Levinas Totality And Immortality

In Totality and Infinity, in “Philosophy and the idea of infinity” and in Otherwise than Being, Levinas is problematizing time and its relation to being. Time, in one sense, is alluded when the word “before” or “anterior” is used many times, but also “present,” a time that seems to be out of phase or dislocated; how can it be anterior and present? Here are a couple of quotes (that I already worked) where time is treated by Levinas:
The differing of the identical is also its manifestation. But time is also a recuperation of all divergences, through retention, memory and history. In its temporalization, in which, thanks to retention, memory and history, nothing is lost, everything is presented or represented, everything is consigned and lends itself to inscription, or is synthetized or, as Heidegger would say, assembled, in which everything is crystallized or sclerosized into substance in the recuperating temporalization, without time lost, without time to lose, and where the being of substance comes to pass –there must be signaled a lapse of time that does not return, a diachrony refractory to all synchronization, a transcending diachrony. (9)

Responsibility for the other, in its antecedence to my freedom, its antecedence to the present and to …show more content…
Otherwise the one totality cannot reveal to other totality without an extra, a residue or a “beyond totality.” For Levinas: “Time is needed, the remission of the immobile eternity, of the immanence of the whole in the whole, in order that there be established the new tension, unique in its kind, through which intentionality or thought is awakened in being. Truth is rediscovery, recall, reminiscence, reuniting under the unity of apperception. There is remission of time and tension of the recapture, relaxation and tension without a break, without a gap” [My italics]