Levinas’s early account of transcendence: locating alterity in the Il y a

ENIn “God and Philosophy,” appearing in 1975, Levinas startled all of his readers by informing them that what keeps them awake at night is the Other. The connection between the there is experienced as insomnia and transcendence as a relation with that which is ostensibly beyond being is discussed by Kris Sealey. Comparing the night of insomnia with what Lcvy-Bruhl called participation in the sacred, Sealey shows that in the night of insomnia the subject is depersonalized to the extent of losing its autonomy, while at the same time retaining its foothold in being. Unlike in ecstatic or mystical experience before the sacred, the depersonalization effectuated by the there «precisely reinforces what makes the self unique. It is this “irrevocable tie to its own existence, or ground,” as Sealey puts it, that essentially makes possible the self’s relation with the transcendent Other qua responsibility and ethics.