Levinas, Adorno, and the Light of Redemption: Notes on a Critical Eschatology

Abstract

This article brings Levinas and Adorno into conversation as an experiment in a broader effort within critical phenomenology to integrate phenomenology and critical theory . Both thinkers’ central concern with a redemptive or messianic futurity provides the basis for a shared critical eschatology, in which Levinas and Adorno mutually illuminate and enrich one another’s thought. In particular, I argue that Levinas’s and Adorno’s respective critical eschatologies share three key features: a fundamental ethical responsibility toward that which exceeds systematization or totalization (the Other and the non-identical, respectively), a refusal of philosophical theodicy in view of the historical catastrophes of the 20th century, and a foregrounding of “‘the light of redemption”’ as the key methodological tool proper to the recognition of the preceding concerns.