The Keenness of hope

ENIt is no secret that Levinas’s work was profoundly marked by the experience of being Jewish and witnessing persecution and war firsthand. Levinas described his life as dominated by “the presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror” (DE 290). Such inhumanity makes palpable our being delivered over to the forces of impersonal being, a tragic fate that leads to the very depths of despair. Can there still be hope when one has witnessed the crumbling of the world and the wretchedness of the human condition, when one has penetrated the vanity of existence so deeply that one has lost all reason to hope? Catherine Chalier’s article examines what it might mean to hold up hope in the very midst of despair. Interrogating Levinas’s comment in Existence and Existents: “There is hope only when hope is no longer permissible” (EE 93), Chalier outlines the development of the concept of “the keenness of hope,” whose poignancy stems from the clear absence of reasons to hope that the present suffering is redeemable while holding onto the irrational hope in its redemption all the same. In despair at my life, and so at the accursed solitude that seems to determine it, I turn away toward the Other, whose existence gives me the intimation of a pardon, and thus holds out the promise of relieving me of the suffering of existence itself.