietzsche, the death of God is final and irreversible. God is “the will to nothingness pronounced holy” (AC §18), Nietzsche declares, enunciating a nothingness fully and actually present, here and now. Nietzsche differs from Hegel insofar as the negativity of the death of God is absolute and culminates in the complete negation of the knowing subject, decentering self-consciousness and releasing all into the Infinity of absolute nothingness. Philosophically, this apocalyptic event announces itself as the end of metaphysics, the end of history, and culturally, as the nihilism that is simultaneously the fulfillment of absolute freedom.
Nietzsche’s apocalyptic reversal of the primordial alterity of God also reverses if not shatters the philosophically knowable ground of God’s kenotic death. Now the ground becomes groundless as absolute becoming, an infinite, irreversible, temporally forward process of ungrounding. Unlike the Hegelian realization of the death of God, in which the primordial otherness of divinity is nullified and transformed into the fullness of historical actuality, in Nietzsche this alterity is once again recovered, although now not in the sense of an eternal return to a primordial plenum or transcendence, but instead as the openness to historical futurity, as eternal recurrence. Here one finds a new or different sense of origin that is not determinate or knowable. Yet, despite this irrevocable break with and dissolution of metaphysics, one signaling the advent of a new infinite horizon, it is textually difficult to locate in Nietzsche a once-and-for-all origin that is synonymous with apocalypse. He arguably rejects a notion of God as providential origin when he hypothesizes that if existence does have a final purpose, it would have long ago realized it since the universe is infinite. Nietzsche’s “new ‘infinite’” (GS §374) is but the destruction of a particular horizon, although one that truly makes possible an endless multiplicity of horizons, or interpretations which in turn are equally destroyed.
The death of God is for Nietzsche absolute and fully historical. In rendering possible a new conception of the future as eternal recurrence, transcendence is radically inverted as immanence, undermining any and all previous metaphysical grounds for ethics and unmasking the will to power as the simultaneous ungrounding and transfiguring of all valuation. Refusing the formation of any Grund to substantiate, validate, or render meaning, Nietzsche doubts “whether a philosopher could possibly have ‘ultimate and real’ opinions, whether behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground [ein Abgrund hinter jedem Grunde], under every attempt to furnish ‘grounds’ [Begründung]” (BG §289). The death of God exposes the paradoxical groundless ground of chaos as the flux of shifting veiled appearances, devoid of substantive identity and truthfulness. In confronting this nihilism, the emphasis falls now on the will to power as the nonmetaphysical locus of valuative meaning. Apocalypse is the realization that history is the actualization of the collapse of eternity into time, the total dissolution of primordial transcendence, and the shattering of everything that human consciousness has previously known as the “I,” self, ego, or subject. Thus construed, apocalypse is the literal and historically actual death of God. This, in turn, permits a new sense of “self,” one that is neither subjectivity nor consciousness in the traditional meaning of those terms but rather, to use a contemporary coinage employed by neither Nietzsche nor Levinas, a singularity.
Levinas and Eschatology
For Levinas, the death of God is posed not so much as an event but as a question; it is principally a matter of which version of God is no longer tenable:
This loss of unity has been proclaimed—and consecrated against the grain—by the famous paradox, become commonplace, of the death of God. The crisis of sense is thus experienced by our contemporaries as a crisis of monotheism. . . . The status of his [that is, God’s] transcendence, despite the immanence of his revelation—a transcendence new with respect to the unbridgeable transcendence of the Aristotelian god—the status of this transcendence of the supernatural was never established.
(BPW 47)
Levinas’s insistence on the preoriginal alterity of the wholly other—or God—opens the dimension of the future as fecundity in a radically different way, one that leaves the domain of being and history in favor of a relationship with that which is “otherwise than being,” with “illeity” (cf. BPW 61–64; OG 69). Transcendence thus signifies for Levinas, to use the language offered in Totality and Infinity, “metaphysics” or “religion,” which he defines as the ethical relationship between the self and the Other, predicated on the face of the Other as the trace of the absolutely other.
Even if metaphysical transcendence is emphasized in terms of the ethical relationship and not with regard to divinity, this profoundly affects Levinas’s interpretation of eschatology. Its meaning undergoes a radical transformation in his thought, in part because his Judaism is so strongly affected by his incorporation of Greek philosophy, which in turn affects his understanding of messianism, prophecy, and eschatology. It is altogether significant that Levinas opens his preface to Totality and Infinity by invoking these concepts (which while not taken up explicitly in the remainder of this work nevertheless condition its entire reading), as they serve in part to elucidate his critical distinctions between ethics and politics, metaphysics and ontology, Infinity and totality, and other and self/same. Prophetic eschatology, which “institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present” (TI 22), disrupts the totalizing, violent maneuvers of a sovereign theoretical reason, characteristic of philosophy in general. The central issue here for Levinas is the status of the immemorial past, or “an-archy” (CPP 127–39; cf. OB 101), which ruptures the absolute totality announced in apocalyptic thinking. The status of the “beyond,” and thus also of “transcendence,” is one of the most problematic aspects of Levinas’s thought, and its connection to the notion of eschatology tends to lead many to construe his philosophy as but another variant of onto-theology. Well aware of this proximity to a metaphysical, or ontological, tradition that he refuses, Levinas writes in a critical passage:
This “beyond” the totality and objective experience is, however, not to be described in a purely negative fashion. It is reflected within the totality and history, within experience. The eschatological, as the “beyond” of history, draws beings out of the jurisdiction of history and the future; it arouses them in and calls them forth to their full responsibility. . . . The eschatological notion of judgment (contrary to the judgment of history in which Hegel wrongly saw its rationalization) implies that beings have an identity “before” [avant] eternity, before the accomplishment of history, before the fullness of time, while there is still time; implies that beings exist in relationship, to be sure, but on the basis of themselves and not on the basis of the totality. . . . The first “vision” of eschatology (hereby distinguished from the revealed opinions of positive religions) reveals the very possibility of eschatology, that is, the breach of the totality, the possibility of a signification without a context.
(TI 23)
The messianic dimension of eschatology reveals itself as a “‘vision’ without image,” as the ethical expressed in the face of the Other, as ethics qua “optics” (cf. TI 23, 78, 174),3 thus opening a new way of understanding subjectivity as arising from the eschatological vision. Here, “messianic” refers neither to a soteriology nor to the realization of the providential fulfillment of a collective desire but rather to the universal embrace of a philosophy of peace, predicated on the promotion and maintenance of alterity, plurality, and difference. And while Levinas does invoke the notion of prophetic eschatology, this is likewise used in a heterodox sense, scarcely resembling anything that the prophetic tradition of Israel understood as eschatological. In Levinas’s use of the term, eschatology is arguably shaped more by the Greek world than it is by the Jewish world, although his sense of time is clearly informed by his Judaism. Eschatology is a concept that developed primarily as such during the Christian period from Paul to Augustine, and any prior conceptions of eschatology remain, for the most part, somewhat vague and debatable. Indeed, what common aspects of eschatology one finds in the Jewish prophetic tradition are generally linked to a nationalistic, not individualistic, conception of messianism. This fundamentally historical conception of eschatology is therefore properly understood as apocalyptic and is precisely what was recognized by early Christianity and reversed soon after by ecclesiastical orthodoxy.
The apocalyptic dimension of eschatology is refused by Levinas, though he does retain the crucial aspect of the messianic. But is Levinas truly opposed to any and all conceptions of historical eschatology? Or does he instead transform the notion of eschatology so as to permit a retention of a primordial memory of ethical meaning, without regressing into the older pre-prophetic myth of the eternal return that captivated the ancient Hebrews along with the other Mesopotamian peoples of the time, a myth subsequently revived and given new impetus and expression by Christianity? This raises the question of whether and, if so, to what extent Levinas has been influenced by such orthodoxy. For example, while recognizing numerous differences, there are striking parallels between the philosophy of Levinas and that of Plotinus,4 who so heavily influenced orthodoxy, not to mention the more obvious and often addressed connection with Plato. And certainly both Plato and Plotinus and the ensuing traditions of Platonism and Neoplatonism are bound to certain conceptions of eternal return, reinscribing the archaic myth as a new philosophical myth focused on the reunification of the soul with the One. Even if this is clearly not Levinas’s agenda, his notion of metaphysical desire (TI 33–5), as a movement toward the beyond, or the Invisible, betrays a certain inclination to return, despite his strong opposition of the archetypes of Abraham and Ulysses. In this sense, also, Levinas’s understanding of eschatology is perhaps more Greek than it is Jewish.
Eschatology Beyond Apocalypse
Nietzsche’s thinking marks the advent of a possible absolute affirmation of existence here and now, an affirmation that is simultaneously fully actual and yet to be realized. Here is precisely where apocalypse (the revealed actualization) and eschatology (the hidden yet to come) coincide. The apocalyptic ground revealed or unveiled by the death of God is at the same time the absence of any substantial ground. If this is so, then with the death of God the trace of the infinite other, the beyond or otherwise than being for Levinas, is also absolutely reversed. In other words, all trace of an absolutely immemorial past is destroyed but also transfigured in meaning as the future beyond, as a new differential unity or coincidentia oppositorum that is simultaneously apocalyptic and eschatological. Only thus is the death of God conceivable as the event that makes possible a unity between the messianic and the übermenschliche, a unity that allows for the infinite to be “within history or the totality” in a truly meaningful way. Otherwise, the eschatological ethics proposed by Levinas remains perpetually bound, at least from a philosophical point of view, to a certain nonactuality. The death of God is the necessary condition for the “atonement”5 of the apocalyptic and the eschatological, the philosophical and the prophetic, the knowable and possible.
Is eschatology a possible name, then, for the very openness to the realization or embodiment of the great Yes-saying to life, made possible by the apocalyptic death of God? Such an event breaks with the archaic myth of the eternal return, which understands Infinity only as the perpetual movement backward toward an elusive past and permits no actual sense of future eschatological possibility. The death of God is, at the very least, the death of a certain conception of God, one already dead in the sense of never having been; namely, the rational god of the philosophers as well as the archaic divinity. Understood apocalyptically, however, the death of God provides an opening for the receptivity of the fully immanent presence of divinity, of Infinity within the totality, but also for the eschatology of Infinity as the absolute openness to the horizon of future possibility. With the death of God, the tyranny of any and all oppressive and coercive transcendence is vanquished, leaving in its wake an inevitable nihilism, but a nihilism that liberates in a joyous affirmation of life here and now.
As Levinas argues, transcendence and ethics are so inseparably conjoined as to constitute one and the same thing. But what is this “transcendence” if not a full disavowal of everything previously known as transcendence? The question of transcendence and its meaning is indeed the Archimedean point on which rests the status of the relationship between apocalypse and eschatology, in all the fullness of meaning that these terms convey. Integral to an eschatological conception of ethics is the conviction that an absolute alterity cannot be adequately thought. This is perhaps the principal difference between the apocalyptic, which maintains that absolute alterity can be thought, and eschatological modes of thinking, and so it would seem the ultimate obstacle toward reconciling these two approaches. This is precisely the hurdle that must be overcome if one is to think the ethical meaning of the death of God, one that Levinas attempts to clear in saying and unsaying absolute alterity-in-the-same.6 This is a—if not the—principal task for the thinking of the future if it is to hold apocalypticism and eschatology in some balance.
While Nietzsche is an apocalyptic thinker, he is also an eschatological thinker, and it is here that he is drawn into a certain proximity with Levinas, despite their vastly different positions regarding the death of God and the fact that Levinas refuses to conjoin completely the apocalyptic and the eschatological, for reasons already indicated but also because of his fidelity to his Jewish tradition. But they are also brought closer together insofar as they each negate in their own way the Hegelian thesis of the primacy of reason. If Hegel is rightly interpreted as the first fully apocalyptic philosophical thinker, then Nietzsche goes beyond or transcends him inasmuch as he overcomes or transcends the absolute finality of the dialectic, not through some deeper or more obscure “cunning of reason” but rather through the hyperrationality of the will to power. Certainly, nihilism follows his every step and foreshadows the indeterminacy of the future, but unlike Hegel, who only sidesteps nihilism as an abstract moment in the dialectic, Nietzsche’s affirmation of the necessary inevitability of nihilism, as a continually recurring event, is the first truly modern affirmation of eschatology.
Is it possible to think of eschatology as the transcendence, or overcoming, of transcendence? Would such a transcendence also be simultaneously a transcendence of immanence, or at least of any prior conceptions thereof ? In its most radical interpretation, the death of God is the complete de-construction of all operative or previously known conceptions of totality, whether conceived in terms of a pure transcendence, a pure immanence, or some intertwining of transcendence and immanence. Is eschatology then a transcendence of every possible totality and the simultaneous death of God and death of the subject? Could this simultaneous death make possible an infinite responsibility to totality, such as one encounters in Nietzsche, that does not render either the Other abstract or the self sovereign? But if the death of God is finally also the transcendence, and thus destruction, of totality, including and perhaps especially, in light of the critiques of Nietzsche and Levinas, every Hegelian Aufhebung (that is, every negation that preserves what it negates), then is infinite responsibility itself a negation of totality that destroys every possible totality, or at least dissolves the hold of totality in each and every moment that infinite responsibility is recognized? Nietzsche’s understanding of responsibility, which ushers in a new conception of Infinity alongside a “new justice” (GS §289), is just such an affirmation of totality, one that is also, and by virtue of it, an affirmation of nihilism, or the dissolution of totality. Such a sense of responsibility is grounded, or rather ungrounded, on the affirmation of the apocalyptic death of God, the death of transcendence itself—“a divine way of thinking” (WP §15). Now the mantle of responsibility lies solely and fully on the shoulders of humanity, and it is of a purple that will fade with time, but for that reason must be continually dyed and mended.
Responsibility is inseparable from nihilism, and Nietzsche’s affirmation of the inevitable necessity of nihilism the first truly modern affirmation of the eschaton. Given that this is a concept of responsibility that necessitates that any ethical thinking is a nihilistic thinking in that it demands a negation of totality, it denotes a decisively distant move from the position of Levinas, which is predicated not only the existence of the Infinite, or God, but also on the trace of that absolutely other within the totality in and as the face of the Other. But such a God, in Nietzsche’s view, is nihilistic and negates the totality in its very being. Thus the death of God, while nihilistic in its affirmation of nothingness, is also the self-overcoming of nihilism, which results in an “ecstatic nihilism” (WP §1055). This is not a final overcoming of nihilism, however, in the sense of returning to a positive ground that vanquishes nihilism absolutely. Rather, the death of God, the nihilistic event par excellence, liberates us from the absolute nihilism of transcendence (the old god), and therefore impresses on us the necessity to assume responsibility for totality, for immanence grasped as the open horizon of eschatological possibility. Now nothingness is no longer simply nihilism, nor is Godhead, for that matter, since the kenotic death of God, as interpreted here, is but another name for the absolute nontotalizable unity of transcendence and immanence, a new unity that is fully open to the future in all its potential.
In Nietzsche’s thinking what is negated is not only all previous conceptions of ethical and political being, but also every thinking in which there is any ethical and political subject or subjectivity, or at least any that has been previously thought. Here, perhaps, there is a realization of the prophetic dimensions of both Nietzsche’s and Levinas’s thinking that can call forth and affirm, in their respective ways, the eschatological youthful saying of the children of the future. Levinas’s interpretation of eschatology is predicated on the possibility of a subjectivity that does not lose its identity in the face of its relation to alterity, and it is here that he reveals his primary relation to a religious (metaphysical) rather than a philosophical (ontological) tradition. But if Nietzsche, and not Levinas, is our first truly modern philosophical thinker of eschatology, then his is a standpoint that makes Levinas’s eschatological ethics impossible, or at least incomplete. Eschatology concerns the end, but there is no thinking of the end without a thinking of the beginning, and it is here that the nonapocalyptic eschatology of Levinas speaks most forcefully: “The first saying is to be sure a word. But the word is God” (CPP 126). Nietzsche’s apocalyptic eschatological thinking, on the other hand, would end not only modernity itself but also any archaic sense of beginning, inaugurating a new sense of beginning, though doing so by destroying, or at least decentering, the subject of thinking by apocalyptically vanquishing all vestiges of the Grund of that thinking—God.
NOTES
1. No one has argued this point more than Thomas Altizer, who is also to be credited with identifying Hegel and Nietzsche as apocalyptic thinkers.
2. I develop this line of thinking in “Can Fig Trees Grow on Mountains? Reversing the Question of Great Politics,” in Difficult Justice: Commentaries on Levinas and Politics, ed. Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 148–71.
3. See my “The Listening Eye: Nietzsche and Levinas,” Research in Phenomenology 31 (2001): 188–202.
4. See my “A Trace of the Eternal Return? Levinas and Neoplatonism,” in Levinas and the Ancients, ed. Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 210–29.
5. See my “Absolute Atonement,” in Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed. Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004), 65–87.
6. I am indebted to Bettina Bergo for reminding me of this important aspect of Levinas’s philosophy and for her numerous helpful comments and suggestions.