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These concluding remarks shall begin and end with an inquiry into dirempted consciousness. As we have already seen, Gillian Rose's critique of Levinas' vision of political life depends upon her claim that post-modern thinking approaches the ruptures of consciousness and world, of freedom and necessity, either by ignoring one of the terms of the conjunction, or by forcing their rapprochement through a meta-or an infra-rational mediation. My question, then, asks: is there an alternative to these diremptions that can escape Levinas' criticism of reason as reductionist? As we know, Rose herself does not subscribe to the eventuality of overcoming diremption. Rather, her work offers a critique of the epistemological, and political, consequences of the thinking "of alterity'. This chapter follows her critique back to Hegel's discussion of what could be called the formal diremptions in the thought of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. From this discussion, I point toward certain resemblances between Levinas' philosophical project and those of late idealism. Notably, I draw final questions about Levinas' Self as the unknowable "source' of subjectivity and about his theory of sensibility, which is always already ethical, and serves as the basis of reason and sociality.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2077-9_13

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