5.12 Lucia Stramaccioni – Tra totalità e infinito: l’ambivalenza della tradizione in Lévinas

The complexity of the meaning of tradition in Lévinas reflects the contraposition between the ontology as Totality and the face of the other as Infinity. Tradition, in its negative meaning, is the history of ontology in its diachronic development and a betrayal of the living subjectivity, crystallizing his axioms in a saying without author. On the other hand, the other’s face is the place of the irruption of the sense in the context of an ethical relation that presupposes no cultural mediation. Nevertheless, the tradition also testifies the historical attempts to give sense to reality by a cultural construction and, in this sense, it has a positive value. In particular, it is possible a revaluation of tradition in Hebraism: the religious heritage transmitted by Scriptures and by their interpretations is not an already-said, but has the same vitality of the oral word coming from the other’s face.