What Moses Saw from Mount Nebo: Levinas, Ethics, and Politics

The moment preceding Moses’ death is invoked to examine Levinas’s ideas of time, ethics, and politics. The episode, in which God shows Moses the Promised Land and mentions the covenant with the Patriarchs, illuminates Levinas’s views of fecund time and diachronic time, as well as his ideas of responsibility and subjectivity. Levinas’s philosophy opens up a new perspective for interpreting the severity of the Moses’ exclusion from the Promised Land. The episode also provides a background for Levinas’s relations with the State of Israel and for the question of whether Levinas’s project allows the move from the intersubjective ethical to the political collective.