Give the word: Levinas and Heidegger on language (Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger)

This dissertation is a comparative study of Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger on the topic of language. The pursuit of their respective questions—the question of the Other and the question of Being—led each thinker to a meditation on the nature of the primordial event of language. This field of inquiry binds the two philosophers together, but it also reveals their essential difference. Whether language comes to pass from the ontological difference as human response to Being or from the ethical difference as the response of one human being to another, there is at stake a conception of responsibility.; Chapter 1 follows closely the phenomenological analysis of Totality and Infinity. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which Levinas' phenomenological description of the Same, the Other, and the ethical relation responds to Heidegger's analysis of Mitsein and Mitdasein. Taken together, the first two chapters elucidate Levinas' critique of fundamental ontology by reading Being and Time from the perspective of Totality and Infinity—an elucidation guided by the overall topic of our investigation, language.; Chapter 3 examines Heidegger's retrieval of Being as Logos. We concentrate on his dialogue with Hölderlin in order to say the unsaid of his dialogue with Paul Celan. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of their meeting at Todtnauberg, the poem it occasioned, and Heidegger's response.; In Chapter 4, we return to Levinas whose essay on Celan employs the distinction between the “saying” and the “said” which is developed in Otherwise than Being, and which completes Levinas' philosophy of language. We show that there is a tension in Celan's work between the Heideggerian and Levinasian conceptions of language, and we use this tension to illuminate the difference between the two thinkers.