RESPONSE TO ANNA YAMPOLSKAYA’S REVIEW OF LEVINAS, KANT AND THE PROBLEMATIC OF TEMPORALITY

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to respond to Anna Yampolskaya’s challenge to the interpretative strategy of my book, Levinas, Kant and the Problematic of Temporality. I intend to refute her claim that by effectively withdrawing the problematic of sensibility from view my book has forgotten, or, at the very least, shaded the Rosenzweigian requirement of concreteness that Levinas first inherited from Heidegger, and to refute her corollary argument that my ethical reading of the schematism in Kant’s First Critique is not sufficiently justified because it suspends the problem of the symbolic imagination in Kant’s Third Critique. This double refutation will require me to reiterate the concrete unveiling of the Kantian schematism in Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant (according to its destruction of the schematism of the categories) and in Levinas’ explication of Rosenzweig (such as it unfolds a more radical destruction of the schematism of the ideas). It will also require me to demonstrate precisely how this ideal notion of the Kantian schematism in the form of the regulative ideas of pure reason (and more specifically, in the form of the regulative idea of God) is indeed read by Levinas himself in the ethical terms of the equivocation or enigma of diachrony, that is, in the ethical terms of his philosophy of ambiguity (such as it adheres to the Kantian antinomies). This is the interpretation that I propose to defend against Yampolskaya’s claim that my ethical reading of the First Critique should have taken this ambiguous form of rationality seriously.